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motivated tortoises
Wednesday, February 18 2026
location: Room 3, Edgecombe Resort, St. Mark, Grenada, the Caribbean Sea
We had the same waitress this morning as we'd had yesterday morning, though she seemed friendlier. Evidently further thought had been put into our dietary needs, and a bigger, more diverse breakfast was scrounged up for us. It included the same old tiresome Nescafe (real coffee had still yet to arrive!), bread that seemed to be sprinkled with cheese (we didn't object), potatoes, plantains, and chickpeas. But the biggest difference was that this morning we both got large bowls of fruit. This made sense, given that delicious fruit could be found lying on the ground at this very resort. Unfortunately, though, the fruit we were given was not that. It was various slices of melon (watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew) without much flavor that might've been imported from Florida. I was able to eat more of these melon pieces than Gretchen was, though I didn't want to leave any uneaten, which would've seemed a little ungrateful. So after first trying to give melon pieces to the various wild birds nearby (they weren't interested), I happened to remember the tortoise pen.
Edgecombe might be an ecoresort, but it also has a number of zoo-like features, including a pond with the fastest turtle I've ever seen (he jumped in the water several times when I walked past), a large bird cage containing no birds, and an area fenced-in by a low stone wall containing four yellow-spotted tortoises, none of whom had shown much sign of life. Gretchen and I walked to tortoise pen and I tossed a few pieces of melon over near a tortoise. He or she suddenly started walking, and moved more quickly than you might expect a tortoise to walk. Soon he was wolfing down the melon piece as other tortoises approached. I'd never seen tortoises so motivated! There was more melon than any one tortoise could eat in multiple chomps, so three of them maaged to eat something. I expected them to be assholes to one another, but they were surprisingly cooperative. Gretchen felt bad about the one especially slow (perhaps in all senses of the word) tortoise who hadn't managed to get any melon, so I went back to the semi-outdoor dining area to retrieve a piece of honeydew I'd set near a piece of pottery that served as a water fountain for songbirds. Gretchen broke it into pieces and put one right next to the slow tortoise, who didn't seem to grasp what was going on. But when she put it up to his snout, he got the idea and began munching. It was an unexpectedly satisfying experience and the best possible one that we could've had with flavorless Florida melons.
Gretchen made one last use of the pool area before we checked out at 11:00am. We had some bills to settle up, and we did so in a small air-conditioned office within the semi-outdoor restaurant area while a colorful tropical songbird pecked at the glass window from the outside, perhaps thinking his reflection was a rival.
Once we'd checked out, our plan was to walk down to the coastal road several hundred feet down the hill and catch a van used by locals to get to and from their jobs. As we were walking out, Gretchen wondered why she had both her phone and my phone in her pockets. "No," I said, "I have my phone!" She then looked at the other phone and realized it wasn't hers. She'd accidentally scooped up the resort staffer's phone while she'd been checking us out! (This was the opposite of the usual pattern Gretchen had of leaving her own things in various places.) We hurried back to the semi-outdoor restaurant area to return the phone, which the staffer had yet to discover missing. She was happy to have it back, saying she would've cried had it disappeared.
On the way down the hill, we found a star fruit tree bearing ripe fruits, so we harvested a few just in case we needed something like that to eat at some point. Again we wondered why the restaurant was serving such inferior imported fruit when delicious & diverse fruit was widely available within easy walking distance.
At the bottom of the hill, we didn't have to wait long before a van arrived. It was nearly full, but the guy responsible for logistics (a different guy from the driver) directed a minor reorganization of seating allowing us to fit in the back seat. Further down the road, people got out and got in, and somehow the logistics guy managed to successfully handle the limited seating still available. Gretchen was worried about groups of people not getting a place in the van because of our rich white asses, but I explained that what we were seeing here was the purist form of capitalism, and if there was a need for more van seating today, some rusty old van would get some tires slapped on and rapidly be put back into service.
It was interesting to ride in van like this with locals, as it gave us a sense of the culture and norms. Everyone in the van except us was black, of course, and all but one of the women had natural (kinky) hair. Nobody seemed to be wearing strong fragrances, which was nice. And if anyone had body odor, it was probably us. Conversation was fairly limited, though one older gentleman was talking to one of the women here and there briefly througout their time together in the van.
