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slot canyon on Martinique
Wednesday, February 25 2026
location: Cabin 300, the Star Clipper ship approaching Saint-Pierre, Martinique, the Caribbean Sea
This morning at breakfast, Gretchen and I had an interesting conversation with Kelly and Brian about word-play in-jokes that form between literate couples. Brian explained how there is a regional use of the word "dog" to mean "put out," and he and Kelly now use it to describe the act of turning something off. And they've spontaneously started using the term "cat" to mean turning something on. Thus one can dog a light or cat a light. I then offered some wordplay from our life. I mentioned that, back in college circa 1986 I'd had a user account on a computer (a Vax 750 running some flavor of Unix) where usernames had a character limit of eight characters, so people with long names would have truncated usernames. One such truncated username belonged to a woman whose last name was Underwood. In the system, she was known as "underwoo." Since that time, I said, I've often playfully truncated the "d" from "wood" and other words that end "-ood." So, for example, it's normal for me to say that "I am putting some more woo in the fire."
Later in the conversation, Kelly told the story of a time when she and Brian, then still in their 20s, were riding a train when a group of chavs (or otherwise working-class youth) climbed aboard. At a subsequent stop, a group of well-groomed young ladies climbed aboard, at which point Kelly snapped to attention, because there was no way in this universe that none of those boys would say something to those girls. Sure enough, after the girls had walked past the boys, one of the boys called out, "Are ye goin' to [name of some town]?" Hearing nothing, he added a wistful, "I hope so!" (in a Glasgow accent, of course). This was so funny that Gretchen and I would be saying "I hope so!" in exactly that way at opportune moments for the rest of the cruise.
Usually Gretchen avoids the official excursions on these vegan cruises because they tend to be poorly organized and not a good value for the expense. But today she'd signed us up for a bus ride that would take us to a walk to a waterfall in the Martinique rainforest. She was a little concerned, though, when it seemed like a group of 30 or so people was all going to be hiking together with just one guide. When she expressed these concerns to dirk after we'd had our dry landing on Martinique, he dismissed them with a hand-wave, saying, not to fear, there would be two guides. Technically this was true, but soon after being introduced to our guides (but after Dirk disappeared) we realized that they weren't functionally two guides at all. One of the guides, a pretty young woman from Spain, spoke English (though not especially well) but had no particular knowledge of Martinique and seemed to know nothing about its biology. When asked what kinds of animals we could expect to see in the rainforest, she offered "goats," which was absurd for several reasons. The other guide was an actual native from Martinique and knew all about the island, including its plants, animals, history, and geography. But he spoke French and knew almost no English. Meanwhile the first guide, the pretty girl from Spain, didn't really know French. The only reason we ended up learning anything at all on this excursion was that one of our fellow travelers from the ship was from Belgium and could converse with our second guide. This level of dysfunction is fairly typical for Dirk-planned excursion.
Of course, even our pretty-faced know-nothing guide could bone up on some basic facts before leading the excursion. As we drove through Saint-Pierre, she mentioned the volcanic devastation that befell the town back in 1902, though at one point she accidentally used the date "2002." The volcano above Saint-Pierre is the famous Pelée, whose peak is usually lost in clouds. Our guide told us numerous times a stupid saying claiming that, if you can see the peak of the mountain, it means you will be returning to Martinique. She also told us about the only survivor of the eruption in Saint-Pierre, a man who happened to be inside the thick walls of a jail cell. There was a roughness to the walls of buildings in Saint-Pierre that might've been a legacy of that eruption. There was also a beautiful set of ruins preserved in their state since the eruption that resembled a cathedral, but our ill-informed guide seemed to think it was some ordinary secular building.
The bus drove us up past a power plant and a rum factory into the heart of the island and then we all got out at a trailhead. I was wearing flip-flops, which nobody seemed to have a problem with, though I was the only one with such footwear. I liked the fact that our native guide, the one who mostly just spoke French, was entirely barefoot. Evidently he wasn't worried about needle palms, scorpions, or snakes. There wasn't much of note along our way except for dense jungle, the occasional anole lizard, and a few Heliconias (false bird-of-paradise plants). The trail was often bounded on the downhill side by plunging cliffs, and there was a fair amount of human-engineered plumbing along the path, apparently carrying water from a reservoir. I heard a roar coming from a concrete box somewhere along the way and found there was a constant blast of air coming out of steel-lined hole, perhaps the air rapidly bubbling out of water that had just made a massive plunge down a pipe.
