Travelogue: Grenada
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5
Day 1 in Grenada. The flight landed at about 7:30 and I was surprised to find it totally dark there. In fact the landing was a bit scary, because I couldn't see a damn thing out of my window until we were about 10 feet from the ground. I later found out that due to latitude, sunrise is at 6am, sunset at 6pm. I found Al and we got a cab to the campus, which was a short but harrowing ride. Each time an oncoming car appeared, the driver would head straight toward it, then casually swerve around it at the last moment, with no sign of any concern. I eventually got used to this driving style, as it was universal there. The cabbie drove around the entire campus honking his horn before letting us off, apparently to advertise his services. Honking of horns was another universal part of the Grenada transportation experience.
Al showed me around the campus that night. I met several of his fellow students, who were in various degrees of shellshock due to final exams having ended that day. They were very nice people of widely varying nationalities--the first two I met were Lebanese and Nigerian. The campus was quite beautiful even by night. Like much of Grenada, it was on a hill, so a big view is only a short yet arduous walk away. It's also on the ocean, and has a black sand beach on one side. We sat on a rocky peninsula and watched the ocean, illuminated by a brilliant moon. I was introduced to some of the various cats that live on the campus. Most of them are small, skinny and pitch black, and scare easily. I also discovered one of the coolest things about Grenada, almost all the soda comes in glass bottles, even out of vending machines. The usual price was about 75 cents US for a .5 liter bottle. It seems the companies have stopped making them, but they're able to keep it going by reusing the bottles.
This night was also my introduction to some of the subject matter of Al's courses, with which I would become remarkably familiar over the next few days, considering my non-student status. The end of exams was not able to stop the students from bringing medical terminology into normal conversation, and using it for some extremely nerdy humor. Al attempted to show me the cadavers he had been dissecting for his anatomy class, but we only managed to catch a glimpse through a window, and they were wrapped up in their body bags. He showed me pictures later, and most of them weren't too unpleasant, because they had been thoroughly dissected and looked more like meat than a person. However the descriptions of some of his assignments, such as extracting the spine or cutting the face in half...I don't think I could ever do that.
And now that I've given you all nightmares, I'll turn in and end the story of Day 1.
On the 2nd day, after a goodly sleep, Al and I set out on a free university bus into the "town" near the campus, which is the town of Grand Anse beach, the biggest beach on the island and somehow connected to the college. We ate at Rick's, an interesting place where you sort of do some of the work for them, in that you get two slips of paper along with your receipt, you have to take one across the cafe and give it to the cooks to tell them what food to make for you, and the other one down the counter to the drink station, to get that. The food slip says at the bottom "You are so nice!" and something else. Al remarked he had always wanted to keep one for the Engrish-like quality, but that would mean paying for food and never getting it.
We then decided to walk on the road to St. George's, the capital city, and see if somewhere we could get access to the beach. We never did, but along the way, we saw lots of very ramshackle houses with animals like goats, roosters, dogs, and such hanging around, and a Catholic School. We also got honked at by every commercial vehicle that passed us, offering us their services. We ended up walking all the way to [the south side of] St. George's, which wasn't all that far but seemed like it. When we got there the place seemed pretty dead to me--there was only one street with commerce on it, and that was the street next to the water. I wanted to sit in a cafe and watch the cricket match that much of Grenada seemed glued to their TVs for. I picked about the worst one--no game on, no beverages, it looked like food had never been served there. Al got an orange juice, which like all the other orange juice in Grenada, tasted like grapefruit juice to me.
That night we went to a party for the students celebrating the end of the school year. It was $10 US to get in, and then all you can drink, the drink selection consisting of vodka, rum, pepsi, beer, and the Jamaican grapefruit soda called Ting (and any mixture thereof). It was fairly typical of parties, but kind of better--most of the people were a lot calmer than at the bar or college party scene that I am familiar with in an extremely limited way. I met several more of Al's friends, and had some decent conversations. The location was a cafe/bar that's basically on the beach, so Al and I decided to go out onto the beach area. There we met THE MOST ENTHUSIASTIC TCBY EMPLOYEE IN THE WORLD. He grabbed Al and started talking to him about the TCBY where we works, which other than KFC seems to be the only American food chain to have made it there. It's also the "hangout" for a lot of the med students, which they laugh at themselves a bit for. This guy was so enthusiastic about the economics of TCBY, how great it is, plans for expansion, that it was hard to believe he was just a cashier/server guy. People at that level here are generally so apathetic, and not without reason. He was shocked that I had never been to TCBY until I explained my very recent arrival. A conversation about drinks ensued, culminating with his friend producing a drink seemingly out of nowhere. Now generally it's ill-advised to take a drink under those circumstances, but in this case, date rape didn't seem too likely. They explained that it was Vodka and Ting, and as soon as I started drinking it they were talking me out of it--"Don't drink it if you don't want to man, it's a fucked up drink." I could understand why, because I really couldn't taste the alcohol, and people say that about a lot of drinks but I rarely find it that way myself. Also I later remembered grapefruit can amplify the effects of things like alcohol. But this didn't do anything too bad to me.
