I was curious as to why anyone would want to invade an island this small, so I took the island tour. Our guide managed to give us a fairly complete history and economic rundown of the island in the few hours we were driving around. As to the invasion: politics on the island took a socialist turn a while back, and the Cubans thought that would be a great opportunity to move in and build an airport capable of landing heavy bombers like the Russian Blackjack and Bison. Many of the Grenadans thought that was a less than wonderful idea, and the techniques used by the socialist contingent to persuade them otherwise were somewhat violent. The American invasion occurred when the runway was about 90% complete, and with a little work the island was presented with a functioning airport, complements of Cuba and the USA. Everyone (except, presumably, the Cubans) thinks this is a wonderful thing. Including our tour guide.
Nonetheless, the island is not an economic powerhouse. They are very dependent on the arrival of the weekly oil tanker from Venezuela. It offloads fuel for the island's diesel generator (the whole island goes dark if it ever shuts down), JP4 for the airliners, and gasoline for the tour busses. Tourism and spices are the only significant economic strengths of Grenada.
And, surprise surprise: spices are the featured items of the tour. We visited one of the places where various spices are grown, harvested, dried, and shipped off the island to your local Safeway. One of the spices is the clove, which is some kind of flower-like thing that grows in packed bunches in short trees.
Nutmeg is perhaps the most versatile tree on the island; the fruit is similar to a peach, and can be used for jelly. Inside the fruit is a shell covered with a spiderweb of red threads; this is peeled off and ground up as the spice Mace (not to be confused with the stuff used by the police). Inside the shell is the nutmeg itself, which is dried and ground and sprinkled on eggnog.
Another island product is cocoa. If you saw what cocoa goes thru to become chocolate, you might pick another vice. The cocoa beans come out of gourd-like pods all covered with white slime. They get tossed into a pot, slime and all, and allowed to fester for a few weeks.Then they get washed off, dried (pictured), and ground into vile cocoa power. This only becomes edible after treatment in alkali chemicals and the addition of sugar, milk, and other adulterants.
The island also exports bananas, which grow all over the place. A tree creates a huge bunch of bananas (pictured) at maturity. Its reward for this generosity is to have the bananas forceably removed, and then get chopped down. A new tree is planted in its place, which grows to full height in three or four months to repeat the process.
Grenada was the only stop at which the ship could not actually pull up and dock in the harbor. (Possibly because the deep-water port was fully occupied by all the other tour boats.) Instead, it anchored just off the town and shuttled passengers in with a collection of tour boats from shore and lifeboats. So we got an opportunity to confirm that the lifeboats actually functioned properly. Pictured are three lifeboats providing shuttle service into town.
Why?
P.R.
Ship
USVI
Dominica
Grenada
Astro
L.G.
Eclipse
Aruba
Bday
Buzz
