David Stanley
No megaresorts, no swim-up bars three deep with cocktails, no overrun tourist attractions, no pushy touts. This 290-square-mile bit of lush real estate wedged between Guadeloupe and Martinique is all rainforest, river, and volcano, with just enough sea and sand to satisfy beach lovers. But while Dominica is just 29 miles tip to tip and 16 across, don't let the size fool you into thinking you can zip around in an hour. The interior is all steep, forested mountains, so even the drive from one end to the other, on switchbacking roads, can eat up two to 2½ hours.
Christopher Columbus spotted the island on a Sunday in 1493 and named it accordingly (for domingo, Sunday in Spanish), but he never landed. Smart move, really — the Kalinago people, Caribbean seafarers who'd settled the island centuries earlier, weren't handing it over easily, and Dominica became the last Caribbean island the Kalinago called their own before France and Britain spent a good 150 years lobbing it back and forth. Britain won the tug of war in 1763, held on through slavery and its abolition, and finally let go in 1978, when Dominica became independent. Around 3,000 Kalinago descendants still live on a territory on the east coast, about an hour's drive from capital Roseau.
The vibe throughout is unhurried and unpretentious, and the friendliness of Dominicans tends to be the thing visitors mention first — genuine curiosity and a hello from strangers on the road, not a tourism-brochure performance of it. Neither Roseau nor the other larger town Portsmouth has anything resembling nightlife in the Caribbean-hotspot sense — think a rum punch and some soca on a bar radio rather than beach clubs or late-night crowds. Things generally wind down early, and that's very much the point.
Replies