A few days in Grenada leave only impressions like snapshots taken from a speeding vehicle. There is just enough time for your eye to click the shutter and capture the image, but not enough to really understand the world around you.
Grenada seems like the Caribbean we only see in postcards. There are no high-rise buildings and nothing is built higher than a coconut tree. Each scene is a photograph: roads wind along coastlines, empty turquoise beaches frame the perimeter and nooks and coves gleam with shiny black volcanic sand.
The most spectacular views are really from the sea. If you can manage it, board a yacht and sail around the 344 km² island where you can get a glimpse of the rolling green hills, the coloured roofs of the buildings that speckle the harbor front and tiny getaways that appear as if by magic in the middle of the ocean.
Outside of St. Georges there are few traffic lights, even fewer cars and no white lines in the roads to govern what little traffic exists. On Sundays the pace slows even further until the sun goes down and the beaches come alive with locals and tourists alike.
People still say good morning and offer food to a stranger passing through. Though Grenada is less than an hour from Trinidad & Tobago, she could not be more different. She is friendly and warm with honest, open smiling faces and helpful hands.
You can’t help but wonder whether there is something in the water, in the air or in the spices that has allowed Grenada to escape the sharp edges. How much of this idyllic charm is real and what history does it conceal? Then you remember the old plantation houses and the cocoa drying in the sun. You think of the grand houses of the expats that dot the hillsides. You remember the stories of Le Morne des Sauteurs, where the Caribs preferred death to surrender. This is the thing about a snapshot, about just passing through, you only see the surface and are left to wonder at the complexity that lies beneath.
Still, it is heaven to hear nothing but your own thoughts in a place as quiet as this. Whether Grenada you have seen is a mirage or a real life paradise, you put your feet up, smell the sea and contemplate staying just a little while longer before you have to go home again.
Writer: Ayanna Gillian Lloyd PHOTOGRAPHER: TANYA MARIE
