Dominica is the Worst

The first rule of Dominica is: don't go to Dominica.

Saturday in St. Lucia began how lots of days do lately, with a cab ride to the airport. The flight was uneventful but the spray-can delousing that we receive on every Liat flight has continued. Nothing says Caribbean fun like getting pesticide sprayed in your eyes.

This ad on the back of the inflight magazine is interesting. There are several Caribbean countries where you can buy citizenship by performing such tasks as investing in real estate or making a donation to the country's development fund. I can't think of a reason why I would ever do that but I do think that being a duel citizen someday might be neat.

We arrived at the Dominica (pronounced DomiNEEca) airport without much hoopla and walked past the gang of pushy taxi guys to the car rental desk. When we told the lady at the Avis rental counter that we had a reservation she laughed. I showed her the reservation printout and I might as well have been showing her my baptism certificate because she didn't care: there were no cars available. For those of you keeping track at home this is the third car reservation that has ended with me not driving away in a car that I reserved.

To make matters worse when I finally gave up and said we would just take a cab she offered to call "a guy she knows" to come give us a ride. Uh, no, I'm not going to give you a kick back for screwing me. When I refused her sleaze-bag offer she insisted, which made it even more satisfying to walk out of her office, leaving her to the important work one does at a rental car desk when there are no rental cars.

So we walked back to the pushy taxi drivers. It didn't take long before one was invading our personal space. $80   the guy quoted us. Yet again we were shocked. Yesterday we paid a guy $100 to drive us "wherever we want" for hours. Today this jerk was demanding most of that just to get us to our hotel. The rental car we had reserved for two days would have cost $142.

Incredulous, I went to the travel information window for help and I was so lucky that her highness took off her head phones to speak to me.

"How much should I expect to pay for a taxi to Roseau?"
"You'll have to ask the taxi drivers".
"Are there any buses?"
"None that come to the airport."
"Thank you, and I hope you contract a preventable jungle disease."

That last part was just in my head.

We tried haggling and talking to another cab driver but to no avail. The second driver simply asked the first what price we had been quoted. Ok, $80 dollars it is, taxi cartel. Dominica, so far, you suck.

Part of the reason for the higher price is that the airport is on the opposite side of the island from the capital city (still it was only like an hour drive).

The cab driver was polite enough but he would not shut his mouth. His veteran son died. His brother died. He'd been waiting for a fare all day. Taxi vans are expensive. He offered us a banana. Most of this crap was clearly designed to increase what he told us should be "a nice tip for Christmas". Oh man did I hate that guy. Christmas is over, bro.

We finally made it to our little hostel and handed the driver his EXACTLY $80 frickin dollars and walked in.

Ma Bass Guest House is run by a little old lady named Ma Bass. It was cheap and nice enough. The AC worked and there weren't bugs everywhere. I think my standards are dropping fast.

The capital city, Roseau, was the scariest place of the entire trip. For example this was the only place in the Caribbean someone asked me for money, and it happened numerous times. It wasn't just a one time ask, these people would follow you for blocks. When a cruise ship docked the government would block off the streets around the dock and post security guards to keep the locals out. An especially creepy man insisted on shaking both of our hands and then asked if he could join us for dinner. Let me just check my datebook.

You can see the top of that day's cruise ship down the street.

It's hard to tell but this statue is a guy with broken shackles blowing into a conch shell. That's the first thing I would do too.

The "State House" of Dominica.

I had a one armed guy follow us for quite a while on our way to have some delicious (safe) American fast food. Lydia was worried about him but I was thinking he didn't strike me as dangerous and even then only had the one arm for evil doing. Afterwards I informed her that if things had gone badly I'd like my gravestone to read "Killed by a one-armed bandit in front of a Caribbean KFC".

Well after seeing a bit of the city, nice old Ma Bass' son helped us get a cab. Previously the hotel people have gotten us good deals on cabs. Not in Dominica. I think people here are taking their pirate past a little two seriously. This time a 15 minute drive there and back was going to cost us $50. We asked him what he'd charge us to get to the airport the next day? $100. Jerk.

Well I must admit that the natural wonders of Dominica are pretty darn cool. We cabbed it to Champagne Reef, so called because geothermal action under the water causes bubbles to rise up, creating a really cool champagne like experience. We both liked that a lot.

We thought it was cool that the dive shop was made out of shipping containers.

The snorkeling other than the cool bubbles wasn't as good as Belize but we saw some pretty cool fish. My favorite find was a blowfish. All of that Japanese "eat poison blowfish" business gave it a special significance to me.

Snorkeling was my first successful use my new GoPro. I like that you can just turn it on and sort of forget about it. It's less obtrusive that way and you're less likely to miss unexpected moments. I realized the downside when I got back to the hostel: I now have 2 hours of fish footage that needs to be edited to 2 minutes. Blah. Having fun is hard work.