Once the student bartenders were so drunk it was hard to get their attention, we took the bus back to the campus, and with the combination of a bumpy ride, and some passengers looking really unhealthy, I felt sure there would be some vomiting, which would be really unpleasant for at least a few people, since they pack the buses so tight. But somehow it didn't happen. As we started walking to the dorm I saw a girl about our age pick up what appeared to be a dead rat off the road, and throw it into the grass. Now that is something you don't see every day. "Vet students," Al's friend remarked--see the Medical students, they don't respect the Veterinary students too much. No regard. No esteem either.
On this day we took it easy, because we got up pretty late due to the party. We went to Grand Anse beach and pretended to swim. We saw a lot of sand crabs. They were never far from their holes in the beach--as soon as I saw one, my next step would send him down into the hole in a flash. I tried to look further ahead of where I was so I could get better looks, but this didn't work all that well. Their camouflage was pretty good. The beach didn't have many good shells, or any sizable waves for that matter, which I suppose can be attributed to its position on the west side of the island, not getting anything directly from the Atlantic. I got a picture of the sunset, which was the first picture I had taken since just about 12 hours earlier, of the sunrise. That night we ate at the Sugar Shack, walked around some more, and watched more episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force that we had been downloading. By this point I knew the theme song lyrics pretty well.
This day is a lot more interesting. We had a mission: to climb Mt. Qua Qua, in Grand Etang National Park. The main obstacle, other than the climb, was getting there with Grenada's very ad hoc transportation system. Al, Faisal and I set out reasonably early, taking a University bus into Grand Anse, and then a reggae bus to downtown St. George's. Now we realized why the city had looked so dead two days ago: we had never gone through the Sendall Tunnel into the north part of the city! This was a real city after all. The challenge before us was to find a reggae bus to take us to Grand Etang. We feared not a lot of locals would be going there. Of course in Grenada you don't find the bus, the bus finds you. In this case, a guy who was just standing against a building suddenly asked us where we wanted to go. When we told him, he said, "that's gonna be a problem. The road that goes there, it's blocked off [or something], so you gotta... [something] Vendome, and you walk, a long way, uphill. Or maybe you could find a cab to take you, for about $50 EC [$18 US]." Paranoia kicked in, but he wasn't trying to sell us a cab, he just kept saying "go to the market" and "Vendome." So we went to the market, but we didn't know what the hell Vendome was, so we told a bus guy our destination, and he said "Oh boy." and then pretty much said what the other guy had said, and to get into the bus which, coincidentally, he was about to get in and be the conductor for.
That bus took us up many hills to what turned out to be the town of Vendome, closest to Grand Etang. The conductor pointed us to the road we then had to walk. It didn't look blocked off to us, but then again it was somewhat understandable that they wouldn't want to take us a long way, all uphill, for our lousy $3 EC (75 cents US, a deal I still can't believe). We stopped at the general store for some sustenance snacks--amazingly, though this looked like a very small town, the food was still mostly American junk food sorts of items. I got some cookies that ended up being about as tasty as Cookie Crisp cereal (i.e., not tasty).
The guy in St. George's was not kidding about the walk to Grand Etang, it was arduous as fuck. The road was paved and that made the walking easy, but it was the steepest road I've ever seen. We got about 2/3 of the way up (though we didn't know that at the time) before a car finally made an appearance, and the driver told us to get in and drove us the rest of the way. He asked $10 EC of each of us, and this was almost the only time I felt ripped off in Grenada, but considering how nice it was not to have walked the rest of the way, I really didn't care. He told us we had to pay an entry fee at a booth, but typically, there was no one there. As we walked to the trail head, we saw some locals eating lunch, and they said "hey guys!" and gave a big thumbs up, while snickering to themselves. This was understandable, as I was wearing khakis and Faisal had on all black including Jnco jeans, but still, we'd show them.
I found the climb very pleasant. It mainly went along ridges, so the views were fantastic most of the way. The trail was often narrow, with very steep drops on boths sides, but with a rainforest canopy of plant life rising out of it. The plant life turned out to be almost more interesting than the animals--bamboo trees, gigantic leaves, some nice flowers, actual tarzan-like vines [fear my ghostly visage!]. The only animals we really saw were hummingbirds and little lizards, the rest were too fast and clever to be seen by the likes of us, though we sometimes heard their scurrying. The trail got pretty steep and muddy (red clay-like mud) at some points, and this created some problems for Faisal, but we all made it up, and were rewarded with more views, and the experience of watching clouds blow up the side of the mountain and right through us. On the way down Faisal ended up sliding a lot, so he was pretty much covered with mud at the end of it. Not wanting to pay our driver any more, we walked down the long steep road to Vendome. Faisal had been exhausted by the 3.5 hour climb, and walked like the living dead down that road.
