Dominica

Hello from Dominica!

Dominica is a small island in the eastern Caribbean between the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.  Dominica is a volcanic island that was formed by an eruption thousands of years ago.  The whole country is only about 750 square kilometers, which is almost 110,000 square kilometers smaller than Virginia!  During the colonial period, the island was owned by the British and the French who fought over it many times.  Dominica changed between British and French control seven times before it got independence in 1978. 

The island is named Dominica because it was spotted by Christopher Columbus on a Sunday, and in Spanish the word for Sunday is Domingo.  The people in Dominica today still honor this fist sighting, and the Catholic religion Columbus brought with him, by not doing any business on Sundays.  We arrived on the island on a Sunday, and as we drove around almost everything was shut, including stores and restaurants.

Dominica is an extremely beautiful, mountainous island.  Most of it is covered by steep hills with lush vegetation.  A lot of the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie was filmed here, and if any of you have seen the movie, it looks a lot like the island where the Jack and his crew get captured by the natives.

On the first day we were there I got to go tubing down one of the rivers, which was really fun because we each got a big inner tube and got to float through rapids and see the scenery along the river.  In the afternoon I went snorkeling on a coral reef.  We got to see lots of different kinds of fish and corals.  The next day I went to Trafalgar Falls, which are two waterfalls in the mountains of Dominica.  One of them is 100 feet tall, and the other is 75 feet.  In the afternoon today I walked around Roseau, the capital city where our ship is docked.  There were lots of brightly colored buildings and we looked in markets where they sell handmade jewelry and crafts.

I wish I could stay in Dominica longer, there’s so much to do here, and I couldn’t possibly fit it all into just two days.