The Real Day One.

9/20

Holy crap, what a day. We woke up about an hour and a half before breakfast, so we did some exploring. Down the road led us to friendly locals, teeming fruit trees and a river, with a few spots to get in. Completely amazing. There were pools in the river; deep, blue part to get all the way in and try to fight the current. Breadfruit, passion fruit, guavas, avocados, starfruit, grapefruit, mangoes, bananas, wild ginger...
And there is a path to the river from Hibiscus Valley and the air is saturated with ginger. Such agriculture.
The locals and friendly and funny. It seems that they don't know how to react to you until you react to them They mostly kind of stare at you until you smile and wave and say hello. Then, the faces soften and smiled are returned. They are curious about us. Truth be told, we haven't seen any other white people since we left the airport.
The men call us beautiful, which is not true. We are sweaty and messy. Red-faced and without make-up, and I'm sure that we look concerned and lost at least most of the time.
We so want to pick fruit off the trees, but we definitely don't know what belongs to whom. No interest in stealing. We did manage to scavenge a little from fruits that had fallen off of the trees. Erin's first passion fruit (which was a little mushy and probably a little rotten, but we ate it, anyway.) and Erin's first guava (not mushy or rotten, but perfect and sweet and delicious). And a wild grapefruit, identifiable not by color at all, but by taste. Which is good, since we decided to eat it before we knew what it was.
We came back fro breakfast. Dominican coffee, local lemongrass tea, fresh bread with guava jam or ginger grapefruit chutney, fresh oranges, scrambled eggs and starfruit juice with lime. Perfect.
We asked how long it would take to walk to Marigot, the closest town. The word "town" is fairly generous here, but we'll go with it. The front desk woman told us that it would be about an hour's walk, and there would be shops and restaurants and a nice beach. One of the property dogs, Jack, decided to accompany us.
Two uphill, dehydrating, dog-tiring hours later, we finally land in Marigot. The walk was pretty rough, actually. There is a lot of construction here, so we kept having to scoot to the sides of very narrow roads to avoid being hit by bug work trucks, nearly all of which slowed to a near halt to say hello and ask how we were liking Dominica. the damned dog turned into a bit of a chore. Too late, we realized that he would not be turning back after we passed his imaginary "gone too far" line. We were a little worried about him the whole time, not sure that he would make it all the way and equally unsure that he would be able to get back on his own.
*That dog is laying under me right now. Passed out under this hammock and showing no signs of wanting to be anything other than completely asleep.*
When we finally got to Marigot, we were starving and tired. So, starving and tired, we asked someone if there was somewhere to eat. He pointed to "J's Spot," a place that serves plantains, stuffed Johnny cakes, saltfish and the like, and also looks to be a hangout for a group of men talking, to whatever degree, about the presence of white people at their restaurant. It was the kind of place with a few plastic tables outside, a dirt floor and a roof that slanted a bit and was made of corrugated steel and seemed as surprised to be there as we were to see it.
The people got less friendly the deeper into town we got (isn't that often the case?), and we were cashed, so we asked the girl working how we get from Marigot to where the airport is, which is where we were going to rent a car.
The face she made when we told her where we had walked from was hysterical and makes me wonder when the last time anyone from Hibiscus Valley walked that "hour" into town might be.
A man overheard us talking and offered to drive us to the airport. The man's car, it turned out, was a bus. A big one that was likely about fifty years old. We thought that the dog would be fine and could find his own way home. We thought this because this is what we were told by the staff at Hibiscus. So, we hopped in. Jack had a different idea and, with locals yelling at us that he wanted to come and with him pawing at the bus wheels, I don't think we had a choice. It was quite a scene, really. As little as probably happens in this town, I suspect the story of five men screaming at two white girls who were trying to escape their canine companion by hopping alone into a stranger's strange, giant bus made the rounds and entertained (or confused) them for at least the next day. *As a side note, this was true. We were definitely recognized as those girls every single time we drove our little rented car through Marigot. People came out of their houses. Honestly.* Bus door open, dog in, and off to rent a car.
The car rental place didn't have much to say about Jack coming with us. Not that there was an option.
We made it back, tired and tired of the dog and ready to get into the river again, which is exactly what we did.
In this hammock now, waiting fairly impatiently for dinner at 7. I am hungry. And I want a beer. And then I want to sleep, because I am jealous of this unmoving dog.