Al and I got to the town about 15 minutes before him, so we sat down in the 'town square' with sodas. We must have looked pretty funny sitting in a town with no tourist draw, with mud on our pants and shoes, because the locals were giving us some weird looks. When Faisal got there, covered in mud and stumbling, an old man sitting on some steps said "the war is over boy, the war is over!" All the locals walking through the square erupted in laughter, causing the man to repeat his comment several more times. Al and I couldn't help but join in. Once that settled down (the old man was still laughing), we waited for the bus, slightly worried their concern for mud-free upholstery would strand us. But they didn't notice, and we got home for some showers and rest. That night we went for some TCBY, and I recognized one employee from the party (not the most enthusiastic employee in the world) but he didn't recognize me. When Faisal ordered a banana split one of them surreptitiously ran out and bought some bananas. Good guys.
On the last full day of the trip we decided to again take it easy, because we were pretty tired and sore from the previous day's hike. Actually we didn't take it that easy, but relatively, yes. We wanted to check out the vibrant city of St. George's that we had passed through the previous day on the way to Grand Etang. So we took the bus through the tunnel and started walking around. It was a bit of a challenge to find good things to bring back that weren't trashy at all. In fact a lot of the merchandise for sale in the street market and the stores there consisted of food, spices, bootleg CD's, and clothing that I would never wear. Like everywhere else in Grenada, the city is on a hill, so we walked to the top and found more amazing views. On the way back down we saw the Parliament house. There were roosters walking around outside it, and some officials managing to sound very dignified while speaking with the Caribbean accent. Then we walked to the other side of the city, which is the fort, a very old one. It's also the site where the prime minister and several others were executed after the coup in 1983. One of the names of the other executees was Unison Whiteman, which I thought was pretty cool, at least the Unison part. Some views from there.
After that we went back to Grand Anse beach.
Al couldn't find peace on the sand because of all the crabs. I
rented snorkling gear and swam around some. The only wildlife
I spotted were the little spiky things that I believe are called
sea anemones, a few little tropical fish, and a starfish. The
fish were fun to watch because of the way they would let themselves
be thrown around a bit by the waves, and then eventually decide
to swim on their own.
That night a lot of students were getting ready to leave, as they
had been the whole time I was there. Almost all the flights were
at 6am or 8am, and no one seemed to mind staying up the whole
night for it. That was a cool thing about the campus, you could
walk around at any hour of the day or night, and at least a few
other people would be casually walking around. But not because
they were out partying, they were just up, used to studying all
night I guess. I found it very enjoyable to be in a whole community
of insomniacs. We walked around and said goodbye to people, and
watched the clouds speed across the sky illuminated by the moon.
The cats were out skulking around as usual.
I had procrastinated about calling for a cab to the airport, since it had proved to be about the most expensive one thing in Grenada at $9 US. As usual the path of least resistance prevailed, and I shared a cab with another leaving student. The airport was closed when we got there and we had to sit outside it for about a half hour. When they did open it, one of the automatic doors wasn't being very automatic, and had to be held open. The line was excruciatingly slow as they inspected the contents of every checked bag. A lot of the students were getting royally screwed by a rule stating that all checked bags could only weigh 70 pounds together, because when they came here it was 70 pounds per bag, and naturally they had acquired a lot of heavy books. So they frantically ran to the scales to test their bags, and transfer things to their carry-on bags if necessary. One obnoxious guy in a Scholes jersey, whose bags were obviously too heavy, talked loudly of trying to "bribe this guy."
I managed to stay awake long enough to snap an aerial picture of the campus right after we took off; after that everything is a blur. I remember thinking to myself "Stay awake, take a picture" and then instantly blacking out, awake, more little thoughts, "should stay awake, get food," then out again. When we got to San Juan I was so tired I couldn't think straight, and my plans of taking my 4 hour layover to explore outside the airport quickly evaporated. Instead I collapsed in a seat at my departure gate and slept, occasionally waking up to see more people sitting around me, and wondering what my face must have looked like after being pressed against my hand and jacket. My seatmate on the flight back to New York was nice enough to wake me for lunch. For the little time I was awake on both flights, I was totally amazed and inspired by the appearance of the clouds from above. The variety of shape and texture, and the light patterns, and the hugeness, is really something. The whole time really I was just drifting anyway.