THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9606040510
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
LENGTH: 152 lines
FOR ALL ITS NATURAL beauty - a rugged, benign volcano on the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea, its lush, green terrain rising up majestically to fog-shrouded peaks - Dominica has an identity problem even more acute than the ship that has brought me here, the Seawind Crown.
Let me deal with Dominica's here. I'll take you aboard the Seawind Crown on Page E5.
``A lot of our mail seems to end up first in the Dominican Republic,'' says my Dominica guide, Isaline Carter, with a sense of resignation.
Few people even pronounce its name correctly. It's
Doh-mee-NEE-ka, sort of French-like. Or maybe Doh-mah-NICK-ah, more English-like. (Both countries took turns ``owning'' the place.) In either case the accent is on the third syllable. Not Doh-MIN-ah-ka.
The inviting landscape, I think, looks more than anything else like a large clump of crumpled green paper floating on a sapphire sea. Turns out, this is not an original thought.
Columbus called it Dominica because he first sighted it on a Sunday, Nov. 3, 1493. When he got back to Spain and everybody asked him the usual questions asked of travelers - ``What's it really like there?'' - he thought for a while, then answered that it was more than anything else like a large piece of crumpled parchment.
Columbus didn't actually ``discover'' the island, of course. The Carib Indians knew it was there because they were living on it. They called the place ``Waitukubuli,'' which means ``tall is her body'' and which is not so much sexist as it is descriptive of the island's 20-odd peaks that rise like spines on a stegosaurus' back more than 4,000 feet above the sea.
Isaline tells me there is talk of coming up with a new name for the island that has been an independent republic since 1978.
If there's a contest, I'm going to suggest they call it Botany, or Zoology, or maybe Biology, which would more or less embrace both and which would certainly be what this island is all about. The Smithsonian has called Dominica a ``great plant laboratory unchanged in 10,000 years.''
Someone has counted 365 rivers, shallow and rocky like those that tumble out of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, on this landmass that is only one-fourth the size of Rhode Island, and that may be close to true. Dominica receives 10 times more rainfall than any other Caribbean island - more than 300 inches a year in the interior.
There are modest beaches, but that is not why people come to Dominica.
This place is greener than Ireland; it's rumpled and verdant as Jamaica without the jerk shacks and T-shirt shops, without the hash hawkers and all that jive.
The Three Rs here are rain, rivers and rainbows.
In 1978 Hurricane David devastated the island. Trees fell like matchsticks. Someone counted 15.1 million of them. Three to four months later, recovery was under way. Today, you'd never know it happened.
There are uncounted waterfalls, boiling lakes, wild orchids, 30-foot ferns and at least 53 species of butterflies. And - listen up, bird watchers - only on Dominica will you hear the native solitaire or siffleur, whose call sounds like the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; it also is the home of two endangered indigenous parrots: the red-necked or jacquot and the imperial or sisserou, which is the national bird.
(The national dish, by the way, is the mountain chicken, which is actually a frog. Its legs taste like chicken. Doesn't everything exotic?)
``Plant it, and it will grow'' should be the national motto. Along the road we saw growing:
The vulcan vine. Its crushed beans are boiled in water and used to treat skin irritation. Its seeds came here in windblown ash from a 1902 eruption of Mount Pelee in Martinique, 26 miles away.
Lemon grass, used for tea and food seasoning. It's pretty effective, too, as an air freshener in a van full of tourists.
The sensitive plant, a tiny mimosa that cowers and folds up when touched. In the creole language (the native tongue) it is called ``Mrs. Murphy, close your door, the jumbi is coming.'' That's better than any Latin name you could possible give it.
Also breadfruit, brought here in 1795 by English Capt. William Bligh to provide food for slaves; coffee bushes, imported by the French; wild hops, but not for the locally brewed Kabuli beer; cocoa beans in large, yellow squash-like pods; pineapples; and bananas.
The stalks of bananas look almost as if they were gift-wrapped, covered as they are on the trees with large blue transparent plastic bags - the sort that dry cleaners use - to protect against ultraviolet light.
(Beachwear fashion designers, there's a hidden message for you in the preceding sentence.)
As in other countries where farmland is at a premium - Costa Rica and Hondouras come immediately to mind - cultivated crops often are planted and tended on hillsides so steep you have to wonder how they manage.
When I see this I always think of the old story, which may or may not be true, of Hattie Bascombe, who (allegedly) was fatally injured when she lost her grip on the plow and fell out of her mountainside cornfield in Atkins Hollow near Thornton Gap in what is now Shenandoah National Park.
The Carib Indians, who supplanted the Arawaks, and once inhabited most of the Caribbean islands, live now as an identifiable group only on Dominica. They met Columbus with poisoned arrows, and he called them cannibals. Bad vibes all around. The 3,000 or so of them live today on a sort of reservation of 3,700 acres in the northeast part of the island.
They differ only slightly in appearance from many of the other Dominicans, most of whom are genetic mixes in various degrees of European and African races. Those Caribs who have little mixed ancestry have light brown skin and straight black hair.
Mixed marriages are allowed. A Carib man can bring an outsider into the reserve, but a Carib womman must go away and live with an outsider.
Seems to me they live a lot like everybody else on the island. This must be washing day. Women are washing clothes in streams. Washed clothes are laid out on the hard-surface roads to dry. Little traffic here. Also, clothes are draped on bushes everywhere. Even, occasionally, hung on clotheslines.
The Caribs are hardly as threatening today as Columbus found them. We stop briefly at a roadside hut covered with banana fronds. A sign reads:
``Welcome my people. Weelcom to the best colture shack. There are things at bargain prices. Have a joyful visit.''
A Carib man comes up and says, ``We have some nice jelly. Coconut jelly.'' He says if I don't buy some, he will shoot me with a poison arrow and eat me. Just kidding. He also has bananas, eight for $1. Bargain price, all right, and great taste, fresh and ripe off the tree.
Dominica's appeal is that it is largely unspoiled. It is the antithesis of tackiness that one finds in, say, Nassau.
Roseau, the capital, is a sleepy town. At the landside of the cruise ship pier is the island museum. It stands on the site of a former slave market and execution grounds. Today, in the cobblestone courtyard, locally made goods are sold here under umbrellas and canopies.
I bought a bottle of locally produced Dominica Double Distilled Bay Rum, which is an after shave and not booze, for $3. It sells for $11 (plus shipping and handling) in the very up-market J. Peterman catalog for retro dressers and aficionados of snob-appeal stuff.
Someday I hope to have the good sense to buy by the gross when I see bargains like that.
Because Dominica is not heavily touristed, there are no international hotels whose names would be familiar. All are locally owned, and several appeared to be quite nice. Construction on an 80-bed, five-star hotel along the Layou River was recently halted because of a disagreement between the present government and Taiwanese investors.
Throughout the island there appear to be a large number of guest houses ranging from bare-bones to fairly plush. I had lunch at one of the latter, Floral Gardens Guest House and Restaurant, on rocky Pagua River. I wouldn't mind going back there, if only long enough to get another hibiscus juice punch.
I've never tasted anything quite like that. Same goes for Dominica. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
STEPHEN HARRIMAN
Photo
STEPHEN HARRIMAN
``A lot of our mail seems to end up first in the Dominican
Republic,'' says guide Isaline Carter.
Graphic
MORE PHOTOS
A slide show of more of Stephen Harriman's pictures from the
Caribbean is available on the Travel page of Pilot Online at
http://www.pilotonline.com/ by CNB