Cabrits National Park

On Saturday, Ryan and I took part of the day to go for a hike. Just across the bay, there's a national park set on two dead volcanoes. We'd been trying to get over there since we arrived, but it hadn't happened yet. So late Saturday morning, after a few hours of work, we took a bus over to Purple Turtle Beach (which is right next to Cabrits) and hiked over to it. It was about a fifteen minute hike along the coast. It was when we were crossing a culvert that we spotted our little eel friend that I told you about.

Cabrits is named for the french word for 'goat', after the goats that were released by soldiers to run wild on the island so that they would always have a fresh source of meat available. Later, the two hills were nearly cleared (pretty impressive, considering they're covered in thick jungle) and a fort was built to defend St. Ruperts Bay and the town of Portsmouth. This was when Portsmouth was the capital of Dominica. The fort was later abandoned and overgrown. Since then it has been partially restored. The restoration is beautifully done, and you can see where they are continuing to work. But my favorite part was to hike back up into the rainforest, amongst the ruins of the fort. You'd be climbing down this steep him and suddenly find the ruins of an old three story building, with trees and vines all over it, all tucked behind a wall defended with cannons, looking out over the water (what you could see of it through the trees). Or you'd round a corner and find a half-buried cannon in the middle of the trail. It was truly beautiful and unique, and while we didn't have enough time to see it all, it is definitely something we want to do again. While we were leaving, they were setting up for a wedding in the restored part of the fort. I bet it was beautiful... the water was an especially beautiful shade of blue on Saturday, and the view was amazing. We hiked all the way home, which was quite a ways, so we were pretty worn out by the time we got back to the apartment.

Here's one of the cannons, looking out over Portsmouth.

 

I took this from the inside of a ruined three story building (the top floor, walls included is totally gone and there are no support joists or anything left) looking out toward Douglas Bay, which is the bay on the opposite side of Cabrits from St. Ruperts Bay.
 

This is a cute photo of us, and it also give you an idea of our walk home. On the far right side of the photo is a peak. Just to the left of the little valley beside the peak is our apartment. Really, I'm not exaggerating. We were very tired that night.

One last story to share before I go. On Monday night, I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. When I spun the toilet paper, a roach, which had been hiding inside the cardboard tube, ran out over my hand and just sat there, on the toilet paper, staring at me with his little beady roachy eyes. Now, I'm not scared of bugs, but a roach running across my hand while I'm reaching for toilet paper in the middle of the night when I'm half asleep is a little bit much, and I screamed. Then I went and woke up Ryan so he could deal with Mr Roach (and Mr Roach was a rather large cockroach) but unfortunately for us Mr Roach got away. So there is still a large toilet-paper-loving cockroach somewhere in our apartment.

Today Ryan had his first day with his small group. Ross works hard to make sure that even though it's a large school, the students still work part of the time in small groups, so the group works on various cases under the guidance of the faculty. He said he enjoyed it, so I was very happy for him. Tomorrow I'll be spending the morning at the school on Ross's campus, for the children of students and faculty. I will be volunteering in the first grade every Thursday morning. I'm looking forward to it.