This was my first visit to Guadeloupe and I found the Eastern Island, Basse-Terre or Karukera in Carib, definitely beautiful and quite diverse in its fauna, with different types of forests, from the mangroves to the rain forests, to the altitude or cloud forest, almost permanently inside a cloud of its own making!
On the only time I went snorkelling (as opposed to daily swims at dawn!), I also saw corals, predictably in poor state, along tropical fish and tortoises, incl. a barracuda (if not at the spot where another tourist got bitten!). And, alas, plenty of sargassum, annoying when swimming and a plague when decomposing on the beaches and storage locations since they emit H²S gases in large quantities. I found online that companies like Suez are turning them into energy and fertiliser but the huge unpredictability of their arrival make this recycling unsustainable at an industrial scale.
We also visited banana and cocoa plantations, always amazed by the huge variety of banana genera and its multiple benefits (and adapting to their local availability by having breakfasts of bananas and mangoes, since preserving bread proved impossible). Unfortunately, I could not find whole cocoa pods for sale on local markets and brought home a bag of loose beans I could only turn into a cocoa stick (rather than the intended paste) as it dried out very quickly. As a 100% chocolate substitute, it is enjoyable in small quantities! (I also brought huge avocados and passion fruits, after securing an export certificate!, necessary despite moving from a French territory to another French territory. While bringing back mangoes was prohibited.) Among the many friendly encounters, special thanks to the lady from Les Saintes who gave me eggs from her chicken when the local grocery would only sell them by crates of 30 eggs. And to the passer-by who helped me out of a ditch by sitting on my rental front hood!
A last point about this trip is that this is the first place in France I visit where tap water is of disputable quality (as confirmed by many locals, incl. our daughter and our host). As a result, I ended up buying more water bottles over three weeks than in the past twenty years! (Boiling water then cooling it was not even sufficient for my own consumption, given the rental conditions, as I was producing less than two liters a day.) The reason for this uncertainty is the poor state of the water pipes and the potential contamination by uncontrolled water sources in the event of heavy rain, at least in our neighbourhood…