At some point our group was split into those who were willing to climb down a cliff using a knotted rope and those who were not. Gretchen and I (and Simon, but not Cathy) were in the group who were happy to do such climbing. Initially this climbing wasn't difficult. But then we arrived at the top of a dramatic slot canyon being carved by a small waterfall (but not, as it turned out, the waterfall that we'd been hiking towards). It was a little tricky to climb down the knotted rope leading the the bottom of the canyon, but fortunately Gretchen was the first to do so, and that gave her something like ten minutes undisturbed swimming time at the head of the slot canyon. I was considerably delayed by the people using the knotted rope in front of me, most of whom seemed unnecessarily clumsy with it. (I'm far from the most athletic person in the world, but, even at my age, I often find that my physical talents are far above average, particularly when part of an excursion from a cruise ship.) When I finally got down into the canyon, I waded up it until the water was too deep and then I stopped, as I didn't have much interest in exercising my pathetic swimming talents in such cold water. Gretchen, though, was having a great time. With the help of our French-speaking guide, she was able to climb up to high spot above the deep pool at the head of the slot canyon and plunge into it with a massive splash. She did this twice, and a colleague of our guide (who randomly happened to be here) made a plunge from an even higher spot, having to spread out his impact a little because the pool wasn't quite deep enough for a true dive.
After we were all satisfied with the slot canyon, we continued our hike to the waterfall. It ended up being more of a manmade structure than expected, with lots of poured concrete and a dramatic arched bridgeway overhead. But, after having been in the slot canyon, it was a disappointment. Strangely, there looked to a small apartment complex there in the jungle adjacent to a dam, and a fair number of cats came parading out to see if we were carrying anything an obligate carnivore might want to eat.
The bus had driven up the road from where our hike had begun to pick us up near the anticlimactic waterfall.
Those of us in the excursion had been given boxed lunches back on the ship, and these consisted mostly of veggie burger sandwiches which were kind of disgusting when eaten cold.
Tonight was probably the night when our six-person clique sat at an eight-top and were joined by Stuart & Val, a couple that has been on many of these cruises. Stuart looks like an aging rock star and he was indeed a professional punk rock drummer in his youth for a band you've never heard of, one that toured with The Damned. These days he and Val, like Gretchen and me, own a real estate empire that funds their lifestyle. But their empire is serveral times the size of ours and thus their lifestyle is grander than ours. Anyway, I was sitting at the part of the table farthest from Stuart, Val, and Brian. Brian was so far away that we decided to not split a bottle of wine but to instead drink individual beers. I didn't like the acoustics out in the middle of the dining room and could barely hear Cathy even though she was directly across the table from me. I'd mentioned to Gretchen several times that I often feel trapped at dinner, and she'd told me it was perfectly acceptable for me to leave whenever I wanted. Not being in a booth tonight, this was very easy, so at some point I pulled an "Irish goodbye" and went back to the cabin to drink rum by myself.
One of these evenings, Gretchen got the ship's nurse Brian (who identifies as female but still pronounces her name "Brian") to come look at her ear a second time. Earlier Gretchen had tried to get Brian to prescribe ear drops for her emerging case of swimmers' ear, but she had looked in Gretchen's ear and seen nothing troubling, and thus hadn't provided any eardrops. But then days had passed and Gretchen's ear got worse, so Gretchen had Brian look at the ear again. Gretchen knows her body and can tell when she needs eardrops, and she was pretty sure she needed them no matter how her ear looked. This time I was there, and Brian again said he couldn't see any inflamation. He had me look, and I don't really know what I saw other than a fleshy hole created by the human development process. We even looked in Gretchen's other ear for comparison, and it looked about the same. But Gretchen was so insistent that Brian relented and gave her the eardrops (later charging us 22 western monetary units for them, which is a good deal for a solution to an infection).
The volcano Mt. Pelée above Saint-Pierre, Martinique. Click to enlarge.
A building ruined by the eruption of Mt. Pelée, in Saint-Pierre, Martinique. Click to enlarge.
An anole lizard on the trail to the waterfall on Martinique. Click to enlarge.
False bird of paradise. Click to enlarge.
Our guides. From left: the cute Spanish guide (nice midriff!), the bare (and tight!) belly of the native Martinique guide, an unimpressed Gretchen in a Lez Zeppelin tee shirt, and two others. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen swims in a small pool even before we get to the slot canyon. Click to enlarge.
Looking down into the slot canyon. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen swimming in the pool at the head of the slot canyon. Click to enlarge.
A group of us in the slot canyon. From left: the Carin's father, the guy from Belgium who acted as translator, our French-speaking guide, his friend we randomly ran across in the canyon, Simon, Gretchen, and me. I gotta do something about my gut. Click to enlarge.
An arch carrying the roadway high above the immediate downstream of the anticlimatic waterfall. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen and a couple others at the anticlimatic waterfall. Click to enlarge.
The cats at the top of the anticlimatic waterfall. Click to enlarge.
Ladies on the top deck of the ship. From left: Gretchen, Kelly, and Midge from Oregon. Click to enlarge.
Our ship this evening with nearly all the sails raised. Click to enlarge.
Looking down from a higher deck to people on a lower deck. Click to enlarge.
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