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Emma April 4, 2001
My turn comes round
again, and I am required to write this week’s group email. However when I
begin I always find myself lost for words, and this time is no exception.
Yesterday we rented a car and went on an island tour. We had a hard time,
actually, finding the car but we managed to secure a “Budget” one, a tiny
white car that wasn’t exactly our ideal but that worked fairly well, except
for the time when we had to get out and help push the car up a steep rainforest
road. We began the island tour by stopping at a spice farm, which was quite
natural, as Grenada is known as “The Spice Isle of the Caribbean,” and its
chief export is nutmeg. There were quite a number of tourists at the beginning
but they all left quickly, and we were shown the principle spices: nutmeg, of
course, with its glossy brown nuts and claw-like, brilliant red mace on the
outside (nutmeg’s really quite a colorful and picturesque spice); cocoa, with
its papaya-like orange fruit and glutinous gray seeds inside, dried and ground
and rolled into large, dark brown balls; all-spice, with the green boughs whose
leaves smell so distinctly of cinnamon and apple pie; cinnamon itself, with its
fragrant, spicy wood and crumbly bark which is dried, broken and tied into
bundles of cinnamon sticks; and a good number of other spices which I had never
heard of before and probably never will again. There were great wooden trays of
the seeds and nuts, laid out to cure in the sun. An old, toothless man, Norris,
showed us around the factory where spices were ground and polished, with its
rusted steam engines and boilers, and tumblers to make the cocoa beans polished
and attractive. He was obviously very proud of the deserted machinery, and it
was rather sad that it was totally out of use now. There were still many nuts
and spices around, dropped on the dirty floor to be crunched underfoot.
We also saw a rum factory, with the gigantic heaps and piles of squeezed
and juiceless sugarcane, the vats with their yeast-like piles, and the pungent,
sickly aroma of rum everywhere you went. I can’t imagine ever being able to
work there, and the lady who showed us around did seem as if she was trying her
very hardest to keep away from it as much as possible.
We ate lunch at a small, open restaurant that served chewy,
room-temperature fried chicken, greasy and undercooked fries, the classic
vegetables of calalou (spelling is unsure but it is a sort of vegetable you boil
as a stew or soup), bok choy, breadfruit and plantain, and some good fish. We
also looked at the small cemetery whose sheer, dizzying cliff had been the
escape of some islanders who didn’t want to surrender or be captured. There
were lots of trees growing out from the lower cliff face, so it wasn’t quite
as impressive, but the shallow breakers were still a long way away.
Last of all we drove high into the cool and cloudy heights and everyone
but Dad went on a half-hour walk in the forest. The very, very tip of Dad’s
toe had been cut off by the sharp edge of the anchor locker lid and stitched up
recently, so he didn’t want to go on a walk. The forest wasn’t as thick as
befit a real, natural rainforest, but in the middle of the walk we refreshed
ourselves at a very cold waterfall pool and that was very nice. We drove back to
the area of St. George’s after that, and so closed our expedition.
I consider this email long enough to be decent, and certainly longer than
the first one I wrote, so this letter, too, will close.
Emma
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