It is official. We have stayed too long in the French islands because I had a dream last night in French….and I don’t even speak French! I have given up trying to learn because it really does not make logical sense to me. The town signs in Guadeloupe have the name of the city/town and then below the name, the sign has the pronunciation. While they are all illogical, I present the best of the bunch to you:
Pointe-A-Pitre = Lapwent Deshaies = Day Baie-Mahault = Maywo Grand Bourg = Granbo Roussel = Wose It is no wonder we can never find what we need! We have also been intrigued by car names on the island as well. Most of the cars are made by Peugeot and Citroen. While the US names most of our cars to represent power and speed (F150; Mustang; Cobra; Charger), the French cars seem to be named at random and definitely do not inspire visions of racing down the road at Mach speed. We have seen the Twingo, the Stepway, the Clio, the Kaptur and our overall favorite…the ever-so-speedy Cactus. We were laughing the other day watching a person try to park in a Twingo. The Twingo is smaller than a VW Bug and it must have taken the driver three tries to park. We tried to imagine him parking an Oldsmobile and that entertained us for quite a while! Our final adventure in Guadeloupe was a trip over to the island of Marie Galante. We decided to take the ferry which was a very quick one hour ride instead of taking Galt which would have been a turtle slow four hour jaunt. Marie Galante is approximately 61 square miles and the majority of the island is sugarcane fields. As we traversed the island, we began to notice that we would enter a town and then 45 seconds later, we would leave the town. I counted on the map and there were in the vicinity of 165 towns on an island that was 61 square miles. We figured the mailman would have no issues delivering the mail since there were only two to three houses in each ‘town’. No week would be complete without our visits to the distilleries and Marie Galante had three offerings. They were all very small in comparison to the large operations on the mainland but given that the locals were still cutting the sugarcane by hand would definitely make production on a grand scale difficult. The Bellevue Distillery had a very nice restored windmill which made for some lovely pictures. We then drove to the site of the most famous windmill on the island. I must say we were sorely disappointed by the fact that it had only two vanes and sat in a field full of cow patties with a doublewide trailer behind it. Did not make for a lovely picture. We spent most of the afternoon eating lunch beachside while watching the locals gather mussels by the reef. The water was so shallow that the men were only knee deep two to three hundred yards offshore! Other sites on the island included a lovely Sally and Bill walk to Gueule Grand Gourffre which was an arch formed by the waves and several soft sand beaches which have been rare on the volcanic islands. The next day we explored several ruins that remained from old plantations and enjoyed another seaside lunch before taking the ferry back to the main island. If the weather cooperates, my next blog should be from Antigua which will definitely help me understand my dreams again because it is an English speaking island. Until then, have a wonderful week….or as the French would pronounce it, “a a woo wee”….
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AuthorSally Miller Archives
May 2024
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