Marigot, St Martin, Caribbean (original) (raw)
February 28 1995, 19:00
I woke up, thoroughly refreshed, at 6:15 this morning. The sky was blue and full of clouds in varied and interesting shapes, the sun was just coming up, and a band or something on shore was going wumpa-wumpa-wumpa.
It was Mardi Gras, and the party had already begun.
I decided to look for work. After hours of prevarication, I finally set off in the dinghy, sailing, towards Simpson's Lagoon. I was armed with a notice to pin to the notice-board in the Lagoon Marina which, in due course and after a pretty pleasant sail, I did. Then I sailed to Port de Plaisance, the absolute sommet of elegance and expense in St Martin marinas, where I had been planning to ask around for work. In the end, though, I felt so much like a bumpkin that I dared not approach the sleek, gleaming machines with so mundane a request. So, feeling pusillanimous, I re-crossed Simpson's Lagoon to Marigot Bay, discovering on the way a conch graveyard—a huge heap of hundreds and hundreds of old conch shells, bleached and slightly malodorous.
By the time I returned I was feeling depressed and hot and hungry. Mum was still aboard; Roo and Dad had headed ashore to catch the Mardi Gras parade. Cramming sandwiches into myself, I got into the dinghy and we followed them.
The parade was good, but not that good. What a parade should be about (Mum says) is costumed people dancing in the streets and whooping it up, and other people in the streets cheering them on and whooping it up and knocking back intoxicating fluids and generally tagging onto the carnival. Not so: people, especially white people, seemed more interested in photographing it to take it away and file it as an "experience". Roo did a bit of that, burning 36 exposures. Had I a camera I would surely have been worse still.
Roo and I returned home. Roo opened a camera before winding the film back and was heart-broken. I think that there will be a few good shots at the beginning of the reel. Roo says that the best ones were at the end; they are gone for sure.
When I went back to drop off some particularly disgusting garbage, three hours later, the parade was still going strong.
Roo cooked amazing spuddy soup for supper.