hurricane damage

John, Mark & Ann decided to stay an extra day and this time we booked a private tour with Paul, who works for one of the PAYS guys who runs a tour bus service on the side (Eddison). We headed south where Paul got off the main road and took us down into some of the seaside villages. The destruction was incredible. You’d see one house demolished sitting next to another house that looked completely untouched. Dominica has the reputation of being one of the best islands with building codes to survive storms, but many of the older homes were built to no such standard and it showed. What was truly frightening was to see the houses that got caught by mud and rock slides. If they weren’t smashed and destroyed, they were either picked up and carried along with the debris, or simply filled up by the debris and mud as it rolled along. Many homes had first floors that were still filled to the ceiling by mud and rock and trees – the families are living on the second floors till they clear the first. In other cases the winds ripped off second stories so the families are now reduced to the first floor. Despite it all, roads were cleared, recovery work was going on everywhere you looked (often sponsored by countries all around the world), and the people still had a smile on their faces and were happy to see us.

hurricane damage – rockslides and mudslides

Paul thought we needed to follow the other tour going on, but since we had booked him privately we convinced him that we wanted to go off on our own, so we headed to Trafalgar Falls. The two sets of falls there are the most famous in the entire island and it is an incredible view. You can climb your way up to the falls, but it’s a lot of bouldering, and we gave up after only making it halfway to one of the falls. We headed back, stopped along the shore for lunch, and then went to check out the sulfur springs.

Trafalgar Falls

Dominica still has between 7 and 9 active volcanoes (depending on who you ask), though none have erupted in decades. They do have hot sulfur springs though at the southern end of the island. Unfortunately all of the main springs just at the edge of the ocean in Soufiere were completely wiped out in the storm, but if you dug into the sand you could still find warm patches and a few years from now those pools may be back. We drove up the hill to the main spring and the park had been mostly flattened. Again, rocks and trees gave way and the mud/rockslides had ripped through the entire area. Though the pools were wiped out, the springs were still there so it was fun to climb through the water up the hillside. Tour guide Paul stripped down to his skivvies and jumped in, climbing to where a pipe poured hot water out into the pools. He said this was the place they had always gone to anyway to get away from the crowds, so I was happy to see some things were still in place.

John pondering the falls

From there we headed back home. Judy spotted wood carvings on the side of the road, so we stopped and were invited into the artist’s studio where we could see the work he was doing post storm. They had a new litter of kittens and it was fun to see his young children playing with them, a little normalcy after all the trauma they’ve been through.

We got back in time for one of the PAYS famous barbeques. For $20 bucks you get a plate full of food and all the rum punch you can drink. The food is tasty but the rum punch is deadly and you have to be careful of how much you drink…………you’ll definitely feel it the next day. I don’t know how, but after putting away gallons of the punch at the last BBQ, Simon & Charles woke up at 3 AM to discover their anchor had dragged and they were drifting well out to sea. I’m not sure I would have done as good a job resetting the anchor after that amount of punch!