Underwater. Boom.

When we walked back to get our taxi, the driver was talking to a Dutch couple who wanted a ride. I was thinking "oh cool, let's split our cab with some interesting people". Our cab driver was thinking otherwise. He quoted them $20 to get back (less than we paid one way of course).  We asked if that meant we would pay less and he just shooed them away. Splitting a cab is not a thing in the Caribbean. Taxi meters are not a thing. There is only how many foreigners can you scam at the same time.

Dominica would be great if it wasn't for the people.

A Treacherous Road to a Stinky Volcano

Lydia:

Due to our Christmas arrival, we weren't able to rent a car as planned.  Instead our super nice host, Stephanie, at the BayGuesthouse called us a cab.  Soon our cabbie, Junior, picked us up in one of the cab/vans that we've become accustomed to.

Our first stop was the grocery store to pick up some bananas and other treats for Breakfast.

Leaving the supermarket we drove through St. Lucia's capital, Castries.  Honestly, it was pretty similar to cities on the other islands.  Colorful houses perched among the hills facing the water.  You get the idea.

We continued winding our way down the coast of St. Lucia.  We were headed to Soufriere, the site of St. Lucia's two UNESCO World Heritage Sites.  The roads were really, really windy.  Every couple of yards there was a road sign warning of a "Hairpin Bend".

In fact it was so windy that the car in front of us slipped off the road.   John and Junior to the rescue!

It was funny because the cab driver kept saying "I don't know how they did that, they were driving so slow and the roads are so wide."  At this point, I was pretty thankful the rental car hadn't worked out.
We also stopped at a little stand along the way for refreshments.  We bought the local Piton beer and a ear of roasted corn.  The corn was not sweet and soft like I was expecting, it was hard and chewy. We decided it tasted like Corn Nuts. I was not a fan.

[This lady was a haggler but I'm from the streets.]

A little further down the road we stopped at a hand-made sign labeled "Viewing Point."  (Junior's idea, not ours.)  We got a quick glimpse in before a local lady started in on her spiel. Beneath us was the town of Soufriere, which she reminded us more than once is her hometown. After providing us with information about the area, she then offered to take a picture of us "free of charge."

The mountains behind us are known as the Pitons.  They are the most well known landmark in St. Lucia.

Of course we weren't going to get off that easy.  She then started wrapping me in jewelry, which she insisted we buy in order to support the local economy.  Sorry lady, no can do.  John offered her a dollar for taking our picture, and we hopped back in the van.

[I gave her 2 dollars for the Superman 2 trivia. A couple scenes in the movie were filmed in St. Lucia. One scene is between the Pitons and the second is at Diamond Falls where we attempted to visit.]

We continued down the winding roads through the town of Soufriere, and soon arrived at Sulphur Springs, "The Caribbean's only drive through volcano."  The area is aptly named as the air smells like rotten eggs. The tour guide led us to the viewing area.  There were a few muddy-looking puddles bubbling up from the ground.

We also hiked up a lot of steps to visit a small museum with a little bit more information.  They had an exhibit about the first people who lived on the island, the Arawaks and Caribs, that I found quite interesting. Overall, the site was cool, but not as cool as the geothermal wonders we visited in Iceland a couple of years ago.

After our geothermal hike we were hungry for lunch.  We followed a suggestion in our guidebook and had Junior take us to Dashanee.  The guidebook described the restaurant as having unparalleled views of the Pitons. Unfortunately, when we arrived there was a sign posted by the door stating, "Non-hotel guests will be charged a $25 table charge per person."  Seriously, seriously? Fifty dollars just to sit down?  You've got to be kidding me.  Since John doesn't negotiate with terrorists, we quickly left.

After finding several other nearby restaurants closed for the Christmas holiday, we decided to settle for some gas station food.  It wasn't great but it got the job done.

Next, Junior suggested that we see Diamond Falls. Unfortunately, that was closed too. I suppose that's the price you pay for traveling on Christmas. It was a little confusing because even though the site was closed, there was a guard standing by and people kept walking through the gate.  Very
strange.

Here's a bit of the conversation between our driver and the waterfall guard in the local Creole.

Anyway, we gave up and drove back towards the hotel in Gros Ilet.  The only interesting thing on the ride home was the rainbow I spotted.

It was pretty awesome!

When we returned to the hotel, I did some relaxing outside.  There were some gorgeous views.

We ended our day with the Gros Ilet street party.  There were lots of people out, but most of them were tourists.  We ordered some delicious looking street food that turned out to be quite disgusting. We ended up stopping by a restaurant for a conch fritters snack.

Crashing an Antiguan Yacht Party

Apparently Antigua has its own special kind of black pineapple which we were unable to locate. We did have an interesting encounter at the grocery store while looking for one though. In the checkout line a kid kept ramming a shopping cart into me and his British-sounding, soccer jersey wearing dad was apologizing for his behavior. Fine. On the way out of the store our cab driver informed us that the man was the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne.

