A Day to Remember – October 1, 2013

Back in the States, several big things happened today; the government shut down and Obamacare started with a thud!  Here on the island, life went on and we didn’t let the news from home stop our fun.

By 8:30 a.m, we were in Anthony’s van on our way to a pick up site to the Rain Forest.  Costilla, one of the few female taxi drivers on the island, met us at a prearranged site with her equally new, clean van and took us to pick up our guide, Belta, for the 2 1/2 walk in the forest.  Costilla has 6 children, four grown and two teens, and has lived on the island all her life.  She has very little accent and is very easy to understand so we asked her lots of questions about the people including about the dreadlocks.  It seems the dreadlocks started as an alternate religion, Rastafari movement, and has progress to more of a style thing, which has upset the true believers.

Belta lives in the village close to the entrance of the Rain Forest and once worked in the sugar industry.  Now he supports his family by making art from coconut shells and giving tours.  We originally questioned his expertise, because we spent several minutes talking about some tobacco plants only to see a sign as we moved on that identified them as cotton plants.  But once we got into the forest, he seemed to be more comfortable. We stopped to see and experience various fruit producing trees like sour orange, guava, wild mango, and avocado.

MG & Carol in Rain forestI wonder what is in this nut?

He also showed us an almond tree and broke open the nut so we could taste them.  The flavor was milder and the nut softer than the almonds we get in the States.  With a single hit with a rock, Belta broke open the nuts so I found my own nut to crack open.  By the time I finished there was nothing left of my nut but almond paste!  Good thing I am not planning to live off the land in the Rain Forest anytime soon.

When we were here in 2008 we hiked through this forest with our friends Faye and Lanny and took a picture at the base of a tree that had long flowing roots.  Belta took us to the same tree and this time we took the picture with Carol.

We walked up the hill to where the government has the water collection sites fenced off because all the water for the island comes out of the Rain Forest and they want to keep it clean and pure.  This meant we had to cross over several shallow streams with slippery stones with Belta’s help pointing to the proper stone to step on. On one of these trips across, I was doing fine, as illustrated by the photo below,

Take note of water bottle in back of MG’s jeans

and then suddenly I was in the water and soaking wet!  Lucky for Jim, his first instinct was not to take another picture but to rush to help me.  I was wearing jeans shorts that managed to hold the water for the rest of day.  Yuck!

At the end of the walk in the forest, Castilla met us at the starting point with a cooler that had cold water, juice, and some native foods to snack on.  We tasted golden apple, and banana bread made by Anthony.  The golden apple was not like any apple we have in the States and had a very prickly pit in the center.  The bread had a different taste as well.  Anthony told us later that he grinds cashews to a powder and adds it to the batter.  He also made us sugar cakes, a candy treat that we did not taste yet.

Some flowers we saw as we were having our snack.

We asked Costilla to take us to Basseterre to have lunch and do some shopping.  We ate at a restaurant called Ballyhoo on the circle across from the clock and had lobster sandwiches which interestingly cost the same as a fish sandwich.  Why not!

We had time to walk around Port Zante and have ice cream before heading back to the hotel.   We only had an hour before we had to get ready for dinner so Jim and Carol went to the pool and I stayed on our back porch and rested. I was really happy to get those wet jeans off.

Anthony picked us up at 5:20 pm so we could see some of the sights on the way to the Pavillion Restaurant.  We stopped to take these pictures.

Do you see the rain in the background?  Some of those rain clouds hit the resort before we left and had us trapped for about 10 minutes.  That was the only rain that impacted our plans since our stay began on September 21st.  We arrived at the restaurant early enough to take lots of pictures of this beautiful place.  When we were here last week, we arrived too late to see all this.

They have a special menu and price on Wednesday nights so most people wait for that to go to the Pavillion Restaurant.  We decided since we did that last week, we wanted to go this week and sample their full menu.  As a result, we were the only people there and had the restaurant to ourselves.  Talk about good service!  For my foodie friends, I had a coconut crusted pork tenderloin with apple chutney, sweet potato pancake, and cucumber-tomato salad.  All of which was outstanding.  Carol and Jim had mahi-mahi with pumpkin croquet and christophene vegetables.  They also thought the food was perfect.  The chef’s complimentary appetizer was lobster sausage brochetta and complimentary dessert was a chocolate cookie.

When we got back to the hotel, we stopped into the casino for a while and I won 11 cents.  as you can tell, we are really big gamblers.  By the time we got back to the room, we were done.  Thank goodness tomorrow is a stay-on-property-except-for-dinner day.  We need the rest because Thursday we plan to go on the Zip Line.