Dominica January 16-17

Arriving in Dominica a few days ago, I had no idea what to expect.  A volcanic island apparently NOT the Dominican Republic, that everyone had been pronouncing domin-EE-ca off the Northern coast of South America posed nothing but mystery to me.  The presentation done at the pre-port meeting focused mostly on nature, which I have to say was pretty accurate.  Since I assume most of you haven’t heard of Dominica before either, I’ll include some

Background:

Dominica is a small island in the Caribbean which officially speaks English but also has two other main languages popularly spoken among it’s inhabitants being Creole or Patois, as well as an English dialect.  As one tour guide put it, “they tried to speak French and it didn’t work, so they created Creole,” which is essentially broken French.  Their dialect (most commonly spoken) is much like a shortened version of English essentially like an oral cursive, and definitely takes some getting used to to understand.

The country gained independence in the 1970s from England and mainly served as a sort of slave haven during the days of Caribbean exploit of the sugar cane.  The volcanic island seems to be extremely fertile for every kind of flora and fauna EXCEPT sugar cane; and because of this, neither the French nor English concerned themselves much with the country during their half-hearted conflicts over colonization over the island.  Because of the general lack of interest, many escaped slaves created “marooned communities” where they were safe from the life of harsh slavery.  It’s also the ONLY island in the Caribbean whose indigenous people survived colonization without being completely wiped out.  The Carib-Indian culture in Dominica remains strong in a community on the Eastern side of the island.

Dominica is also the “greenest” country in the world.  This means it’s not only physically green, but environmentally green.  They have the purest water (coming from 365 rivers flowing through the land), little pollution problems, and stronger environmental laws then traffic laws.  Many Dominicans begin operating cars by around age 10, and there are no speed limits or traffic lights on many of the roads, which many have turns so sharp that all cars honk before turning to warn others of their presence.  They make great use of their immense natural resources and are certainly an environmental role model for the rest of the world.

My Experiences:

The morning of arrival, I woke up with some time to kill before my first arranged side trip through SAS.  Walking around the capitol Roseau, we took a lot of pictures and got an essential lay of the land until a cab pulled up with some other kids from SAS and invited us to ride with them up to the top of a steep mountain.  The roads were WILD, but when we got to the top, the view was phenomenal.  After spotting a few men in military uniforms, we discovered another viewpoint nearby where we encountered a lot of sweaty SAS people who had hiked all the way to this point, and continued to hike back down in the route that many of them took ending up in the botanical gardens, which were very nice.

After not finding an internet café to upload pics and update my blog in the morning, I continued to meet my group for an arranged side trip which was essentially an off-road jeep tour of the island.  Ironically, we went back to the same places I had been to before: the view point and botanical gardens, but it was nice to get a bit more information on the sites I had seen.  After that we went on a long and windy road to a hidden waterfall and river in which we got to swim through caves to get to the waterfall area.  Along the way we saw a few boiling ponds and lakes which serve as exhaust pipes for the volcano and keep it from erupting.  I wasn’t able to take pictures there because we had to swim to the waterfall, but if you’d like to see that area, check out Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, because apparently a majority of the film was shot in Dominica including the river within the cave.

The next day, Rachel and I wandered around the French Quarter of Roseau before returning to the meeting area for our second trips.  We stopped in a few souvenir shops, picked up post cards, talked with local people, and got some groceries to keep in our room for snacks.  Everyone was very nice and friendly; there were also a lot of very cool music stores all around town, which helped to draw attention to what seemed to be a very Rastafari-influenced culture.  It did start to rain a bit while walking around, which is to be expected of the rain forest, but still encouraged us to get to the sheltered meeting area early.  My group was doing a river-tubing tour where we also hiked through a rainforest/national park to the Emerald Pool (a waterfall and pool area so called because the heavy vegetation surrounding it reflects in the water making it appear green) which is also a main attraction in Dominica.  It was a short hike to the pool in the middle of beautiful rain forest which almost looked fake.  After that, we drove to a special point in what is the longest river on the island (I can’t remember the name), and got tubes and paddles to float down the river carried by the current which varied from lazy to intense.  It was a lot of fun and a great conclusion to my trip.

