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recovery, with a mosaic of broad low buttresses on the forest floor now reaching from shadow into light. At the same time, the sight of the rainforest parting and the sky dissolving into the crater lake fills my vision, the silvery surface merging with the regrouping clouds as I reach the water’s edge. Somewhere, the monkeys are still looking on. It’s like being in my own Indiana Jones movie. In the days that follow, we peel back the
many layers of Grenada, as if we were gradually dehusking a coconut. There’s much more for us to see and so we drive on, searching. A common urge is to wallow on one of Grenada’s 45 beaches but I’m drawn instead to the colour of the deep-green highlands, the fruit bowl jumble of the markets and the burnt umber of the chocolate factories. Even so, appearances of cocoa bean plantations
on Caribbean islands are increasingly rare nowadays. Here, they appear fleetingly by roadsides, almost in a state of stasis, at odds with the satisfyingly fat heavyweight producers of the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Ecuador. And it seems today that the Grenada cocoa farmers’ raison d’être is to provide a more refined response to their supposed rivals. Almost as if their story is worthy of a more romantic reimagining. At least, I sense this is the case in St Andrew parish at Jouvay, a low-key production site built
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tight into a cradle of cacoa trees from where seeds are effortlessly harvested. It’s empty when I arrive, except for Nolan, a tour guide who talks little, but laughs a lot. “We’re just a tiny dot on the map, hard to find, but you get the best chocolate in the world right here,” he says, cackling. The work has finished for the day and so we
have the run of the factory to ourselves during our spontaneous visit. The building is almost a relic, with a ragged profile, empty wooden floors, bare- stone walls and basement level that leads to silent sheds of drying racks, where millions of raw cocoa beans the colour of dark chocolate huddle in the dark. Tomorrow, they’ll be wheeled back out into the morning sun, like a tanning shop on steroids. The soundtrack, Nolan says, is always the soft tambourine rattle of the seeds being raked. Eventually we come to the barrows for storing
cacao pods. Nolan picks one out. There, he says, driving a knife into the seed to break the skin before ringing the blade around its midriff — one swift move and it opens like a Fabergé egg to reveal a gelatinous white centre and clump of beans. He looks happy. “We make cocoa tea from this,” he says, handing me the pod to smell —the scent is musty, almost sour, and sticks to my palm. “It’s like Viagra and an island bestseller.” He cackles again, slapping me on the shoulder.
From left: Close-up of a freshly harvested nutmeg; processing sugarcane at River Antoine Rum Distillery; a lizard in Grand Etang National Park
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