It took about an hour before we arrived at a van depot in St. George's. At that point Gretchen tried to pay the logistics guy with American currency, but he insisted that we pay in Eastern Caribbean dollars, which we definitely did not have. Gretchen said that she'd been told American dollars would be accepted and that we had no other way to pay. So the guy relented and took her $5, though he examined it closely to make sure it wasn't counterfeit. He then tried to give Gretchen change, since our combined fare was only $4, but Gretchen refused, saying that she'd inconvenienced him and he could keep the change. He didn't seem to like this, but quickly relented a second time because Gretchen has an enviably effortless assertiveness to her.
From the van depot, we walked through a tunnel under a massive ridge-top fort to get to the harbor. The tunnel was clearly designed to be for vehicles only, but it was also the most convenient path for pedestrians, so of course it was being shared by both, with vehicles driving slowly past us as we strode through. I was noticing again that, much like in Sri Lanka, vehicles coexist with other road users much better than they do in the United States. A great indication of this was the complete absence of roadkill.
As we emerged from the tunnel into the harbor area, we could see the Star Clipper, the tall sailing ship where we'd be living for the next ten days. It was across the water, but it didn't take much walking to get to it around the end of the harbor. We were able to drop off our backpacks and such in a Ports Authority building that had been set up to receive us. Gretchen was able to use the internet there, though I wasn't. She did some research and we eventually headed further south along the harbor to a vegan restaurant called Vegan Vibes. On the way there, we saw a gentleman who looked exactly like a notorious (but somewhat ubiquitous) vegan from the mid-Hudson Valley. Gretchen was horrified. Would we really be trapped on a boat for ten days with that guy? But the woman he was with was a little too attractive, and when a rain shower forced us all into a bus stop together, we could see that this was some other guy.
Vegan Vibes was open, but when we went inside, the people in there told us it was actually closed. So we ended up at Tropicana Inn instead, where a woman confirmed that she could provide vegan food. She brought us out big plates heaped with rice, beans, lettuce, pasta, and various cooked vegetables. Its flavor profile was similar to what we'd had at Edgecombe, though it was nice to also get fresh salad greens for a change. They also had a reasonably good hot sauce, though it had more of a vinegar component than I prefer. Gretchen didn't much like the food, perhaps because there was nothing equivalent to hot sauce that would tune it better to her preferences. Also, she didn't have a beer. I had a locally-brewed Carib in a typical (small) 275 mL bottle and found it surprisingly good (that is, complex in a positive way) for a lager.
Gretchen left me back at the Ports Authority while she strolled off to some commercial center nearby to do some commerce. I would've gone with her, but I was feeling too tired to stand around while she looked at products that didn't interest me in stores that had nothing of interest to me. But without internet on my phone and nothing much to do in the Ports Authority, I just sat there in a chair staring off into the distance and thinking the sort of thoughts one has when one is bored (something I rarely am, and then only when waiting for something to happen). People who would be on the sailboat cruise were steadily arriving, but, surprisingly, I didn't recognize any of them. I'm a fairly frequent cruiser with this particular vegan cruise company, and there are many other regulars, so I expected to see some familiar faces. Perhaps the fact that this was the first one I'd be attending outside of Europe had something to do with it; there probably be more Americans, perhaps the kind less likely to fly to Europe for such an adventure.
At 3:00pm sharp, the young woman at the desk announced that now she would be accepting our paperwork if we lined up in a queue. Gretchen had filled out this paperwork earlier, but I didn't know that, so I filled it out myself, something I was just finishing doing as Gretchen arrived from her retail adventure. She'd bought a metal water bottle to replace the one she'd lost in Atlanta, this one featuring an extremely tacky photograph of a Caribbean beach scene, complete with a palm tree.
As other arrived, I began to recognize people, such as the morbidly obese German guy and his less obese wife, who has been on almost every cruise we'd been on. Midge, a very skinny woman from Oregan who knows Gretchen from outside the vegan cruise world, came up to give her an enthusiastic hello and to introduce herself to me. Later her husband came up and did something similar. By then I was watching the interaction between various crabs who had climbed up the side of the concrete sea wall. One strolled past another, the two exchanged a brief tap of their claws, and then one leapt off the wall into the water while the other hung back.
