Grenadian Car!
Emma, James and Puppy
Town of Sauteurs
Hmmm, I haven’t blogged for four days now and as a result I’m not entirely sure where to begin on catching things up. Do I start from yesterday and work backwards or start from Friday and work forwards? See that’s the trouble with blogs, once you’ve started them you need to maintain them and I find myself entering a total state of blogheadedness…..
“Ooooh, I must take a photo of that for my blog!” (cue instructing Brad to screech to a stop on a blind bend to facilitate photo-taking-ability) or “Oh no! It’s 1 am and I’m knackered and my feel shite but I haven’t blogged about how I went and bought a cheap skirt in a shop today!”
The first photo in this entry was taken during one of these blogphotomoments. I find it amusing to drive around the tiny villages on the island and see cars in various states of decay, just happily residing alongside the road, with plants and climbers and assorted vegetation happily winding around them to make quite an interesting display. I guess there aren’t too many scrapyards on an island this size, so they tend to just become part of the roadside undergrowth. The best one I saw was a Volkswagen Mini Van with no doors, which, as well as taking on the role of artistic vegetative display, was also housing a donkey inside it. Now that’s what I call resourceful!
I’m sure the man standing beside the road was extremely intrigued why these strange tourists would want to stop in the middle of the road and begin photographing a rusty old banger instead of the beautiful countryside….but that’s blogging for you!
There are two things that I enjoy most about travelling. The first is exploring the “true” country, away from the tourist areas, and the other is talking to the people of that country about their lives and their views on things. We spent Friday doing just that and although it was a very long and tiring day, it was well worth it.
We decided to cut right through the middle of the country and go up to the very northern part. If you look at the map above, we are living down in the south-west coast in the area called Lance Aux Epines and we wanted to drive up through St George’s (the capital), go across the centre of the island and up to Sauteurs. This is a distance of approximately 35 miles which we anticipated would take a couple of hours each way. Ha! Not quite!
As I’ve mentioned before, driving in Grenada is very different from driving in the UK, apart from the fact that both countries drive on the left. Apart from in the southwest of the country (near the capital), the roads are very small, narrow, very winding and often very potholed. And that’s the main roads! The biggest problem however is finding the way to where you are going if you are not intimately aquainted with every area of the island. The map is often of little help because there are no signposts letting you know which direction each road is going in, and there are no names on any of the villages that line the way one after the other. So every few minutes we will arrive at another point with four apparently identical roads going off in opposite directions (three will just take you further into the village and only one will take you through the village but you have no way of knowing which one of the four that is) and we will spend 20 minutes taking each one in turn, eventually finding that the first three take us on a 5 minute route that suddenly turns into grass and the final one (sod’s law it always IS the final one!) will get you to the next village along the route, where the process will begin again. Oh and of course you also don’t know which village you are now at as you had no idea what the last village was called, or the one before that, or the one before that……
Usually the easiest solution is to stop and ask people the way as you pass through the villages. There are always plenty of people about…workmen on the roadside, people cutting down vegetation with machetes, people walking home from work or school, and friends sitting on the front porch of their house or in a shack bar chatting together. The only problem with this solution is that you need to be able to make yourself understood and also to understand the response. It’s not normally a problem (after all the national language is English) but in some of the more rural areas, the accent can be very thick and difficult for us to understand, and naturally they have the same difficulty in understanding us. This doesn’t just happen when you ask for directions. Grenada is such a friendly place that people will call out to you as you drive by or stop to share a joke with you through their car window as you pass in the road. Often we just have to smile, nod and laugh along and hope we are making the right noises in the right places!
Because of the difficulties in navigating the route and the time spent going round and round in circles hopelessly lost, as well as the need to stop for calls of nature and food, the journey to the north and back home took us a staggering 8 hours!!!! It was utterly exhausting physically with all that driving, but also mentally since I spent most of that time peering at the map and trying desperately to fathom out where on earth we could be. However we did see so much of the country and learnt so much about the way of life away from the capital city area, that it was definitely educational and worthwhile.
Driving along these roads one passes through a village and then shortly after, another village and so on, all the way. Many of these houses are tiny and built simply of wood, with just a couple of rooms inside. Others are bigger and built of cement blocks. All of them tend to have a front porch facing the road, where people can sit out and watch the world going by as they chat with friends or braid each others hair etc. There is often washing hanging on lines merrily waving in the breeze, or sometimes it is laid out over the bushes around the house to dry in the hot sun.
