Sunday – St. Georges, Grenada
Today, we arrived in Grenada. We arrived at about 11:30am, giving me about forty-five minutes to make a quick reccie of the town, to identify the best free wi-fi spots, before having to be back on board again to get lunch. The reason? I was back on tour escort duty again, meaning that I needed to be on the quayside by 1pm.
The tour is was assigned to was titled ‘Discover Grenada’. These sort of excursions are never my favourite; they mostly entail being cooped up in a coach for several hours, only being let out occasionally to take a few photographs before moving on. The coaches we were to be travelling in were small, 22-seater minivans; fifteen of them in all, to cope with the large numbers of people wanting to undertake the tour. It was hot inside, as we left the port, but the driver pulled over as some passengers started opening the windows. “Please close the windows”, he said, then repeated it a couple of times, and refused to start moving again until they’d been closed. Hmm… good start.
Being so small, the driver and guide come packaged as a single person. Every now and then, he would reach forward (I managed to bag the front seat, so I was able to watch him at work), and speak into the microphone. I have to say that I struggled to understand what he was saying, his caribbean accent was so thick. The microphone quality didn’t help much, either, but what was most disconcerting was the fact that he seemed totally disinterested. At our first stop, Neil Bonner, who was escorting on one of the other coaches, told me about how good his guide was, and how enthusiastic he has, giving information at just the right sort of pace, allowing the scenery to tell its own story, but enhancing the journey as appropriate. Don’t get me wrong; our driver was a nice enough chap, and even tried to throw in the occasional joke, but whether his sense of humour was just extremely dry, or whatever, I’m not sure; if he’d told me that his wife had just left him and his house had just been reposessed, I wouldn’t have been surprised… he did seem slightly depressed.
Our first stop was at a spice factory, a large wooden shed where spices are manufactured, grown, or whatever… and it was utter mayhem, with 15 minibuses descending upon the place more or less all at the same time. I lost my group to the crowd, and by the time we were all getting back on the coach, I’d had one or two people asking me why it was that some groups appeared to get a proper guided tour, with someone explaining exactly what was going off, and our group didn’t.
It was around this time that Neil found out that one of the locations listed on the itinerary for this particular tour wasn’t on the list that had been given to the drivers. When he’d asked his driver if we were going to be seeing the Annandale Waterfall, he’d been answered with an emphatic ‘no’. He pressed his driver on it, and I got dragged into the conversation. When it was apparent that the drivers, as far as they were concerned, would not be taking us to see the waterfall, both Neil and myself, harangued our respectiive drivers, explaining that it was down in the printed itinerary for the trip, and that it was one of the things that passengers had specifically paid their money for. Not only that; if the drivers didn’t take us to see the waterfall, then those same passengers would complain to the shore excursions office, probably demanding to have theiir money back, and the shore excursions team would then be ringing up the shoreside companies to demand why the waterfall hadn’t been included. Anyway; needless to say, a couple of phonecalls were made, as was an assurance that the waterfall would be included… Neil is still proudly wearing his halo!
There was over an hour’s worth of driving between the first stop and the next, along very rough, potholed roads, and over some steep inclines that make Sutton Bank look like a gentle slope. There’d been an accident at one point; a battered car was being lifted out of a deep gulley by a crane, to the fascination of what looked like an entire village population’s-worth of onlookers. On more than one occasion, we’d pass over a particularly deep pothole. I’d wince, and the driver would say “Don’t Worry… Be Happy…”
Eventually, we arrived at out second stop, billed as ‘Crater Lake’. High up in the National Park interior of the island, where we were treated to a free drink (beer!) and a view of the lake, whilst being entertained by a really crap busker who not only seemed to be making up his songs as he went along, but also seemed to be murdering them at the same time. The view of the lake was slightly underwhelming, but the beer was good!
Almost another hour’s worth of bumpy, hot, humourless driving (don’t worry… be happy…), brought us to Annandale Waterfall. A short walk was rewarded with a good view of the falls… although it was nothing that could hold a candle to even any one of Yorkshire’s most modest offerings. It was okay, but it wasn’t the most spectacular waterfall I’d ever seen. A group of enterprising young Grenadians (I’m guessing that’s what they’re called) were hanging about there, asking visitors if they’d like to see a spectacular dive from one of their members into the water; for no charge at all! A couple of people even fell for it; a bloke would make a big thing out of preparing to dive into the water, with fingers counting down and everything… they wanted the visitors to have their cameras at the ready. Then, after the chap had jumped, rather unceremoniously, and really not that spectacularly (and not from very high up), they would whip out a hat, and say “contributions?…”, “One Dollar?…”
Our last stop was at Frederick’s Fort, overlooking the harbour, almost a thousand feet below us. The views were actually rather spectacular, and with the sun in it’s last half hour before sunset, the light was particularly good. We had twenty minutes to admire the views in all directions, and explore the fort. There wasn’t really long enough to walk around the whole thing, but in one section that I did walk through, there was a small colony of bats hanging from the ceiling and occasionally flitting off to do bat-things… that was cool!
We were back by the quayside within 15 minutes, just in time to see the sun set – and spectacular it was too. I had about an hour to make use of the free wi-fi just outside the cruise terminal building before having to head on back inside for dinner. We left Grenada at just gone 10pm.
