First things first, let me say that we are super-grateful that we found this studio rental on such short notice, and have a good home base for the next week. However, when the time came to settle in to bed last night, Mario grabbed the remote to turn on the aircon to cool off the room, and... Nothing. No cold, no air, not nothing. And this room is one big cement box, which is good for keeping cool during the day, but also is *fantastic* for holding in the heat at night, resulting in one very humid and muggy bedroom. So much so that neither of us got much sleep at all, and it made for a very bleary-eyes wake-up this morning. No matter, it's a slow day, so we take a little longer at breakfast, lingering over a second cup of coffee.
The day is mostly a check-list of things to do to make our stay on Marie-Galante as confortable as possible. We hop in the car and boot down the always-twisty-turny roads to Grand-Bourg, where we arrived yesterday. We park near the Sports Complex, finally built since our last visit, and walk past the church to Au Soleil Levant, our preferred bakery in town. We pick up a Couronne des Rois, because it is the 6th, Epiphany and so we HAVE to have a king's cake. We also buy some of our favorite snack, bonbon siwo, which is a dense, rich, molasses-y cake made with sirop de batterie, a sugar cane juice reduction. It lasts forever, and we like to cut the slabs into thin pieces to snack on while we hike - it is like eating a delicious energy bar!
Through the centre of town we walk, past the vendors stalls piled high with madras fabrics, painted bottles of home-made fruit liqueurs, spices, fruits and vegetables. We browse a couple of our favorite shops, noting which are still here, which new ones have opened up, what in the town has changed in two years. We pick up the missing Christmas ham for our baguette sandwiches at the Carrefour grocery store, then decide to get a couple of bokits from the vendor next to the Sports field, who makes a mean Codfish sandwich with spicy creole sauce. We pack all of our purchases in the truck and head on to the next stop.
Further down the road, outside of town, we bounce along the narrow roads to the Bielle distillery, makers of our favorite rhum in all of Guadeloupe. We are pretty close to having tried all the rhums agricole both her and on mainland Guadeloupe, and so far, nothing beats out Bielle's 59° white rhum. We recently found out, from our tasting guide at Papa Rouyo, that Marie-Galante rhums are often blended with juice from some wild varieties of sugar cane, as well as the farmed varieties, which gives the rhum its characteristic "green" taste that both Mario and I enjoy so much. We take the time to taste a few of the new "single varietal" rhums that Bielle has started making, but we always gravitate back to our favorite. I take a minute to calculate out which bottles we need to buy to cover the rest of the trip's consumption, plus each of our import allowances, and then we have our bottles in hand and are on our way again. We laugh at some of the comments other tasters have when "trying" the rhums, because we can pin-point who knows the agricole rhum in Guadeloupe, and who is in for a surprise when they sip(or shoot) a 59° rhum.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Back at the studio in Canada, we drop off our purchases, have a late lunch of tasty bokits(fried bread sandwiches) and pack up our beach stuff. The afternoon consists of lounging, swimming, snorkeling and reading on the soft sands of Plage aux Trois Îlets, a long, quiet slice of sand maybe 5 minutes' drive from our place. It's one of our favorites given the soft sandy floor under the waves, the long, shallow entrance into the waters, the calmness on the waves that makes the ocean look like a mirror, especially around sunset. And it is a relatively unknown, or maybe just unfrequented, beach, so for a good 10 minutes tonight, we had the ENTIRE beach all to ourselves.
 |
| Look who got the bean in her cake! |
No comments:
Post a Comment