Dominica, named by Columbus, is different.
It isn’t duty-free shops and chair-lined beaches and timeshare hustlers. Cruise ships, all but a couple, pass it by. There is no casino. Its largest accommodation, the spiffy Fort Young Hotel near downtown Roseau, is three stories high, has 53 rooms and no beach.
It is Caribbean, but it is not the Dominican Republic. Sammy Sosa hasn’t slept here.
This is Dominica (Dom-in-eek-a).
“The best way to explain it,” said my guide, Sonya, “is Dominica is an English-speaking island between the French-speaking islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.”
Which doesn’t begin to explain her special island.
Other islands of the Caribbean talk of ecotourism. Dominica, with few good beaches and little flat land, is 290 square miles of overwhelming eco. Antigua, a couple of islands to the north, boasts of its 365 beaches. Dominica claims to have 365 rivers.
“And when there’s a leap year,” said Sonya, “we add one to it, to make 366.” The leap year part is a joke, she said, but the 365 is real. “Ever since I was a little girl, there were 365. It has not changed. It’s not a gimmick.
“A lot of people use gimmicks to try to attract people. We don’t need gimmicks.”
The history is real enough. A coastal road lined with flowering bougainvillia leads to a village called Massacre. It is named for a massacre. Ft. Shirley, built by the British in the late 1700s, used molasses as mortar, and much of the fort survives. Fields of breadfruit trace their roots, literally, to Capt. William Bligh, who introduced them here.
Here, too, are pure Carib Indians, slaughtered or bred out of existence elsewhere in a sea that took their name but who live on, in protected settlements, only on this island.
Dominica, like the others, has been used to grow money for absentee lords of commerce. Like the others, there is material poverty in the towns–Roseau, in the southwest; Portsmouth, in the northwest; and dozens of lesser villages where people get by in the mysterious ways of people who need little.
The richness is in the land, its mountains, waterfalls, rivers. Paul, who rows visitors up the Indian River–Oprah has been rowed here–pointed toward blossoms in the thick trees that lined both banks.
“You’ll find a lot of hummingbirds come to feed on the nectar from that plant,” he said. He pointed again. “You see that up there, growing on it like grass? Those are orchids . . . “
On Dominica is the only Unesco World Heritage Site in the Caribbean–Morne Trois Pitons National Park, whose preservation dates to 1952. There’s more glory to explore; in all, 65 percent of the island is essentially as it was.
“While other islands were cutting down their forests,” said Sonya, “Dominica’s government was already putting legislation in place to protect its own.”
There is a trail here–well, there are more trails than there are rivers on Dominica–but there is this one trail here that takes visitors to Emerald Pool. Filled by a waterfall, the pool’s greenness would make an Irishman weep.
To swim in this pool, even for a moment, is to be blessed.
The trail winds beyond the pool through rainforest, past ancient trees–“They grow very tall, very straight, very wide,” said Sonya–once used by the once-warlike Caribs to make their canoes.
Finally, there is a high clearing, and from that clearing can be seen mountains and valleys and places where rivers flow and water falls and, beyond that, to the east, the Atlantic.
“This,” said Sonya, arm outstretched, eyes and heart on the land before us, “is Dominica.”
This, is magnificence.
