After arriving in Grenada we first spent the day in the harbour. As the captain, I had to get clearance for all of us in the customs and immigration office before anyone was allowed to leave the boat. This was the first time for us to clear into a non-EU country, but we read up on how to do it and already filled out all the online forms to make the process much easier. The office opened at 8 a.m. and so I went there at eight. I got my first taste of the Caribbean lifestyle, when the customs officer arrived half an hour late, and the immigration officer finally arrived at nine. The grumpy men in their nice uniforms accepted our arrival and we were ready to roam the country and its waters.
First thing after that we went for a nice breakfast in the marina, one where you didn’t have to hold your bowl to keep it from falling to the floor and fear getting sick. The rest of the day we cleaned the boat and just enjoyed marina life.
In the evening we decided to go to St. George’s, the capital city of Grenada close to our Marina. Since we didn’t know where exactly we wanted to go, we took a cab and asked the driver to take us to a nice bar or restaurant. He said that St. George’s wasn’t the right place (we later realised why), and proposed that we should rather go to Grand Anse beach to the Umbrellas Bar. At first, we were a bit worried that he was just trying to get us for a longer drive and bring us to his friend’s bar, but we still accepted. It turned out to be the perfect proposition and we had a lovely evening. We went to the beach to watch the sunset and had a great dinner at the beach bar.
Since the cab was surprisingly expensive (locals do not take cabs, they are only for tourists), we decided to try and take the bus home, which turned out to be our next real Caribbean experience. The buses in Grenada are small privately owned mini-vans. From the outside, you would guess that they would fit two people in the front and have three rows in the back with each three chairs. In fact, they have 4 rows in the back where they each fit 4 people. And when the bus arrived I thought well, it’s already full, but miraculously they managed to still fit the 6 of us in: 5 or 6 people in each row, everybody sitting on top of each other. Each bus has a driver and an additional person who was in charge of cashing in the tickets and stuffing as many people in the bus as would somehow fit. If the bus is full, he himself will somehow stand half bent over at the door to make space for an extra seat. And the best thing about the whole bus experience was that the driver was blasting unbelievably loud Caribbean music and honking around every corner of the road, announcing his arrival and saying hello to people he knew. We can really recommend taking the bus once or twice if you are in the Caribbean, it really is a fun experience (although I’m very glad I don’t have to take it every day commuting to work…).
The next day we did some boat repairs. We fixed the Gennaker halyard that snapped and of course fell down inside the mast. So somebody had to climb up, drop a piece of rope with a weight down and at the bottom we attached the halyard to pull it up again. We also fixed the reef line, but that also needed a bit of rope gymnastics because the rest of the reefing line was lost in the boom (and here you can’t drop a weight down as the boom is horizontal).
We still decided to go to St. George’s and walked to the city. We had to go through a tunnel where there really wasn’t space for cars and pedestrians at the same time, but it was the official way into town. We went up to a fort which sadly was closed but we still had a good view over the surrounding hills from the police station which was almost at the top right in front of the fort.
Jenny and I did not really enjoy the rest of the town, as we tried to find a restaurant which turned out to be much harder than we thought. None seemed to be open, and the ones that were open didn’t look very inviting. In the end, we resorted to some shady street food stands and ate half a grilled chicken and some lentil-pigtail soup on a dirty sidewalk (the nicest we found) next to a lot of hungry but well-behaved street dogs who waited for our chicken bones and some pigtail. Now we understood why the cab driver seemed surprised when we told him we wanted to go to town for dinner.
On the next day, we took another bus into the heart of the country to the Grand Etang National Park where we did a short hike. It was the first time for us being in a Caribbean rainforest and we were captivated by the local flora, a vast variety of different plants, some of them with leaves as big as ourselves. Our European forests seem quite boring in contrast. We even spotted some hummingbirds.
On the way back Jenny and I were picked up by a cab driver who usually does tours for tourists and he brought us to a spot where there are lots of wild mona monkeys. With a little persuasion in the form of some fruits, one monkey jumped onto my arms.
The next day we took a bus to a rum distillery where we got a tour of the production process through the old factory. Sugar from sugar cane used to be one of the main interests in the colonisation of the Caribbean, and rum was more of a by-product of sugar production. Once the Europeans figured out how to make sugar out of other plants themselves, the rum gained much more importance. Caribbean rum was viewed with a high reputation and became one of their most important export products.
Rum is typically made from sugar molasses, a by-product of the sugar-making process. You add water and yeast and let it ferment. The fermented product is distilled and you get white rum. It can then be put into charred barrels (oak barrels that were burned on the inside) and aged there for a couple of years. The longer it is aged, the more charcoal is dissolved into the rum and the darker it turns. By ageing the alcohol slowly evaporates making the rum less strong.
After that, it was time for us to leave the harbour. Our first stop was quite close, an underwater sculpture park where we went snorkelling. To be honest, all the colourful fish were much more exciting than the stone statues, but that was certainly because it was our first snorkelling expedition in the Caribbean. We stayed one night on a buoy, funnily next to another Neel.