Eventually the cruise director, a tall handsome greyhaired man named Frederick, began calling up various groups to be taken aboard the ship. When it was our turn, Gretchen and I were eager to board. As we approached the boat, I noted that it was about the same size as a riverboat, the kind that carries about 100 passengers. This ship, the Star Clipper, could hold 120 passengers. Evidently to fit that number, some compromises had been made; when we finally saw our room, we noted that it wasn't much more than a double bed, and the shower area was only separated from the toilet by a curtain. But before we saw that, we checked out the public spaces in the middle of the ship. There was a piano bar with eight or so cozy booths that shared a bar area with a semi-outdoor gathering place (it was sheltered from rain and sun by a large semi-permanent tarp) called the Jungle Bar. Immediately sternward of that was a cozy library with a whole wall of various books in several languages. After we checked in with the ship's nurse (a trans woman who still referred to herself as "Brian"), and turned over our passports, we snacked on the usual introductory finger foods (sandwiches and little eggrolls, the latter of which I ate many of) and then went to check out our room, which I've already described. When we arrived, a video about sailing ships was playing on our room's television and there was a hardback book all about such sailing ships. It occurred to me (in a way that I hadn't anticipated) that some people on this cruise would be there for the sailing aspect of it, perhaps more than the vegan aspect of it. I myself was not especially interested in the sailing technology of the boat, but I'm sure it's the kind of thing I could get interested in. I assumed at this point that all the sailing hardware (the rigging, pulleys, masts, sails, and cables) were mostly there for show and that the ship mostly relied on its diesel engine for reliably moving from place to place.
We went up on the top decks of the boat in both the front and back (on either side of the tarped-over Jungle Bar) to check out the little swimming pools and outdoor places to spend time. Everything looked adequate, but in places there was so much sailing hardware and rigging that it looked a bit like a construction site. Were we really going to be allowed to sunbathe in a place criss-crossed and overhung by so much rigging?
Next came the compulsory safety drill. We were told to go back to our cabins and wait for a video to appear on our televisions. But there was some sort of technical problem and the video never started playing. So I opened our door and asked some women walking past what we were supposed to be doing. They said we were supposed to put on the life vests in our rooms and then go to the "muster point." We didn't know where that was, but we happened to walk out to the right spot (in the Jungle Bar) at about the right time, and there some of the crew helped us into our life vests. That was the whole safety drill. Like us, many others had failed to see anything on their in-room televisions.
One obvious early fly in the ointment of this particular cruise was the situation with the internet. Unlike on other cruises, it would not be free. We'd have to pay surprisingly large sums for astoundingly small amounts of bandwidth, all to be provided by evil Elon Musk's Starlink satellite network. One gigabyte cost eighteen euros and three gigabytes cost 50 euros. I know from experience that a laptop or a phone can burn through such meagre data plans very rapidly, so I immediately closed my Facebook tag (that's a known bandwidth hog, what with its auto-playing video clips), committing myself to not using it for the next ten days. Fortunately, Gretchen and I could share a plan, though only one of us could use it at a time. So we resolved to only use it sparing an to immediately disconnect after, say, checking our email or loading Spelling Bee. We opted for the three gigabyte plan.
As dinner approached, Gretchen started fretting about what had happened to our friends, the folks we'd socialized with on earlier cruises, particularly Simon and Cathy and Kelly and Brian. They were supposedly to be arriving from London at around 5:00pm, but we'd yet to hear from them and, given our crappy nickel-and-dimed internet, it was difficult to stay in communication with them. We did run into a nice young couple from Texas named Carin and her tall husband Eric, whom we encountered chatting with Tara, a staff photographer from an earlier cruise, and Tara's young daughter Angel (who was probably twenty but looked maybe fourteen). Carin kind of reminded me of Jenny, the founder of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. She told us all about how she and Eric had met during the covid pandemic while being withdrawn from their Peace Corps assignments (she in Kosovo, he in Uganda).
Kelly and Brian arrived in time for dinner, which the four of us ate in a six-top booth with an older British couple who now live in Florida. Brian and I formed a wine-splitting cooperative starting with this meal (I jokingly referred to him as my "wine bride"), with me buying the first bottle, a 32 euro bottle branded with the name of Francis Ford Coppola for some reason.
After dinner, we finally saw that Simon and Cathy were also aboard the Star Clipper and now the cruise could finally begin. We all went up on deck to watch the ceremonial hoisting of one or two sails while pompously uplifting music (it sounded Russian and vaguely classical) played over the sound system. I was still under the impression that the sails were purely ornamental, and the fact that the sails didn't seem to be oriented any particular way seemed to support this impression.
Some sort of black bird. Click to enlarge.
A friendly cat belonging to another guest at Mount Edgecombe resort explores our section of porch. Click to enlarge.
A hungy tortoise eats melon at Mount Edgecombe resort. Click to enlarge.
Hungry tortoises eat melon at Mount Edgecombe resort. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen in the tunnel under the St. George's fort today. Click to enlarge.
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