GR-G1 - Day 3 - Reaching the Beach

We sleep a bit longer than we would have liked to, but after the gruelling march of the day before, this is understandable. Nothing has really dried and getting back into the wet, grimy dirt clothes from the day before is a pain, but a necessary evil. While Rebecca is still packing the rest of her stuff, I go outside and photograph a few of the plants around. There's another hummingbird whirring around the hut, hopping from plant to plant and the sun is glowing through the leaves, still wet from the previous days rain.

Once we are ready to walk the sun is finally out but there is still some fog left in the air and the sunshine filters through the water vapour in the air, breaking and glittering in surreal godrays shining through the leaves of the forest. It looks wrong. Like reality broke.

I've never seen anything like it and the supreme beauty of this moment will stay in my memory for some time to come. Just taking photos doesn't do it justice. The light faded and came back, waving, when the leaves move, like that seemed to move around, caressing the surfaces they touch with a warm glow. It was surreal.

We were off for a good start for todays hike, and even though the feet still hurt a little bit from the monstrous exercise of the day before, we keep walking. The path is still wet and slippery and the mud sticks up our legs all the way to our backpacks again after a short while, but today, without time pressure, we just take it slow.

We know that at the end of this hike we will reach a beautiful beach and that in the night there will be a nice dry hotel or something of that sort waiting for us, before we continue the hike in the South of the island.

So we walk, stopping regularly to take pictures. My phone has charge again, because of the power bank that Rebecca had with her and so I can keep clicking away, picture after picture of the beautiful forest bathed in sunlight, the old trees and all the different sorts of plants lining our way.

It's a beautiful day, with lots of sunlight coming through the trees and because the hike is much less hard one can actually, take the time to really enjoy this beautiful nature. There are so many little details to see, the scenery of the path, and the details of the plants lining the way.

Even though we are stopping every 100 meters we make good mileage, slowly but surely walking towards Deshaies (it's pronounced Deai), the end of our journey, the end of the first part of the Trace du Alicés.

Sometimes the beauty of the scenery comes out in the context of somebody walking or standing in this landscape. Some of my favorite pictures from the hike are just like that, of us, in this incredible piece of nature. In this living ecosystem. Almost disappearing amidst the plants.

It's interesting to see how the scenery changes, from a dense jungle foliage, to something that looks much more like a European forest. Including trees that would seem almost native to us.

The forest also get's much more lighter and brighter as we keep walking and there are several rivers crossing our path now. But the amount of spider webs also increases and so every once in a while I do a little dance, trying to wipe a spider web off of my face and arms, hoping that whatever spider was sitting in it's net isn't poisonous.

Some of the cliffs that we walk up and down are still very steep though and we again slide down on all fours, sitting on our butts just to be sure that we don't slip and slide down all the way and hurt ourselves.

At some point we see leaf cutter ants crossing our path and they are just funny to watch. Carrying their little pieces of leaves around.

I tell Rebecca that leave cutter ants are the only other species besides humans, which do something that could be reasonably called agriculture. They use the leaves to feed a species of fungus that they cultivate in their hives. They don't eat the leaves, they eat the fungus which they feed the leaves. To me little facts about nature are beautiful to know. It just makes life more interesting and I feel that I would like to know much more about the plants in the forest that we see. It's like there is a treasure trove of knowledge waiting to be discovered if you only knew all the names and uses of the plants that we walked past during the last three days.

Eventually we climb up a slope and I can see brighter than usual light at the end of the slope and we reach a small road that leads back to Deshaies. Back to civilization. Back to other people, and most importantly back to the coast, out of the jungle, to the sea, to the warm beautiful turquoise waters of the Atlantic ocean. At some point we can see the sea from the road that we're walking on.

On this good road I walk much faster than Rebecca somehow. There is just something about walking on a good road that makes me happy and it sends my feet flying through the air, happily almost jogging down the asphalt. Every once in a while I wait for Rebecca because in the end we want to reach the beach together.

And not soon after we arrive. Once our feet dig into the sand at the beach we start howling in excitement and laughter because it's so goddamn beautiful to see the ocean again.

After days of only green, all the different shades of green in the world, seeing this deep blue and the white, golden sands is just heaven. And we just jump into the water, clothes on and all, washing off all the grime and dirt from the day again. It's heaven.

But we can't stay too long because we still have to make our way down to the other side of the island before nightfall, because that's where our next bit of trekking is going to start and also where we booked a real hotel for the night. As nice as it is to sleep in a wooden hut on an inflatable mattress, simply because it's out in the jungle and exciting and wonderful, the idea of being back at a hotel has it's draw too.

But hitching goes slower than expected. And we need to hitch quite far and the time flies by. Waiting, and sitting in cars. We hitch with 6 people that day, and at some point it starts getting dark. Rebecca's phone is dead. Mine has 10% battery left and I regret all the photos that I took because the camera took precious battery that we now need to solve our problem. We are still 25 minutes away from the hostel, sitting at the side of a road, in the dark, because the sun has set, a bit of panic starting to become reality, starting to sink in. Again, being two people makes this feeling much more endurable, and it feels like we can solve this situation, but still, here we are, at nightfall, at the entrance to a small highway, with no cars stopping for over half an hour.

I write to the owner of the hotel that we might be a bit late and he writes back something in French. And we are lucky, because he says that we should stay there and that he is going to come and get us. A giant stone of stress falls from our hearts and shoulders. Like somebody lifted a great weight off of us and we can breathe again. Elated we wait. Then a bus stops and tells us to get it in, they are also going to where we are going, Capesterre de Bel Eau, and I feel like we can save the hotel owner some work and so we get onto the bus and give the phone number to the woman on the bus. It's after their official shift, it's just the family of the bus driver going home and we don't even have to pay for a bus ticket and they are so friendly to us it's insane. We just sit there, stomped and exhausted from the hike and all the tramping we did that day, not sure how to handle this situation especially because the people on the bus speak almost no English and our french is basically non-existent too. Eventually we reach Capesterre and tell that to the hotel owner. He says, to wait just there, he'll be there in 20 minutes. So we sit down besides the road and wait. It's a little bit of a shady area, not many cars or people around and at some point a car stops.

But the people that come out are not the owner and adrenaline starts to pump. They smell like alcohol and in French they ask us what we do here. They are two women, luckily, but still the first shock remains. We tell them in a mix of broken French and English that we are waiting for a friend who comes to get us to the hotel and they say that this is a bit of a bad area and that they will wait until our friend is here, and so we talk to them about our adventures, showing them pictures of our last days and weeks and all the crazy and cool things we had done, like the Atlantic crossing, or this hike. And we get along quite well. I am so exhausted and wasted already for the day, that I just go along with the flow, playing off the slightly crazy and drunk nature of these people, bouncing around, hopping, dancing, screaming, being a bit over the top to pass the time. And eventually the hotel owner arrives. And the people with whom we were waiting actually knew the guy. What a relieve. We get into the car, and everything is alright. The name of our new friend is Patrice and he drives us to a chicken diner on the way back to the hotel, he can see that we are starving, the packet of gummy bears and bananas we ate on the way hadn't quite helped to still our hunger. We buy a full chicken and a big portion of fries and then continue our journey towards the night toward the hotel. And while it feels really really late, it's only 21:00 by the time that we reach.

And we tell Patrice our full story, while eating and sipping a beer and we are so extremely happy about the beauty of the place. We have a whole apartment for ourselves and can't quite believe how incredibly lucky we had been again that day. After the food we just fall into bed and sleep like stones until the next morning... But that's a story for another post.