A Road Well Travelled

We’ve spent part of the past couple of weeks getting things up and running in the house. We’re fortunate to have two kitchens but we didn’t have an operating oven in either one. The stove upstairs is a new stainless steel, ceramic surface stove. It looks great but it doesn’t heat well. To make his point to the landlord, Norm timed how long it look for a litre of water to boil on the stove upstairs and the stove downstairs. It took 27 minutes on the electric stove and 7 minutes on the gas stove. There was definitely a problem. And while the gas elements worked downstairs, the oven did not.

The landlord agreed to get the two ovens fixed and we got the call from the worker who was on his way to fix the “cooker”. Answering the phone can be a little disconcerting because there are many different accents and dialects on the island and it’s not always easy to understand what people say. In this case, the “cooker repair man” wanted instructions on how to get to our place.

There is no street name and no address. I asked the cleaning lady to help him out but listening to her conversation I realized she wasn’t used to giving directions. So it was agreed that I would walk up the road to meet him, and show him the way in. I thought it would be a good opportunity to highlight on the blog this week, the road that leads to our place. I walk it just about every day to either go for a stroll, go to the store, or to meet Norm on his way home from school.

I start each walk by grabbing a walking stick. I bring it along just in case I run across a nasty dog. The house across the street has three dogs, one tiny white one whose collar looks as heavy as he is, a medium sized white one and a big brown one. They bark like crazy whenever I walk by the house. They usually stay in their yard but one day they came into the road and nipped at my heels. I yelled at them and that’s been enough to convince them to bark from the safety of their yard.

The first part of the walk is a narrow laneway, flanked by flowering shrubs and flowers, including bird of paradise. The road is often wet & slippery because of the heavy tropical rains we get for a few minutes, several times a day, during the rainy season.

From there, the road is full of huge pot holes. Drivers have to weave from one side to the other at a very slow speed to avoid falling into a hole or scraping the bottom of the car on a rock. There’s a long fenced in property along the road with three dogs. They used to follow along the fence barking, as I walked by. They’ve since become used to seeing me and sometimes don’t bark at all.

The rest of the road, although narrow, is in pretty good shape the rest of the way. A lot of the houses are landscaped with beautiful shrubs. There are often mango, coconut or palm trees in the yard. Just about every house has between one and three dogs, but we’ll often see hens, roosters and baby chicks walking along the road.

The brown dog here is my favourite. He sleeps all day, sometimes in the middle of the road. I worry that one day a car will come by and he won’t bother getting up.

There’s a steep downhill climb on the way to meet Norm when

he comes home on the maxi (the local taxi/bus service) and

there’s a nice view of the surrounding hills. At the bottom of the hill there is often a guy sitting on a stool near the side of the road drinking a beer. We’ve gone by and seen him there at 10 o’clock at night and again at 8 the next morning. We don’t know whether he spends the night there or is just an early riser.

And finally, we couldn't last 10 months without a garden so check out our new mini garden. We’ve just transplanted the tomatoes, cukes & peppers. It will be interesting to see how things grow. We keep them out of the bright sun because they would just cook. We've been told we'll have to put netting on the plants to keep the birds and animals away. We'll move the garden to the balcony upstairs if it becomes a problem.