It was especially funny because his face is all over these Christmas billboards but I never would have recognized him.

Always a little money-grubber, I found the equivalent of 7.41 US on the ground in the supermarket. I hope the prime minister didn't see that. Embarrassing. I used it to prop up the local economy sir.

We took a cab to Nelson's Dockyard which is a major tourist destination. It is named after Admiral Horatio Nelson, who lived in the Dockyard from 1784 through 1787. The place itself was about as we expected, with lots of old buildings with interpretive signs posted everywhere. Some rusted cannons and defensive walls rounded out the old naval base experience. However it wouldn't surprise me if this turns out to be the strangest day of our trip.

I'm glad SCUBA isn't like this anymore.

It began with the other visitors that we saw walking into the historic grounds. One was dressed like a sailor off of a Cracker Jack box. Others had garish Christmas outfits on. What the heck was going on? Inside this historic British naval base bad highschool prom music blared and a group of white people were playing beach volleyball. There were way more westerners than locals which was a first for us anywhere in the Caribbean. Several were quite drunk and yelling Christmas greetings at each other in varying levels of accented English.

The ancient docks were filled with yachts of differing shapes and sizes. Most had US or British Commonwealth-looking flags on them. We had officially stumbled upon a fancy people Christmas boat party.

A yacht fun fact is that some countries have specific flags for recreational ships to use. The US required this one from 1848 to 1980:

At first I was weirded out by the un-local nature of this odd gathering, but by the time we left I was glad we were there. There wasn't that much to see at the historic site anyway.

I approached one of the boat people (he had one of those silly looking floaty sunglasses straps around the back of his head). I was most interested in how long it had taken everyone to converge their big boats on this place. I didn't recognize the name of the place he'd embarked from but he said 3 weeks. No thanks! I suddenly felt a lot less inferior. I'd been on the boat yesterday for about 30 minutes before I was barfing over the side. Somebody really needed to tell these rich people that planes are way faster than yachts. Silly rich people. I'm going to be in America the beautiful for weeks while that poor guy is still staring at his naval little navel off the coast of nowhere.

An additional plus was that all these rich people meant that all of the restaurants on the property were open and rocking despite it being Christmas. The downside was most of the restaurant prices were obscene and it was mostly ham and figgy pudding sort of stuff. I was hoping for more local fare but we did pretty well. Local stuff included ginger beer, sorrel, which is a fruit punch-like drink enjoyed in many Caribbean locations on Christmas. The food was solid but pretty normal by American standards.

There was enough ginger in that ginger beer to cure what ails you. Ales you?

We found this notice board at the nearby marina, and it was like a window in a world I have no experience with.

There were several people looking for employment on yachts. Some clearly stated where they wanted the boat to be headed and others didn't. How interesting, if a person picked up some nautical skills they could just boat hitchhike across the earth. Wild.

It felt especially awkward when we returned to our cab driver's beat up van. I felt like we had to do that thing where your friend didn't get invited to a party so when he asks how it was you lie and say it wasn't fun. Sorry bro, it was fun.

This little governmental looking sticker was on the back of our taxi van. I don't have time to look this up but I'm pretty sure it's Japanese. Japan never seemed to have ANY older cars on the road. I think they must ship all their beaters to poorer countries.

We next did a little drive to nearby Shirley Heights which served as a lookout for the British to keep an eye on those sneaky French. There were more cannons and guardhouses. I'd like to see a recreation of a naval battle from this era. It seems like it would be pretty hard to hit a building from a mile away with a little iron bowling ball. Who knows.

Our taxi guide pointed out Eric Clapton's house across the bay. It's called Standfast Point and it actually looks like parts of it are available to rent. Clapton also seems to own a rehab center just north of that across another bay. Very interesting.

On the flight to St. Lucia they announced and then sprayed an aerosol pesticide in the cabin. Nothing gets me more excited about a trip than a good delousing. We then had to fill out an Ebola related health questionnaire at immigration. Get real. Get in close contact with me and you are at risk to contract a serious case of healthy and/or awesome.

Our driver Dalma Ossei was one of my favorite of the whole trip.

He's good people. Give him a call next time you're in town.

I think Antigua's flag is pretty cool looking.

Welcome to St. Lucia! Have you been bleeding from anywhere recently?

When we arrived in St. Lucia we went to the car rental desk and... surprise! They were closed for Christmas despite the fact they were accepting reservations. Good work guys. Stay classy.

You guys are the worst but it's not really an emergency, I imagine it's a long term condition.

In the capital city of Castries, St. Lucia we ate a really nice dinner at an Indian restaurant a la Christmas Story, as every other restaurant in town was closed (fa ra ra).

 We then retired for the night in our latest little guesthouse.

You know you're going to have fun when your bed has a mosquito net!