Lonely Planet - Destination Eastern Caribbean

World Country Guide - Dominica

The flora and fauna of Dominica

Getting there

AS THE Twin Otter's altimeter unwound through 6,000ft we caught sight of Dominica's mountains over the pilot's shoulder. The island, 29 miles long and 16 wide, rose green and misted from the blue-black ocean, a steaming heap of spinach on the hot-plate of the Caribbean. Dominica - not to be confused with the Dominican Republic in the Greater Antilles - is debating its future. Unspoiled but in need of foreign currency, it has to choose between the mutually exclusive goals of mass tourism and eco-tourism.

"It's the most environmentally intact island in the Caribbean," said Dr Peter Evans, as we sailed offshore in search of whales. "Dominica retains much of what existed when the Arawak indians arrived. There's been relatively little change over the past 2,000 years." He pointed to the distant wall of trees: "Sixty-seven per cent of the island is still covered with rainforest." Hidden in that forest, continued the Oxford scientist, were rare parrots, spectacular waterfalls and the world's second-largest boiling lake.

'What's happenin' is two vehicles makin' love in de middle o' de road'

Evans, an incongruous figure in his thick English cords, broke off to swing his binoculars towards a nearby sperm whale, loafing in the swell beside its baby. The whales rose and fell like a pair of capsized hulls, then the adult tilted the vanes of its tail skywards, and for a few moments diamond drops of water tumbled through the sun before the colossus sank from sight. With dolphins burrowing our bow wave we bore back towards the coast and Evans - who was recently commissioned by the EC to produce a report on eco-tourism in Dominica - elaborated upon the island's uniqueness:

"It is formidable to humans; steep; thickly vegetated and very wet . . ." So wet that one of the island's rain gauges collects 10,000 millimetres of water a year, more than twice the average for the UK's wettest spot, Sty Head Tarn in the Lake District. (The most popular pen in Dominica's shops is a rollerball with waterproof ink.) Dominica's rain is magnificent, dropping in abrupt deluges with rainbows and crystalline light shows.

The weather and the absence of gleaming beaches have protected Dominica from the viral spread of hotels and beach-bars. Sand, where it can be found on the precipitous coast, is black or slate-grey, the pulverised crumbs of volcanic rock. Under a pregnant sky, these dark strands are dramatically leaden and usually deserted.

The whale-watchers, botanists and painters, hikers, writers and refugees from the urban thrum who visit this tempestuous garden find that accommodation is limited. The most exotic place to stay is Petit Coulibri, on the southern tip of the island, 1,000ft above the sea at the end of a rough, four-wheel-drive track.

"We couldn't leave . . ." said Loye Barnard, as she served rum punches on the hardwood deck of their home. The Barnards - originally from Florida - opened their guest cottages in 1992, after a 10-year attempt at aloe farming ran out of steam. Now they have ocean views and peacocks fanning the blue breezes. On a terrace below the house a swimming pool contemplates a flawless sky.

The peace was palpable; a conspiracy of softness in the air, in the music of birds and frogs, in the blur of the hummingbird's wings as it hovered by the bougainvillaea. At night the stars burned so brightly that they looked how the city we had left might look from an orbiting satellite. The nearest terrestrial lights are those of the Barnards' neighbours, 20 miles away on Martinique. While Petit Coulibri empties the mind of cares, the best base for exploring the island is Roseau. The capital's wooden, fretworked houses and cement infills occupy a grid of streets in the angle of the waterfront (with its new cruise-ship berth) and the Roseau River.

On the riverbank is the market. Early on a Saturday morning the trucks come down from the hills and turn this corner into a carnival of fresh food. Flowers and fruit froth into walkways; at every turn there are grapefruit, oranges, pineapples, guavas, papayas, tangerines, set with an eye for colour and pattern beneath golf umbrellas. Creole bounces to and fro as goods change hands and barters are concluded.

The original market - abandoned in 1972 and converted into a miniature Covent Garden, with cobbles and craft stalls - lies in the centre of town behind the old Post Office, now a museum of ethnography.

The man responsible for the museum's creation is Lennox Honychurch, broadcaster, artist, Oxford post-graduate and author of The Dominica Story. Between 1975 and 1979 he served as a member of the Dominica House of Assembly, and he was involved in the independence negotiations of 1978. A passionate environmentalist, he has often found himself at odds with the government of the moment.

