pull up for a soft drink and find that the Coke and 7-Up signs are there for decoration. The children lining the rural roads are trimly uniformed, healthy-looking, well-ordered - and above all numerous. Dennery and Micoud, the more neglected townships on the island's battered Atlantic coast, lie soaked and puddled in rainy-season boredom. There is much unemployment, and no welfare. People are poor, but nature is rich; it would be hard to starve. The street-wanderers of Micoud regard us with ambiguous levity. We stop for a can of orange juice and are unsmilingly overcharged. Although you wouldn't call them hostile, they are no more friendly than I would feel, if a stranger drove down my street in a car the size of my house.
Even at its most rank and jungly, St Lucia has a kiddy-book harmlessness. The leaves and palms seem greased with baby oil. You expect to encounter Babar the Elephant, smiling tigers, naughty monkeys. Even the real dangers ('minor only!') are Disneyish: poison apples, falling coconuts. Swooningly the vegetation topples into the bluer green of the sea. The Pitons, twin larval peaks, look elemental — a land that time forgot — but cinematic too; King Kong would feel at home with them, clambering from one to the other. At the 'unique' drive-in volcano our gaptoothed Rasta led us through the smells and steam of Sulphur Springs. Now here was blackness and menace. The dark cauldrons bubble at 300°F. Fall in there and you would be dead five times over in a couple of seconds. Everywhere the ground fizzed and simmered (busy counter-space in hell's kitchen), containing with effort the fury of its nethers. With its salty gusts, its splattings and eructations, the strangeness and danger of Sulphur Springs underline the absence of such qualities elsewhere. As we returned to town the locals waved at the car or gazed at us with languid scepticism. In your capacity as a tourist, you feel tolerated as something crucial to the health of the economy. You sometimes feel like a banana trader, a banana planter, a banana expert. Indeed, you sometimes feel like a banana.
Feeling like a banana, however, is not quite what the traveller has in mind. What does he have in mind - strange meetings, close encounters, freedom from the usual transactions? At Gros Inlet, on the northern tip, we had made our first entrance into the prettiness and poverty: a bluesy bar at noon, the talkative bargirl, the gorgeous baby, the youth wanting a light for his six-paper joint, the spent fifths of rum, a view of the changeless lagoon. On Friday night we returned, as invited, for the weekly Street Party - once a spontaneous carouse, now an island institution. (Spies from gimmick-weary, disco-infested Barbados have visited Gros Inlet, to see how it's done.) This is rural carnival: there is no sense of coercion, of enforced high spirits and interracial cheer. In the excited miscegenation you gamble and drink and dance. You needn't worry if one of the brothers tries to cut in on you and your wife. The mean-dude persona has yet to arrive, has yet to seep out from untamed Trinidad or feral Jamaica. There is no violence. There is innocence, in fact — and how terrible it would be if one could no longer recognise it. Money is clumsily at work on all this (the high prices, the preposterous odds of the dicing games), and one joins in the informal redistribution of wealth. Money is working on the innocence too; but the people are new at it, for now. Which way will things go?
Late the next morning we began the drive from Castries to Soufrière. It is the worst main road in St Lucia. We were advised to allow at least two hours for the 29 km journey; it might be quicker, they said, to circumnavigate the entire island. The road meanders and so does the car, as you weave between puddle and pothole. Half an hour and a couple of miles later, we were stopped by a young man who stood carelessly in the middle of the road, flagging us down with some show of
Even at its most rank and jungly, St Lucia has a kiddy-book harmlessness. The leaves and palms seem greased with baby oil. You expect to encounter Babar the Elephant, smiling tigers, naughty monkeys. Even the real dangers ('minor only!') are Disneyish: poison apples, falling coconuts. Swooningly the vegetation topples into the bluer green of the sea. The Pitons, twin larval peaks, look elemental — a land that time forgot — but cinematic too; King Kong would feel at home with them, clambering from one to the other. At the 'unique' drive-in volcano our gaptoothed Rasta led us through the smells and steam of Sulphur Springs. Now here was blackness and menace. The dark cauldrons bubble at 300°F. Fall in there and you would be dead five times over in a couple of seconds. Everywhere the ground fizzed and simmered (busy counter-space in hell's kitchen), containing with effort the fury of its nethers. With its salty gusts, its splattings and eructations, the strangeness and danger of Sulphur Springs underline the absence of such qualities elsewhere. As we returned to town the locals waved at the car or gazed at us with languid scepticism. In your capacity as a tourist, you feel tolerated as something crucial to the health of the economy. You sometimes feel like a banana trader, a banana planter, a banana expert. Indeed, you sometimes feel like a banana.
Feeling like a banana, however, is not quite what the traveller has in mind. What does he have in mind - strange meetings, close encounters, freedom from the usual transactions? At Gros Inlet, on the northern tip, we had made our first entrance into the prettiness and poverty: a bluesy bar at noon, the talkative bargirl, the gorgeous baby, the youth wanting a light for his six-paper joint, the spent fifths of rum, a view of the changeless lagoon. On Friday night we returned, as invited, for the weekly Street Party - once a spontaneous carouse, now an island institution. (Spies from gimmick-weary, disco-infested Barbados have visited Gros Inlet, to see how it's done.) This is rural carnival: there is no sense of coercion, of enforced high spirits and interracial cheer. In the excited miscegenation you gamble and drink and dance. You needn't worry if one of the brothers tries to cut in on you and your wife. The mean-dude persona has yet to arrive, has yet to seep out from untamed Trinidad or feral Jamaica. There is no violence. There is innocence, in fact — and how terrible it would be if one could no longer recognise it. Money is clumsily at work on all this (the high prices, the preposterous odds of the dicing games), and one joins in the informal redistribution of wealth. Money is working on the innocence too; but the people are new at it, for now. Which way will things go?
Late the next morning we began the drive from Castries to Soufrière. It is the worst main road in St Lucia. We were advised to allow at least two hours for the 29 km journey; it might be quicker, they said, to circumnavigate the entire island. The road meanders and so does the car, as you weave between puddle and pothole. Half an hour and a couple of miles later, we were stopped by a young man who stood carelessly in the middle of the road, flagging us down with some show of
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