... "taliban" travelogue trilogy ... 1st gear ... Dominica ...

    I went for a ride in an all terrain pick-up, on an island I'd never been to before ...

    the mountains were steepled and shaggy, rivers and streams rushed to the shores ...

    this place is called Dominica ... not the republic where Spanish is spoke ...

    but the land where Johnny Depp made his film, the one about that pirate bloke ...

    Bully for Anita the Film-Commish, getting us shown at the borrowed French Hall ...

    there's no cinema here you know ... but, we'd have settled for a large blank white wall ...

  
 adults and schoolers loved our film and swore they'd invite us back ...

    encouraging me, while I was there, to sightsee off the beaten track ...

    my friend Lowell stepped up, with his knowledge of the lie-of-the-land ...

    he brought some friends and we set off, this intrepid impromptu band ...

    the girls rode up front with the driver, Ras Petros and I in the open-backed berth ...

    slalom style, windswept, carefree, brave sons of the earth ...

  
  this west-to-east cross-island drive, through misty low cloud and dew rain ... 

    tight-gripped and stagger-standing ... you'd have thought us insane ...

     well we were, in a way, as we ate up the fly-by view ...

    of the verdant landscape we found ourselves adventurously barrelling through ...

    
passing gardens, citrus orchards and many abundant plantations ...

    precipitous plunges, cascading streams and steep, steep inclinations ...

    emerging to the Atlantic, by delightfully named Rosalie ...

    on a bridge where another run-off riverbed meets the wide open sea ...

   on to La Plaine, our destination, the ancestral home of our guide ...

   what we visited around that district ... was more than worth the risky ride ...

    I walked in a Garden Of Eden, strolled on volcanic black sand ...

     and rode a green grotto rope swing, on Lowell's own plot of land ...

 

    it was a while before we got tired, sundown and chill signalling end of day ...
    we climbed aboard the trusty truck, once again on our way ...

    the return run to Roseau took us south before turning back west ...
    if we thought the first leg twisty, the second was a more tortuous test ...

  by the time night enveloped there was much less to see ...

    still, we made it back, thankfully intact, primed and ready for a cold Kubuli or three ...