Some Tourist Stuff

Sometimes the best way to get an overview of the latest island’s attractions is to dress up like a tourist, grab your camera and do the all day tour. A dozen boats got together and chartered a 25-passenger van to tour Grenada for the day. The van is owned by a man named Elvis, although the king himself did not actually guide our tour. Our guide was great and explained a lot of history and interesting sites along the way. He also has a theory that most of the animals on the island are brown. We would get the usual tour stuff: “On your right is the island’s land fill” along with: “and on your left a brown dog… and goat, also brown”. A black and white dog with some brown on its face also counted as a brown dog.

Stops along the way included: an old spice plantation, nutmeg pressing house, chocolate factory, rum distillery, lunch and of course, a waterfall. The spice plantation had a brief lecture on processing spices but no real tour. Our herb lecture in Dominica was lots better but he had more time and a smaller group. The nutmeg house was more interesting since it is still in operation. Nuts are purchased from farmers, dried, shelled, sorted, sized, tested and packed for export all pretty much by hand. Not much has changed there in the last hundred years. The chocolate factory was a very small operation with solar power running antique machines from all over the world. It was like a working museum that actually produced a product. A delicious product! Another working museum was the Rivers Rum Distillery. A waterwheel powers the sugar cane squeezing machine and the juice flows down an open concrete trench to the boiling vats. It is then hand-dipped from vat to vat until it flows to a series of big stills that would cause a hillbilly’s heart to leap. The heat for boiling and distilling comes from burning the dried, squeezed sugar cane as well as some wood. And the end product… paint thinner. The stuff was pure alcohol, moonshine; a tiny sip was more than enough for all of us salty sailors. They do not export. The waterfall was small but pretty and featured a Rasta guy that we were supposed to tip for jumping off the top.

We saw a lot of hurricane damage from the past few years and learned what a “Jenny house” is. They are small, two room wooden houses provided for temporary shelter after hurricane Jenny struck the island 50 years ago. They seem to hold up rather well and have even survived big storms since.

The Elvis tour bus dropped us back at the yacht club and 24 sailors returned to their floating homes, tired and a little bit better educated on the beautiful island of Grenada.

Glenn