Monday in Marriaqua ( "This all used to be banana...!")

I promised an update on yesterday's field site reconnaissance trip to Mespo and I'm going to be a man of my word.

Like I wrote in the Georgetown post: although we are eager to get going with the fieldwork we decided to at least investigate alternatives to Georgetown as field site. One obvious alternative is the Marriaqua Valley in the southern interior of the island. Often hailed as the bread basket of St. Vincent, this valley is so fertile you can drop pretty much anything in the soil and it will grow. A fair deal of what is grown is bananas, although other crops such as taro (here known as dasheen) have become increasingly common. The valley is also praised for its grand scenery and magnificent vistas and so a drive up to Mespo and on to the Montreal gardens even further up in the mountains, is held to be one of the island's prime tourist attractions.

We decided to call Brother, a somewhat solemn but highly knowledgeable taxi driver who, like he said it himself "is not in de business only for de dollah". He had told me he was a 24/7 kind of guy - "call me anytime!" What is more, Brother has worked the banana himself. Allthough this was some time ago he knows the drill. And so fifteen minutes to twelve on Monday (fifteen minutes early), Brother parked his taxi outside our flat. Our deal was that he would take us for a four-hour sight-seeing of the Mespo-area and also talk to some people to see if there were any places to rent. What we got was a whole lot more.

Long before we got anywhere close to Marriaqua Brother had stopped the vehicle a number of times to tell us about certain plants (avocado, bread fruit, butter cup, cat's tail, rose mint, nut meg) or places (the spot where the Carib chief Joseph Chatoyer died, a number of lookout points). He would stop at road side fruit stalls and get us samples. At one point we stopped and walked into a banana field where he demonstrated deflowering and pruning. He would point at the landscape and name the crops we saw, usually followed by a contemplative silence and then: "This all used to be banana! All banana...!"

Brother seemed annoyed at farmers who drop out of bananas, either to diversify into other crops or livestock or to get out of farming altogether. He also made sure to comment whenever we passed a banana row that was ill maintained - if e.g the trees weren't pruned or the undergrowth cleared. And likewise he would praise the healthy and well maintained fields.

Reaching Mespo we headed straight inland and upwards, climbing the ridge on which the village of Richland Park is located. A detour into a large farm area afforded us a first hand demonstration of banana cutting (the cutting of a bunch into hands). Again: "This was all bananas!" when we passed taro fields or grace lands. Back in Richland Park, Borther asked around about an apartment or house and got a couple of names. One guy aparently had two newly refurnished houses to let and the one, they thought, was vacant. Turned out it wasn't, but the lady renting it had moved to Canada. She wanted to hold onto the place though and paid the rent duly. Another man had two apartments which we would have loved to live in if we could have renovated them first. After having gotten our hopes up we began to understand that we had drawn blank. Mespo/Richland Park had struck us as a good place to live but what can you do?

We came to terms with this in the Montreal Gardens, a 7.5 acre (3 hectares) estate at 1500 feet (450 m), a beautful place open to the public and with views all the way to the ocean. At this point our four hours were up but Brother insisted that it didn't matter and so we got a chance to wheel Ella, who was now asleep around in her trolly for a while, on narrow walkways of slabs of rock, through formal gardens and underneath tropical canopies. Afterward we returned home along Windward highway, the same road we took to Georgetown, last week, but this time with plenty of stops to take in the view.

So what's next on the programme? Well, we don't want to give up on Mespo just yet so we have asked the people at WINFA if they can dig up any other available accommodation in the area. Wherever we end up though, we need to get there soon.