Time Passages
I'm not saying that there hasn't been anything down here to inspire me to write, but I have been loathe to appraoach the keyboard. The topical daze, I guess. You would think that I should have been able to process the whirlwind of experiences that was our trip to Italy, but I haven't really done that either. Somehow I knew that time would slip away down here, that days would be long and weeks short. Routines would set in and suddenly we would be at the end of our stay. In Ialy the near constant moving and the barrage of ites and sounds and dazzling evidence of high human achievement made the trip seem to go on forever. We will have stayed in each place for one month and perhaps as we look back on this trip the durations of stay will seem to balance out, for now though, the Italian journey seems to have been months and Bequia days.
Tonight we are leaving this little Island to go to the bigger St. Vincent to see a conert by the Jamaican reggae star, Beanie Man. We take a big steel ferry across the seven mile channel. Four or five go back and forth aday. The last time we went across, the wind was kicking out of the north east and the waves were huge and the boat was rocking upand down and rolling side to side. We went with Mom and doug to have lunch with her friend and landlord Dr. Vivian Child, a British woman who has lived nealy fifty years in St. Vincent. she hosted us in her cozy, ramshackle 30's West Indian gingerbread house. Her eyes are as blue and bright as the sun and the sea you can see from her porch but she showing beginning signs of Alzhiemer's. But she is lovely company, a kind a bouyant person. I hate to say however that I was absorbed by Doug's constant banter with her, which used to be funny when she enjoyed fencing with words, but now that she is defenceless the play seemed just rude. Anna and I escaped as soon as lunch was over and took a dollar van back to Kingstown, the main city on the Island. We walked our way through the arcaded, Georgian streets, this time less cacophonous and threatening than when we first arrived fresh from transatlantic transeasonal travel. Through the streets and up the hill to the oldest botanical gardens in the new world, where they have breadfruit trees from the originals Capitan Bligh carried from Tahiti on his second try, after the mutineed first. A man named Elroy, who we met on the way up, showed us through the gardens he has helped care for since he was a boy. He showed us bushes whose leaves you could use for nail files and flowers Vincentians put together in chains like the Hawaiians as well as cinnamon trees, almond trees, mahogany and all sorts of palms from all over the English Empire. It Began to rain and we took shelter with other groups under a well placed gazebo. Elroy and one of the other guides began to sing obscure Ray Charles songs and "Summertime" which the other guide called a Michael Bolton song ( he even told us the track number on the cd and told us he always listened to it twice and then sang it again). After the rain we went to see the aviary where they were keeping the Vincy parrots (native to this and only this Island) in a program to repopulate the inner rain forests. the birds were happy about the rain and squaking like mad hatters. They are a stange purple-green in color with a pale yellow to whitish head. Tomorrow we will go to the nature trails there to see if we can see the parrots in the wild.
On Bequia the scale is smaller and slower. There are lots of yachtees and retired people. And many fine yellow sand beaches nearly all deserted. You could walk to all of them from the main harbor withn an hour. Mom has rented Vivian's house for the past six or seven winters and it is right on the harbor. Their new house is on the windy side of the Island, up high over looking a small coconut grove and shallow bay protected by a reef called Spring. ON that beach there is lots of drifted junk, seagrass, coconuts, plastic jugs, and of course great wood for the bed and mirror I am making for the new place. The next beach up is my favorite. We ride the scooter there for afternoon swims sometimes. It is calle Industry but there is nothing industrial about it. At the far end of it's three hundred yard length there is a three room hotel with a slow restaurant and cats and dogs that lay on the beach, but that is it. You look out on to two uninhabited islands with the dreamlike names Battowia and Baliceaux. I keep a photo of this view from this beach under my sunvisor.
The next beach up is alittle wilder. The trees on shore begin to give out and Bequia really does seem like a desert island. An ex-fisherman, Orton King, has set up a homemade sea turtle refuge and keeps hundreds or hawksbill turtles from infancy to three year olds and then releases them. BEyond that beach there is no development. We have not yet hiked that area.
The two most popular beaches are on the harbor and they are each so calm and lovely and shady and yet still almost never crowded. They are Princess Margaret and Lower bay. I will tell more of them another time.
Tonight we are leaving this little Island to go to the bigger St. Vincent to see a conert by the Jamaican reggae star, Beanie Man. We take a big steel ferry across the seven mile channel. Four or five go back and forth aday. The last time we went across, the wind was kicking out of the north east and the waves were huge and the boat was rocking upand down and rolling side to side. We went with Mom and doug to have lunch with her friend and landlord Dr. Vivian Child, a British woman who has lived nealy fifty years in St. Vincent. she hosted us in her cozy, ramshackle 30's West Indian gingerbread house. Her eyes are as blue and bright as the sun and the sea you can see from her porch but she showing beginning signs of Alzhiemer's. But she is lovely company, a kind a bouyant person. I hate to say however that I was absorbed by Doug's constant banter with her, which used to be funny when she enjoyed fencing with words, but now that she is defenceless the play seemed just rude. Anna and I escaped as soon as lunch was over and took a dollar van back to Kingstown, the main city on the Island. We walked our way through the arcaded, Georgian streets, this time less cacophonous and threatening than when we first arrived fresh from transatlantic transeasonal travel. Through the streets and up the hill to the oldest botanical gardens in the new world, where they have breadfruit trees from the originals Capitan Bligh carried from Tahiti on his second try, after the mutineed first. A man named Elroy, who we met on the way up, showed us through the gardens he has helped care for since he was a boy. He showed us bushes whose leaves you could use for nail files and flowers Vincentians put together in chains like the Hawaiians as well as cinnamon trees, almond trees, mahogany and all sorts of palms from all over the English Empire. It Began to rain and we took shelter with other groups under a well placed gazebo. Elroy and one of the other guides began to sing obscure Ray Charles songs and "Summertime" which the other guide called a Michael Bolton song ( he even told us the track number on the cd and told us he always listened to it twice and then sang it again). After the rain we went to see the aviary where they were keeping the Vincy parrots (native to this and only this Island) in a program to repopulate the inner rain forests. the birds were happy about the rain and squaking like mad hatters. They are a stange purple-green in color with a pale yellow to whitish head. Tomorrow we will go to the nature trails there to see if we can see the parrots in the wild.
On Bequia the scale is smaller and slower. There are lots of yachtees and retired people. And many fine yellow sand beaches nearly all deserted. You could walk to all of them from the main harbor withn an hour. Mom has rented Vivian's house for the past six or seven winters and it is right on the harbor. Their new house is on the windy side of the Island, up high over looking a small coconut grove and shallow bay protected by a reef called Spring. ON that beach there is lots of drifted junk, seagrass, coconuts, plastic jugs, and of course great wood for the bed and mirror I am making for the new place. The next beach up is my favorite. We ride the scooter there for afternoon swims sometimes. It is calle Industry but there is nothing industrial about it. At the far end of it's three hundred yard length there is a three room hotel with a slow restaurant and cats and dogs that lay on the beach, but that is it. You look out on to two uninhabited islands with the dreamlike names Battowia and Baliceaux. I keep a photo of this view from this beach under my sunvisor.
The next beach up is alittle wilder. The trees on shore begin to give out and Bequia really does seem like a desert island. An ex-fisherman, Orton King, has set up a homemade sea turtle refuge and keeps hundreds or hawksbill turtles from infancy to three year olds and then releases them. BEyond that beach there is no development. We have not yet hiked that area.
The two most popular beaches are on the harbor and they are each so calm and lovely and shady and yet still almost never crowded. They are Princess Margaret and Lower bay. I will tell more of them another time.
posted by honeymooners at 7:10 AM
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