I just about made the LIAT plane to Saint Vincent.
I had decided against an expensive taxi and went for the minibus option instead. First, a lift on the back of a pickup down the hill to Roseau, then luck and a good connection with a minibus from the market up the west coast to Portsmouth, followed by an anxious twenty minute wait for another one to fill up with passengers to go across the north to the villages of Calibishie and Marigot. On the way, it was raining and rivers had overflowed their banks onto the road. Inside, young guys and a Carib woman sang along to Bob Marley.
At the check-in, the clerk asked for my return ticket to Europe. I didn't have one yet, I said, nor was it needed, as I had an onward flight booked from Saint Vincent to Grenada. This is what I had been doing with each island stop in the Caribbean. His supervisor came out and after a discussion between us, he called Saint Vincent immigration. He'd had a case of someone getting repatriated back to Dominica on a flight to Barbados, even when Barbados was not the final destination in the Caribbean. But Saint Vincent would be OK, immigration just informed him, so I could go through.
The flight veered away from the rugged cliffs and dark cloud-covered mountains of Dominica, heading across the open sea to Barbados, which I spotted half an hour later as a flat round illuminated island. In Bridgetown, there was a brief stop-over and change of plane. St George's, Grenada, was forty minutes later, and we landed at night, with the bay lit up all around. Another twenty minutes and then the same plane took off on the half hour flight to Kingstown, Saint Vincent.
Renwick Bailey, five foot three and smiling, appeared from amongst a gathering of people outside the peppermint green E.T Joshua airport terminal, coming up to me and saying that I must be Alex. He said I fit the profile he imagined. I guess that meant a white European with a weather-worn backpack, looking slightly lost.
We drove around the airstrip, Renwick chatting all along, and then up some hills into Cane Garden. Now a quiet residential area on the coast, this valley was formerly a sugar cane plantation, and it is where Renwick had his house and Bay Hill apartments lodging. It was late and we decided to meet up at seven thirty in the morning, as Renwick was going into Kingstown and would give me a lift.
