Guadeloupe, Part 2!

The roosters seem to be having a competition. Either that or a conversation that involves a lot of interruption and one-upmanship. I hear them calling across the beach, some from one side and some from the other. The thing is, it’s 2 am. Aren’t they supposed to crow at dawn? Is the full moon throwing them off?

Welcome to Terre de Haut, Iles des Saintes, Guadeloupe. During the day, the rooster sounds are joined in animal chorus with bleating goats and screeching cats. The occasional fishing boat zips by, as does the less-occasional high speed ferry. Sometimes people swim past too, heading from one boat or another to maybe the beach that’s off our beam. People watching is fairly entertaining in even more mundane spots, but here it’s taken to a new level. Between resident fishermen mending nets and sunburned tourists snorkeling on the nearby shipwreck, it’s easy to spend the day in the cockpit just observing all that’s going on. Life is sweet indeed.

My last post about Guadeloupe was when we were in Saint Francois, a small village on the south east side. From there we went out to Petite Terre for a night. This island, part of the national park system, has a shallow bar at the entrance to the harbor that can be challenging in north swells when the waves build up and can even break on the bar. Our entrance was pretty scary, involving some major surfing that had our boat speed up to 10 knots. When I saw the first wave start to curl I closed my eyes and just held on. It took a while for the adrenaline heart beat to slow down for both of us.

The island has some nice trails and some okay snorkeling with lots of turtles. The shallower areas are apparently a nursery for lemon sharks; we saw one small one playing in the surf line of the tidal pool along the beach. There are moorings available for maybe 10 boats (no anchoring allowed) which limits the overnight stays. There was only one other boat there the night we stayed. The big influx of day trippers that arrive on boats from the mainland of Guadeloupe starts at 7 am, so you’re sharing a pretty small space with a hundred or more of your new friends. We hiked the trails, walked on the beach, did a drift snorkel from the reef back to the boat, and slid out of the harbor at lunchtime. Luckily the wind had shifted just enough that getting out of the entrance was a non-event.

*Looking across Petite Terre. See Calypso?*

Marie Galante was the next stop. This pancake-shaped, flat island has a couple of different anchorages, a couple of small towns, some beautiful beaches, and supposedly the best rhum (rhum agricole, made directly from sugar cane as opposed to from molasses) in the Caribbean. Three distilleries occupy space on this tiny island.

We rented a car to check out the scene. Endless fields of sugar cane, multiple trees laden with mangoes and breadfruit and papayas, and road signs that warned of turtle crossings . . . it’s the little things that remind you of being somewhere totally new.

*Windmill (just for show, unfortunately)*

The distilleries and their tasting rooms all close at 1 pm. For the day. This makes tasting rhum after lunch challenging and makes us wonder about the thinking. Rhum agricole is an acquired taste that we don’t yet fully appreciate; we refer to it as “rocket fuel” and there wasn’t much at either of the 2 distilleries that changed our minds. It was pretty cool to see the ancient windmills that once crushed the cane and also to see the vats of liquid in various states of fermentation. In Virginia, one of our favorite wineries had a sign behind the bar with something along the lines of “grapes only grow in beautiful places”. The same could be said for sugar cane.

After Marie Galante we sailed off to Iles des Saintes. Yeah, still a part of Guadeloupe! Did you think Guadeloupe was just one island? No!

The Saintes is a group of 3 (4? 5?) islands with 2 settlements in total. We were there for just over a week and spent all our time in Terre de Haut, exploring on land and the water, and digging out the paddle board and paddling around the harbor. We did rent an electric scooter and tooled all over, a bit overkill on an island with maybe 10 miles of roads in total. We did get up some good hills and onto a few more remote beaches . . .

It’s likely that we’d have left after a couple of days except that we knew Alison and David Lennarz (friends from UVA days who introduced us to each other) were coming in on their boat and we wanted to hang out with them.

*Wahoo on a mooring just a hundred yards away!*

It was a magical treat to see them and their boat, to relax and share meals together. We’ve been talking about sharing an anchorage in the Caribbean since they started the process of building their boat; to finally make it happen felt surreal.

They left on Friday, headed to mainland Guadeloupe. We waited until Monday to leave since overtime charges to clear into Dominica on a weekend are excessive. Our time in Guadeloupe, at least for now, is over.