Bahamas: Jan 09-13

The Bahamas were absolutely beautiful and populated by the most cheerful, happy people I think I’ve ever seen! Really made me want to just quit everything and move there for the rest of my life, but I’m on the ship now so I guess I just missed my chance with this one.
To sum up my time, it was a weird limbo waiting to set sail, and the hotel was literally taken over by Semester at Sea students, so I was meeting someone different everywhere: the elevator, the bathrooms, etc. It was wild. Surprisingly, I didn’t spend that much time sunbathing; I tended to miss the sunny parts of the day and it would get a little cloudy and chilly at times, plus I foresee a lot of sunbathing on the ship as the decks here are fantastic.
The first day (1/9), I laid out a bit cause the weather was amazing and warm, and after a while in the sun we decided to go to an open-air botanical garden/zoo. It was very cool because the set up was open so that many of the animals were very up close, and even better, some of them would wander around free in areas that people were walking such as the peacocks and flamingos. The flamingos actually had a little demonstration that they did where they actually listened to commands and marched around, very cool. There was also a bird cage that we could go into, and feed these adorable and gentile parrots fruit. They would land on our heads and our hands which was pretty neat. I’ll try to put a few pictures up in a few days, or maybe later today, who knows.
The next day (1/10), I woke up early to go scuba diving, which has to be in my top ten experiences in life, it was absolutely amazing to see the coral growth, and a school of fish followed us around which was really cool to experience. I’ll hopefully get certified once I get home to do that more often. We spent the rest of that day relaxing.
The last day (1/11), I went to the Pirates of Nassau Museum downtown and was actually very impressed with the way that the information was displayed and learned some very interesting stuff! Unfortunately, the mannequins did freak me out a little bit, but it wasn’t too bad since they weren’t the kind that move…then there would’ve been some problems! After that, we walked around the straw market a bit which was very cool. There were people actually weaving objects out of straw right at their stand, and carving wooden objects right there as well. Didn’t buy anything due to the obnoxious amount of stuff I had already packed for this voyage, but still interesting nonetheless.

I'll be talking about these past few days on the ship next so keep reading!

Keeping in Touch Info

Here's a link to help with things like figuring out when to mail me stuff for which port with time differences etc.
CHECK IT OUT!  http://www.semesteratsea.org/voyages/spring-2011/spring-2011-staying-in-touch.php

PS -  The Bahamas are beautiful!  I'll add more after I actually do some stuff

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." -Yogi

For those visual learners, I've taken the time to make a route on a map!  Normally, I'd just draw the route on that hottie's face on my blog background, but he didn't want to draw attention away from the art which is my words.  Anywho, enjoy, and visualize where I am as you read my blog!

I was going to do it with color-coded lines by month, but, alas, you'll all have to make do!  Click to see it larger

My Baby-Boomer Blog Orientation:
I'm aware that many of my readers will be a little less "tech-savvy," you know who you are, so I'll quickly walk you through how I designed this blog.  On the left, as it says, is a list of the various areas I'll be visiting (in order), which may help you (and me) keep track of where I'm going, am, and have been thus far in the blog.  Below this list, is a fun little app which is essentially a fish tank; if you get a little antsy while reading my amazing adventures and want to do something exciting, you can feed the fish by clicking anywhere in the fish tank, and they'll eat the food too!  Go ahead, try!  On the right hand side, you'll find a link to the Semester at Sea (my program) website, if you'd like to read more about where we're going and what we're doing.  Below that, WILL be an archive of my posts, which isn't up yet b/c there's only one, and what is currently in it's place is the followers section.  This is where you can choose to follow me with your yahoo, google, or whatever account you have or wish to create.  CLICK IT!  It'll make sure you're updated on all my posts and other priceless tidbits I have to say.  If not, you can go ahead and book mark me....DO IT, you know you want toooo!
Almost done, I promise!  Below the followers section is something really cool:  I set up a pre-directed search with all the countries I'm going to and semester at sea, you can click any one of the terms (they'll underline when you move your mouse over them) and it'll pull up articles on the topic, so you can see what's happening in the countries I visit just by going to my blog, hope you like that!  And last but not least, for those of you with specific interests in topics or countries, on the lower right, there's a search tool to search my blog for whatever topic you type and see if I've mentioned it, and next to that is a sharing option for those of you that are facebook or twitter users.  Click on one of those links to share a post of mine on one of those sites!

SO,
Hope this helped and wasn't too complicated and that it'll encourage you all to keep reading, as it's only going to get better (hard to believe, as I realize how great this start was), but I haven't even left the States yet!  Leave comments, send emails, keep in touch and all that stuff!

I may not be able to post again until I reach the Bahamas, because, courteous blogger that I am, I'll only write about the awesome stuff, no boring posts, I promise!
Which is why I'm signing off to avoid boring you with my packing disasters etc.

Be back in the Bahamas!