There are dogs wandering around the houses and roads. Often these dogs will lie in the middle of the road and be reluctant to move! It is very sad to see that many of the dogs are very thin and occasionally limping. I want to take them all home and look after them! We saw two dogs who had obviously recently given birth and the tiny little puppies looked so adorable sitting by the side of the road with an expression of bemusement at the world around them! There are no noticeable breeds of dogs here like there are in the UK. Dogs here seem to belong to people but are not treated as “pets” in the same way as they are at home. They all look quite similar….basically short haired, brownish “Heinz 57” varieties!
As you drive along, you see goats every now and again, tethered to the verge by the road. We also stopped abruptly along one road when faced with a big brown bull in the middle of the road staring at us! Thankfully he didn’t seem to be in the least bit aggressive and after a couple of toots on the horn, he ambled to the side of the road where he was tethered to a rock.
There is a noticeably poorer standard of living when you start driving up into the villages inland and away from the main towns. People still have food and clothing and the children go to school etc, but there are many smaller wooden houses, people are working with machetes to cut down vegetation and in one area we noticed that people were collecting their water from standpipes alongside the roads.
We eventually decided to stop for lunch at another point where we had found ourselves lost and pulled into a bar/restaurant called “Daw’s Café”. Here we were greeted by a really nice guy called Wade who proceeded to cook us some lunch. We were the only people in the place and it consisted of one large room with a single table and a wooden bar. The food was absolutely delicious...chicken cooked over a BBQ, rice, pasta salad and green salad. This was washed down with a fresh fruit punch and the whole lot came to the grand total of £3.50 each!
We finally reached our destination on the north coast…the town of Sauteurs (pronounced “So-tairs”). As with our trip to Grenville, we arrived at school leaving time and one of the busiest times of the day. The town was pretty small and basic, but we wanted to visit a place there called “Carib’s Leap”. This is the edge of a cliff above the town itself where, in 1650, forty Carib warriors threw themelves off into the rocks and angry waters below, rather than surrender to the French who were invading their island. The actual spot was less dramatic than anticipated when we arrived and was now part of a rather unkempt graveyard belonging to the church that is now on this area of land.
After a brief drive around Sauteurs and the north east coast of Grenada, and having taken some photos, we decided to make our way back to the south of the island. We thought that having finally found our way up the route to the north, we would find it easier to get back again….not quite as easy as anticipated, especially since the sun was now going down and there was no light in the car! Having found ourselves going in the wrong direction, we eventually stopped back at Daw’s café again for refreshments and (mainly!) for a desperately needed toilet stop. I think Wade was somewhat surprised to see us back again a few hours since our last visit. We’d told him we would come back soon, but I doubt either of us was expecting it to be that soon!
We went inside and had some drinks and some of the cake he had just taken out of the oven (still warm!). Whilst there we met his two year old son, James, who must have been at nursery when we had stopped off for lunch. James was full of beans and, although we could barely understand what he was saying and he could barely understand us, we had fun playing with him whilst his Dad was in the kitchen. He particularly enjoyed us showing him how to take photos on our camera! Wade’s family have two dogs, one of which is a young puppy. Both were fairly thin and the little puppy looked so cute and sad that I picked him up and spent 20 minutes cuddling him on my lap…he really was adorable!
By now all the light had gone (the sun goes down very quickly here and by 6pm each day it is completely dark) and we had to make our way back the rest of the way with me trying to read the map by the light on my mobile phone! Thankfully we did remember most of the way from here on and the journey back was a bit less stressful that on the way up!
Phew! That was another massive bog entry! I’m not sure whether anyone will actually read all that, but it’s nice for me to have a record of my time here for the future so I’m glad I got it all down in writing. It has been very cloudy all day today, which is a first since we got here but actually makes a nice change! It rained very heavily in the night and a short while ago we had another big downpour, which I guess isn’t too suprising since we are at the end of the rainy season here. It is still nice and bright though, so I’m not complaining!
I’m off to get something to eat for lunch now and may be have a swim later. It is Sunday here, so all the shops are shut and people are at the beach or “liming” with friends (liming means chilling out and spending time together). Sounds like the best way to spend a Sunday to me!
