Dominica!

We got to our first port yesterday in Dominica and it was a lot of fun. I went on a SAS trip that was for the oceanography class I’m taking to the hot springs and beaches that lasted for most of the day and was totally worth the money. Probably my favorite part of the whole day was riding in the open jeep/bus vehicles with our awesome tour guide Louisiana.  She taught us a funny rum song and other cool things about the island and people.  She told us that the people there live to be very old—actually she said only the women live to be very old and there’s like 3 women to every 1 man on the island. A lot of women live past 100 years old, which she said was because of their clean drinking water and other things.

Driving around the island was a little scary at first because the roads are extremely narrow and winding. There are also a lot of cliffs all over the place. The drivers are beeping their horns constantly around corners because you can’t see around the bends at all, but our guide told us they only have about 2 fatal accidents a year, which is very surprising.

So, on our first stop we hiked to the hot springs. The rainforest was really nice but I didn’t think the hot springs were that impressive. Then we rode around to a couple of different beaches and stopped at each for a while. There was this one little strip of land that we drove down where you could see the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea on each side of you. It was gorgeous there!

After that we went to Champagne beach where we went snorkeling for a while. They call this spot Champagne beach because there is an area where bubbles float up from the hot air underground that makes it look like the bubbles in champagne. We swam through it and the bubbles were cool but I was expecting a little more. The reefs were really cool though and they had a lot of tropical fish swimming around us. They said sometimes there are turtles but we didn’t end up seeing any, unfortunately.

Today was a lot less exciting though. It kept raining on and off and we couldn’t find much to do within walking distance. We just went in to town to do some shopping but there weren’t really a lot of cool places to go to. I did buy a cool colorful necklace though. If I were to ever come here again I would definitely stick to the more nature-y places because it’s all so gorgeous and town gets old pretty quickly.