Aujourd’hui we say au
revoir à Guadeloupe. It is time to
leave. Some western wind is blowing
great rafts of seaweed up on the all the beaches, they look quite bearded and
it is not quite as much fun to swim around in.
Since our flight is not
until mid-afternoon, we venture over to the other island to see what we were
missing. Not much, we all agree.
Actually that’s not
entirely fair. Passing the big city of Pointe-a-Pitre
(which has a velodrome! That’s something
you don’t see where we come from.), we take a stop at the beautifully situated
Fort Fleurs d’Epée. This 18th
c. French fort was a major point in island defense, and while mostly ruins now
is worth a visit for the spectacular views of the bay, the flamboyant trees
(not so flamboyant this time of year, but we can see that they would be
spectacular), and an art exhibit down a stuffy tunnel that deals mostly in
themes of Gwada history, especially race and slavery. The fort is actually on something called the
Route des Esclaves, which is a kind of slavery heritage trail of sites around
the island. I’m sorry that I didn’t find
this out until the end, and that it required navigating a French website,
because we could have perhaps tracked some of these sites down. There are plantations and cemeteries and
forts and such. I’m not surprised this
wasn’t in our ancient Fodor’s but the Guide Vert might have said something
(although maybe it did and I couldn’t read it) and Lonely Planet? Get with the program!
The Conseil-Général’s
residence is right next to the Fort.
Looks pretty swish, and pretty secure.
I should note that the only place I found information about the Route
des Esclaves was on the Conseil-Général’s website, so that is something.
We check out the
beachside town of Sainte-Anne, where the big resorts start and continue down
the coast of Grande-Terre. The beach in
town is quite crowded with families, and all the beachy activities you could
want: hair-braiding, tattoos, rentals of
various watercraft, and a touristically-oriented market where we nevertheless
buy some spices and palm bowls and things made out of madras. The sand here is soft and
classically-Caribbean white, and the water is turquoise and shallow, and there
are even lifeguards. But there are a lot
of people (well, compared to B-T), and it is clearly geared to the French
tourist.
Peter’s sausage sandwich
at lunch today had so much mustard on it that he cries while eating it. Next time he will say non, merci, when asked
about moutarde.
While our travel day
starts well, it ends up as a bit of a saga, thanks to the unbelievably clueless
management of international arrivals at Miami International Airport. Instead of getting home to Boston late that
night, we end up spending five hours at an airport hotel, then fly to LaGuardia,
and drive home from there in a little over three hours. If you want to
know where all the people in Boston are on the second Saturday of April Break
Week, look no further than all the flights back to Boston, which is why we had
to go to New York.
It’s not such a terrible
thing to have a less-than-successful reentry because you are actually really
happy to get home after all that.
And it is bliss to sleep
uninterrupted by the gd roosters.
Here are a few notes.
We’re all always reading,
particularly Isabel who motored through several books on this vacation. She figured out that dinner went much better
if she brought a book along, and there was a very comfy hammock-chair back at
our villa that was just the right size for her to curl up in with a good
read. When Peter is not playing games on
his phone, he is delving into H. P. Lovecraft’s creepy horror stories. He tries to describe them to us one evening,
and ends by saying that while Lovecraft is considered the father of the modern
horror story, he is really sui generis.
Bill is reading an edition of Wolf
Hall that has a picture of his high school classmate Mark Rylance on the
cover, which always gives me a start when I see him gazing mournfully up at me
from the bottom of the beach bag. I’ve
got a Tony Hillerman mystery about grave robbers in the Southwest, which is
great, although it is funny to read about the arid and dry desert when you are
in the middle of tropical lushness.
At the grocery store, we
are mad about:
- Exotique, a tropical-fruity
juice which is surely mostly sugar but still tastes of guava and passion fruit
and all those other local things.
- Sucre, which is a very
lightly-sweetened plain yogurt. Yogurt
in general is better in France (and this is all French) so that was a treat for
the yogurt eaters among us.
- In his quest for
morning cereal, Bill became quite fond of Fitness, which is like sweet
Wheaties, which he mixed with muesli.
Fitness became a fad in our house.
- I can’t remember the
name of the really good cookies that were like little chocolate cakes with a
bit of vanilla cake in the middle, but they were delicious. They came individually wrapped which was good
because I left the other box of really good cookies (some kind of palmier) open
one night and the next morning it was filled with tiny bugs.
- teeny bananas about the
size of Bill’s thumb
- some kind of local
Cheeto that was flavored like colombo stew.
- a lovely cheese tray
that is probably like generic store-brand cheese in France but to us Yanks,
with a baguette on the beach, it tasted pretty great.
- speaking of baguette,
every town has a boulangerie or two.
Just knowing that makes one feel somehow better, that a decent loaf of
bread is available wherever one turns.
Restaurants all kind of
have the same menu – poisson grillée, Colombo, blaff, accras, boudin, bananes
flambées, and some plain viandes like entrecote or agneau – unless you spend
more money, then things get a little more French and sometimes a little more
interesting. I’d have liked to have
ventured a little farther afield to some of the table d’hote restaurants I read
about, but this cuisine was challenging for Isabel. She was pretty sick of the ubiquitous Menu
Enfant by the end, which was invariably poisson grillée or steack haché with
frites or pate and une boule de glace.
That said, it is not so bad to sit by a dark bay at night with a
‘ti-punch and some accras, and a little vivaneau coming your way. The smell of grilled fish with some lime on
a hot night will forever evoke Gwada for me.
Beaches and their
characteristics:
- La Grande Anse –
postcard, long perfect golden crescent.
Crazy parking under the trees with everyone going every which way. Big waves that break right at the beach, but
then is nicely calm just a few feet out.
Watch out for underwater rocks.
If the lady is there selling sorbet, don’t trust your instinct and skip
the coco. It was actually very vanilla-y
and delicious! Of course, the passion fruit
was good, too. These were scooped up
from old ice cream maker canisters, pretty soft by the end of the
afternoon.
- La Petite Anse – way
smaller than the Grande. A very
sheltered bay, with good coral pickings for Isabel, but lots of rocks at the
edge of the water.
- Plage Leroux – OK,
nice, but we never had the transcendent experience that that blogger had. We did see an iguana there, though.
- Plage de la Perle – my
favorite, just long enough for a nice walk, golden, not very wavy, and hardly
anyone there. The ice cream truck here
claimed to be sorbets maison but I’m skeptical.
The kids did not share my skepticism.
We didn’t find the good
boulangerie until our last day. But now
we know where it is, for when we go back.
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