Dominica

January 23: Dominica 

On a bridge over a gorge in the rain forest in Dominica

Aidan: We arrived in Dominica early this morning, docking around 7:30. After breakfast, we took a van into the middle of the island, where we got on a tram for a ride into the rain forest. I am studying the rain forest in second grade, anyway, and it was amazing to see it in person. I got to swing from vines. The path was hard to walk on, which made it fun. I was surprised that there were so few animals. (ed.: Our helpful guide pointed at that because Dominica is an "oceanic" island, one that has never been part of a mainland, it has no native mammals, but also no poisonous snakes. It has many species of birds.)

In the afternoon, Mom and I climbed a mountain.  I was the first one to get to the top. It was half worth it; there was a huge cannon, a place for religious people to pray, and the President's House. Other than that, there was only trees and grass.

I really like Dominica. I feel like I live here already.

John: The rain forest tram ride was one of a number of tours arranged for the voyage by the Institute for Shipboard Education, the entity that founded and continues to run the logistical side of Semester at Sea. We went as a family, and it was indeed a wonderful experience. The tram took us up to the emergent layer of an incredibly lush forest. From the top, we hiked part of the way down, and our informative guide gave us short lectures on some of the local flora. The rainforest gets about 400 inches of rain a year--the guide offered what is surely a well-worn joke about Dominica having two seasons "wet and wetter"--but it did not rain during our trip, though the temperature was a good 25 degrees cooler in the mountains than it was down at sea level.

Dominica (which takes it accent on the third syllable) is a beautiful small island in the Caribbean. It is almost unique in the Caribbean for still having a considerable amount of pristine rain forest. Almost all of the other islands saw their rain forests largely or wholly cleared for sugar plantations centuries ago. But Dominica is hilly, rocky, and volcanic and was thereby spared that kind of ecological catastrophe. It also has, again uniquely among these islands, a population of the indigenous people, the Caribs, who were decimated everywhere else by the diseases that Europeans brought with them and to which the native people had no immunity. It is not a large population--only about 3,000 or so on an island of 70,000 people--but it is remarkable that it exists at all.

Dominica also does not seem to have a tremendous tourist industry--certainly nothing compared with the Bahamas or some of the nearby islands. And again, this is probably a consequence of topography--the island has beaches, but the sand is dark and volcanic, and they are largely shallow rather than the kind of broad beaches on which you could imagine hotels and sunbathers. After seeing Nassau and its tourist-oriented downtown, I'm inclined to think of this as a happy accident, but there are probably people on Dominica who would disagree. According to the guide in the van that took us to the arial tram, the main industry on the island now is agriculture, particularly bananas, which are exported to the United Kingdom in particular, and other fruit that is exported to the neighboring islands.

In the evening, we all took a shuttle to the center of Roseau, the capital of Dominica. We ran into Ronald Bagel and Margaret O'Brien, other Semester at Sea people (she is working as the coordinator of the in port Field Programs, which looks from the outside as a challenging job involving many moving pieces), who pointed us to a restaurant/patisserie. We had dessert there, some chocolate rum cake that was less exciting that we hoped, given where we are. We all got back to the ship pretty exhausted, but somehow Maeve managed to stay up quite late. She's made the fascinating discovery that she can turn the lights in her cabin on and off from her bed, which is not helping the going-to-sleep process.