Dominica, Hiking to the Falls

Saturday 10th July

Location: Portsmouth Bay, Dominica.

Stevenson arrived at 8:30 to ferry us ashore. We picked up the car at the hotel, and headed out along the coast road towards Roseau, the capital of Dominica, where I planned to do my vegetable provisioning for the trip. The weather was lovely, and despite the terrible roads, the drive was otherwise very pleasant, with some truly fabulous views. Everyone on this island drives as though they are blind drunk, swerving violently all over the road in an attempt to avoid holes and craters. Driving here really is a nerve racking, exhausting experience. We rattled, swerved and bounced our way through the pretty little villages, attempting to avoid the craters and other swerving vehicles.
Due to the heavy rainfall on this island, there’s a lot of erosion, and some of the roads have quite scary sheer drops where the sides of the road have eroded away over the years.
Roseau was a pretty, bustling, little Creole style town, full of bright colors and beautiful old buildings with gingerbread trim, balconies and flowers everywhere. Stevenson led us to the busy local market square where I was able to buy fresh homegrown vegetables. It wasn’t cheap, and I’m pretty sure I was paying 2 or 3 times what the locals were being charged, so I started bartering, and easily managed to get much better prices.
After the market we headed inland to Trafalgar Falls. Once again the drive was breathtakingly beautiful, with incredible views. Dominica really is the prettiest of all the islands, with its mountainous interior, waterfalls, rivers and magnificent trees and flowers.
Trafalgar falls were very easy to reach, with only about a 10 minute walk from the parking lot. Once there we had to climb over huge boulders to reach the actual pools, it reminded me of the Baths at Virgin Gorda. It wasn’t easy for me, and some of the rocks and boulders were quite slippery, but I managed it without incident. Edi was in the water swimming before I could blink, and Bob wasn’t far behind. The water was clear clean and quite cold, but very refreshing, I got in up to chest height but couldn’t bring myself to actually swim, it was just too cold, for me, I have been spoilt by the usually wonderfuly warm Caribbean water. The force of the water from the falls was very strong and it was very easy to get either pulled under or washed down stream. We stayed for about an hour, moving from one pool to the next, splashing around and swimming. On the way out we paddled in the hot spring in the forest.
Unfortunately we had once again run out of time, as we had to get our rental car back by 5pm so we needed to get going. There are so many wonderful places to visit and see on Dominica, we really needed a