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Showing posts from March, 2019

Grenada

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About 2 million years ago, Grenada was formed as an underwater volcano. You can tell this by Kick-’em-Jenny which is still an active submarine volcano north from Grenada's main island. This volcano rises some 1300 m above the sea floor and is just some 180 m below the sea surface. The crater contains fumaroles which emit bubbles of gas, so the boats go around it when they want to go to the northern island of Grenada called Carriacou. Despite these cool facts I had also heard that 30% of the natives were living below the poverty line. Grenada, like many of the Caribbean islands is subject to a large amount of migration, with a large number of young people wanting to leave the island to seek life elsewhere. This means that probably only around a third of those born in Grenada still live there. When my friend Christofer and I arrived at the capital St. George´s with a cruise ship, I was both excited and scared. We had decided we would go to The Molinere Underwater Sculpture Par

Dominica

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I had never heard about Dominica before and maybe it's because it's the youngest island in the Lesser Antilles, and in fact it is still being formed by geothermal-volcanic activity, as evidenced by the world's second-largest hot spring, called Boiling Lake. It's 9 km east of the capital Roseau where my friend Christofer and I went by cruise ship.  The country has the fewest visitors of the Caribbean islands, and that was a great thing since I was fed up with the tourist malls in every harbour of all the other islands. Roseau had an authentic feel to it when walking the streets in this picturesque city. It's poor with a charm instead of ghetto poor. The drainage system in front of the houses with many small bridges built in utterly chaos made it look like a poor man's version of Venice. I feel sorry for the natives since it's one of the most poor countries in the West Indies with many people being unemployed, but you couldn't tell as a touri

Barbados

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Barbados is both a famous spot for tourists in the Caribbean and the name of a famous Swedish "dansband" (dance band in English). It's a cheezy music genre that's popular in Sweden for old people to dance pair dance to. It resembles how the music from Eurovision Song Contest used to sound before they got modernized. I guess the gay singer of the band Barbados didn't know that homosexual acts are illegal in Barbados and that the colonial era law bears a maximum sentence of life in prison for being gay. Maybe the band would have chosen another exotic name then. I prefer the musicians from the island Barbados instead of the Swedish "dansband", both Rihanna and Grandmaster Flash originated from Barbados, which used to be colonized by Great Britain. This is why they still speak English which the tourists can appreciate.  My friend Christofer and I arrived by a cruise ship and after heading into the capital of Bridgetown to get some Barbadian Dollars we

Antigua And Barbuda

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The small country of Antigua And Barbuda is divided into two islands where the latter one only houses 100 people, since the hurricane Irma almost destroyed all buildings and infrastructure on Barbuda in 2017. My friend Christofer and I visited the more lively capital of Antigua called Saint John's. It was our last stop after a two week vacation in the Carribean by cruise ship and you could tell they once was a part of the British Empire since they still drive on the left side of the country. It didn't take long until someone yelled "taxi?" after us since it was obvious we we're tourists, when we declined he continued by saying "girls?". Christopher and I looked at each other thinking "did he really say that?". We would soon discover many of the people of Antigua had multiple businesses going on at the same time. We went around the harbour that was mostly a made up area for tourists to shop, and an older part called Heritage Quay, which was