Chaudiere Pool - Dominica

On the last of our three days in Portsmouth under the care of Martin, he assigned his assistant, Walsh, to be our driver for the day. (Walsh is to the right, with Lene and a cow.)


For nine hours we were driven across the northern part of the Island from the west to the east coast and back, with stops for lunch in Calabishi (a seaside beach of restaurants overlooked by homes built by and for foreigners -- far side of bay, left),
a visit to the newly renovated airport which now permits night landings and of which Walsh was quite proud, an ice cream stop, through his village, called Wesley, and stops at two natural wonders.

The first of these is the waterfalls. Actually we stopped about a mile from them and then walked over a dirt road that became a path and then a trail and then vertical.

It was quite slippery with mud; Ilene slipped and fell a few times and luckily was not hurt. Walsh found her a walking stick -- a third leg he called it -- and we proceeded until we came to a river near the falls that required us to take off our shoes (mud encrusted to an inch. We walked barefoot on the rocks or in the water to the pool. We swam but did not dive off the rocks on both sides as the French party that followed us did.
The falling water, so concentrated at the point of the falls, carved out a deep pool. Water, filled with air, bubbles up from the pool and pushed us not downstream, but to the side and then, since what goes up, must come down, downward.

During this pre-lunch waterfall hike we had oranges, sugar cane (strip off the outer bark with your teeth, bite off a piece, chew to release the sweet liquid and spit out the remaining fibrous material) lemon grass. We were shown coffee trees, cocoa trees, breadfruit trees, various tuber bushes, cinnamon (Walsh carved off pieces of its bark and told us it was his brother's house), ginger (very fresh and wet and not yet dried off, and of course the ubiquitous bananas. All the rural men carry unsheathed machetes.

After lunch we visited Red Rocks, a natural coastal cliff deposit of red rocks -- where did they come from on this volcanic island whose sandy beaches are black ground up volcanic rock, and where did the very red inland clay come from? Walsh said this was the oldest part of the island but that did not fully explain the geology of the matter.

Here in Dominica, the friendliest of the islands we have visited so far, and the smallest with only about 75,000 residents, the custom is to toot your car horn when you see someone you know. Walsh knows thousands! At age 42 with wife and kids, he has never set foot off this island; it has everything he needs. He was surprised to learn that in New York, one can be fined for tooting a horn.