Automatically you're thinking some big player names like Bahamas or Cayman Islands. Maybe Barbados or one of those nice Dominican Republic packages? Not even close! This little slice of heaven you would have to 'google zoom' into at least three times for it to even become noticeable. St Vincent & the Grenadines lasses and landlubbers, the tiny little tropical sand pit floating in the middle of (nowhere) the Caribbean Sea.
I left the breezy scuba diving wreck show of Utila behind me, enjoying another thirty hour ferry and bus ride back to San Pedro Sula. Writing this now, I cannot even remember what the airport, town or airplane even looked like, but it was my final goodbye to Central America. Adios! St Vincent being such a minuscule speck of an island, it proved to be a pretty staggering journey to get there, something along the lines of...
Utila -> La Ceiba -> San Pedro Sula -> Miami -> Barbados -> St Lucia -> St Vincent
With layovers and an extremely cozy sleep on a bench outside the Barbados airport, I was in transit for a couple days and then some. After fifty hours of little sleep, customs, shitty airplane food and more customs I was really feeling the joys of travelling abroad. The final leg of the journey was on one of those tiny little twin prop planes, and despite the noise I could not stop falling asleep. Barbados to St Lucia took about forty minutes, so the flight attendant takes it upon herself to wake me up for the landing as I'm drooling onto myself and my book. We land for ten minutes, I fall asleep, and she wakes me up again, this time for take-off. Buckle it yourself lady, I'm dying here!
After a short stint in 'immigration', basically a couch and a desk with some pictures of trees on the wall, I got to reunite with the big reason for all this trans-national island plane hopping...
Luckily she'd been standing right outside customs to vouch for my haggard ass, because the grumpy chick at the desk wasn't too keen on me entering without an onward ticket. She asked the reason for my visit, where I was staying and who with. 'Ummm. Vacation. Maddy's apartment. with Maddy? Oh, who's Maddy and where does she live? Not really sure, hopefully she's standing outside if you could go check for me' (And get this...the customs clerk leaves her desk, goes outside and talks to Maddy to verify my claims! Imagine that at Pearson or JFK!) Maddy assured her I didn't want to mooch off St Vincent's non existent social security system, and we were on our way.
The island is stunning. The main road basically stretches around the circumference of St Vincent in a narrow and twisted snakes and ladders game, where you climb up and down hills with turquoise ocean and palm fronds boxing you in. You can see the other islands of the archipelago off in the hazy distance as sailboats and seagulls dot the oceanic landscape. Bit much? K, I'll tone it down. But check out this sunset...
Comparative to any other Caribbean nation, the island is basically untouched by tourism, but that's not to say there's nothing there. The main port is Kingstown, where massive freighters and the occasional packaged cruise full of seniors stops off. The town is a touching little collection of ramshackle residences and businesses, the most important of which would be KFC. Two of them.
Maddy's house was a quick but daunting fifteen minutes outside of Kingstown, arriving in a passenger van literally overflowing with human beings. You have people with legs and arms sticking out the window for space, babies being held by your seat partner to make room for your grocery bags, and complete strangers coming very close to face to crotch contact. It's sweaty and very uncomfortable, but kind of a cool way to get around. They just zip up and down this one main road all day, picking up whoever hails them down and taking a couple bucks each time, all the while playing this incredibly intense, bass driven, repetitive, very catchy pile of shit called 'Soca'. More on that later.
The first few days were spent exploring the island, albeit without the guidance of our host as she had to do really lame, sunshine-less office work. We rented a car that ended up getting abused not only by the amazing road conditions, but by our A-class driving skills on the opposite side of said road. We challenged a waterfall, a flower garden, a couple different beaches and almost a volcano, but not quite. We showed up around four o'clock in the afternoon, allegedly not a good time for trudging through the jungle up a volcano for four hours surrounded by nighttime, beasts and pot fields. Go figure.
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| 'Ballers' |
The next couple weeks were a myriad of activities and, of course, caribbean style drinking. Through the benevolence of the partying Gods I've been praying to for years, I showed up for the week of Carnaval, a mass of booze, costumes, music, events and overall pulsating energy that transcends the otherwise laid back atmosphere of caribbean islands. Most of you are probably thinking, Carnival? Isn't that the feathered semi-drag queen production out of Rio De Janeiro? For sure, that's the biggest one in the world, but it seems like the majority of the Caribbean islands participate as well, Vincy no exception.
The whole island is obsessed with this genre of music called Soca, which is a fast paced mixture of dance, bass & drum and the artist repeating the same phrase over and over....and over...for three minutes. One of the biggest ingratiations I had into this style was 'Soca Monarch', which as you can probably tell by the title, they choose the new king or queen of Soca music. I'll be the first to admit, I couldn't handle this music whatsoever the first couple days I was there. You can only play it extremely loud, it's extremely abrasive and comes with only one type of associated dancing, which I'll talk about in just a minute (after typing this I realize it makes me seem about 85 years old). After a little while though, despite your best efforts, you find yourself humming these tunes all day, pumping your fists and flailing around like everyone else. If you're interested, this was the winner.
Happening tune right?
If the music doesn't quite tickle your fancy, then you can join into the Caribbean dance phenomena called 'whining'. Maddy had given me the low down on this devious style long before I arrived, but nothing can really prepare you for this sexually charged shuffle. Like most dances there's different steps the men and women follow, but this one is particularly straight forward.
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| Artists Interpretation |
If it looks like some crude amateur drawing of some hot and heavy body thumping, that's what I was going for. The women assume a very inviting 45 degree posture and 'shake that ass' until the man, and I mean any man in the entire crowd of human beings, comes behind them, grabs their hips or whatever else they can hold onto and proceeds to bump front to backside. Some of you are probably saying 'right on' or 'wtf?' which were both my initial reactions. At times it's a slow and passionate rotating of many body parts, and other times it's a twenty second 'thump and run'. My absolute favourite moment of whining was watching a couple girls boogying at the front of the previously mentioned Soca Monarch, rain coming down in sheets, as two guys come up behind them, grab their stomachs and thrust away like it was their last night on Earth. Without a word between boy or girl, the guys walk off into the crowd never to be seen again. Legally it was about as close to dance rape as you could probably come, but after a few nights out I learned to appreciate this quick coupling for the absolutely fun and somewhat disturbing icebreaker it was.
Personally I was terrible at whining, usually losing my partner to a more experienced, taller, blacker and heavier pounding Caribbean dude than I will probably ever be in this life (probably). That being said, getting a little taste of this dance made every other style I will ever encounter on this planet look like a seniors home full of nuns doing the macarena, so I'm glad I got a shot at it.
When Maddy finished up her internship we had a week or two of beautiful beach lounging and soaking our souls with 'strong rum', the locally brewed crazy sauce that was also good for starting bonfires and removing paint. If you ever have the good fortune to pick up a bottle make sure you keep it away from open flame. When the time came to leave the island Maddy was a little choked up, mostly in part to the amount of girl gear she had to shed for the rest of the trip. I watched this speck of an island disappear from the plane knowing that I would never see a stranger, unheard of and untouched island gem like this again. Places like that don't stay a secret forever. Thanks to everyone I met there, and who knows, maybe see you for another rum addled, feather covered, Soca banging whining parade someday.
Thanks for reading!
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| Graffiti outside the airport: 'We nah tun back'. |
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