Today was Grenada. I wasn’t really expecting much, but we were very pleasantly surprised. It’s very clean and busy. Tomorrow is their celebration of independence in 1974 and the whole place is ablaze with their national colors of red, yellow and green. Our tour took us to a spice processing plant where they make everything imaginable with spices. The nutmeg syrup was particularly good - not too sweet. Next was an herb and spice garden which was very interesting. They grow nutmeg trees on the island, but 40% were destroyed in hurricane Ivan in 2004 and the replacement trees aren’t ready for production for another few years. The cashews fall from the trees and rot because there are too many for the population to eat and, for reasons I didn’t understand, they don’t harvest and export them. There are various fruit trees all over the place and anyone is welcome to pick whatever they need for themselves. If the tree is on private property, it is frowned on to pick and sell at the local market. The villages are clean and the homes very well kept for the most part. And the people are very friendly - waving to us as we drove through their villages. Of course, there was also a stop at a rum factory. Notice a pattern developing? No temptation to buy here - even if we didn‘t have 2 bottles being held in “quarantine“ for us - the 2 we sampled tasted like moonshine. For the first time we didn’t get a celebrity report.
I should have mentioned that we can bring 2 bottles of wine on board for our consumption, it’s only hard liquor they “hold” for us. We have a plan to get our bottles back when we change cabins for the final 17 days on March 4. Hopefully, our cabin steward can help.
Every time we go ashore we slather on the sunscreen and then bug spray, which is oily and disgusting, but beats getting yellow fever or “chichimonga”, which isn’t the correct term I know, but I can’t remember the exact disease. It is so hot that while we were waiting for our tour, I held the cold water bottle to my neck and then put it in my arm while I dug for something in my bag. A while later I noticed that the colors from the bottle label had come off on my hand and arm but I was able to wipe it off. I forgot all about my neck, and of course Michael didn’t notice it with his dark glasses until we were getting back on board, so I walked around all day with a very colorful neck. Lovely. Maybe the locals thought I was celebrating their independence too!
Tomorrow is Trinidad (real mosquito and yellow fever country). That’s a lot of port days in a row. After that we have 5 sea days, our longest stretch. I played mahjongg with 3 very nice ladies last Monday and we plan to play again on those sea days. This afternoon was another laundry day for me and nap day for Michael - another trend I see developing.
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