"People have called me the Richard Leakey of Dominica," said Lennox, as we threaded our way through Roseau's streets in his down-at-heel pick-up, a vehicle of presidential status; every pedestrian called a greeting or waved Honychurch to a halt for a conversation. "The trouble nowadays," he added, after a shouted message into a shop doorway, "is that many Dominicans expect the island to be like a suburb of Miami. But the reality is that we're limited to agriculture and tourism."

Behind this genial lexicographer is a man on a crusade: "My commitment is to provide Dominicans with a knowledge of their heritage and to ensure that they don't lose touch with the essence of the island."

To touch this essence you must leave Roseau. I joined Clement James, a 43-year-old guide with Ken's Hinterland Adventure Tours, and pottered around the island's alarming coast roads. Shortly after leaving Roseau we ran into a traffic jam caused by a head-on collision that had left the occupants dazed but unwounded. Unnecessarily, I asked a bystander what was happening. "What's happenin'," he repeated in a drawl as long as the ocean swell, "is two vehicles makin' love in de middle o' de road."

The coast has two faces: on the eastern Atlantic side is the Carib Reserve, an area set aside for the indigenous Carib Indians. A big swell smacks into rocky headlands and palms heel in the trade wind. On the roadside near Castle Bruce we passed boat-builders hacking dug-outs from the trunks of giant gommiers; the infrequent shops were piled with baskets and carvings for passing tourists.

In contrast, the leeward coast has Dominica's colonial heritage. At Fort Shirley, fungal walls rise from the forest of the Cabrits National Park like Mayan temples, and the rusting barrels of George III cannons lie in the grass overlooking Dominica's second town, Portsmouth, on a bay that has sheltered - among others - Drake, Hawkins, Grenville and Nelson.

Of the island's inner parts, the Emerald Pool - a small and unsurprising waterfall set in a forest walk - is usually busy with cruise-ship visitors. So is the Indian River, where locals with biceps like quarrelling coconuts row skiffs upstream past giant mang trees and scuttling crabs. This riparian paradise lasts until the thump of reggae filters through the static hiss of rain and the squalid forest bar is reached.

LESS known is the mile-long Syndicate rainforest trail, 1,800ft up on the western slopes of Morne Diablotin. Here stands the balata, whose wood is so hard that it was used for engineering-bushes in sugar cane mills when the brass ran out. Lianas and stranglers threaded their way up towards the light and the silhouette of a sisserou, the largest of the Amazon parrots (and found only on Dominica). Later we peered from dripping capes across the gorge of the Picard River as flights of green-backed jacos criss-crossed the wet air.

At the southern end of the island are the waterfalls. To reach the 200ft mare's tail of Sari Sari required a slippery scramble over mud and boulders to the kind of place where iguanodons slumbered, a squelchy gorge walled with exotic ferns and the huge leaves of the zel mouche (the wings of a fly), once used by Indians for thatching huts. To see Victoria Falls we had to wade chin-deep upstream to the point where the River Blanche flew over a cliff in a ragged parabola that filled the air with a thunderous mist.

Having introduced me to Dominica's trails, Clem asked whether I would like to see the Boiling Lake. "Mick Jagger twisted his ankle doing this," he warned me.

We started early. Blue-headed hummingbirds hovered and darted, looking for nectar in the under shrubs and a rufous-throated solitaire - the mountain whistler - called like a creaking gate. The muddy gully of the path climbed a ridge, dropped steeply to Breakfast River, then scrambled over Morne Nicholls at 2,965ft. Through a gauze of rain we could see the distant vapours of the Boiling Lake rising from the forest. "A German woman slipped here," said Clem, as we stepped along a gangplank of slime which separated awesome drops.

"She hurt?"

"Dead."

We descended into the Valley of Desolation, a crater pitted with smoking vents and thick with the stench of sulphur. Poisonous-looking streams oozed black mineral-laden water, or gushed silver or iron-red.

The path wormed up till the vegetation dropped back and we were standing on the lip of a crumbling cliff. Below us was a broken crucible of steam through which could be glimpsed a writhing surface: not the idle evaporation of a pot left to simmer but the furious popping and squirming of volcanically superheated liquid.

A spectacle more antagonistic to the Rousseauesque image of a romantic mountainscape would be hard to imagine. Yet even this vile cauldron, lost in the heart of one of the Caribbean's last true wildernesses, is running the risk of being tamed, for there are plans to open it up by road. Dominicans should remember that the desecrators will come armed with the island's old colonial motto: Animis opibusque parati - Ready with our souls and wealth.

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