… must come to an end. Today is my last day in Dominica. We’ve had a strange week waiting for a container to clear customs, it still hasn’t come through. We’ve been up and down to Roseau to see if we can help and we’ve done some little jobs for some of the schools we visited last year.

Now, I’m ready to pack my bag and head for Antigua later today. Hopefully, we’ll be visiting Spanny’s on the way to the airport so I can get some more nice photographs.

Hopefully, I’ll be back in Dominica soon

TTFN

A nice relaxing weekend in one of the most relaxing (if not THE most relaxing) places on the planet. Following the drinkies on Friday night, I had a bit of a lie-in on Saturday morning. Thankfully, when I went for breakfast, bacon and eggs were on the go along with some fresh coffee. I just had a chilling day at Rosalie Forest and tidied up a few small issues with computers.

The previous evening, I had been invited to jam with Xavier and his band and he called round on Saturday to make sure I had remembered and also to let us know that he was cooking up some saltfish and bananas for us. Jem dropped Michelle and I off in Grand Fond and we had a couple of drinks before going to Xavier’s house for food. He had done a marvellous job and the meal was lovely. Once we had finished, we headed down to the band room (next to the bar) and were joined by the rest of the band. Now, I love to jam and I especially like to play something a little different. Having not played a great deal of reggae style before, I rather enjoyed myself – so much that it wasn’t until around 11 o’clock that I realised I needed to call Jem to see if he could pick us up. What a night! Thanks to all the band members and especially to Xavier for his extended hospitality.

Another little lie-in for me on Sunday and I completely missed breakfast. Never mind, that was made up for by the terrific spaghetti bolognese we had for lunch. After that, Jem took us to see some sights around the island. We picked up Jem’s better-half, Jackie (sorry if the spelling is wrong) in Canefield and went up to Trafalgar Falls. On the way, we drove through an area of the island which has hot sulphur pools – we could smell the sulphur on the drive up. Jem stopped and showed is this little boiling pool, a very strange sight.

Once at Trafalgar Falls, we had a little refreshment and bought passes to go up to the falls themselves. What a magnificent sight. There are two large waterfalls and some hot pools there. Jem and I tried to climb up to the base of the larger waterfall but were thwarted as Hurricane Dean last year had moved some of the rocks so the climb was very tough. Here’s a shot of the other waterfall as well

Once we had climbed back up, we jumped back in the car to head back – stopping off at Ti Kwen for a drink (they also have volcanic hot baths there). Ti Kwen did not completely quench our thirst so we headed to The Cove (where I had been for ‘Thirsty Thursday’ previously) for another couple of drinks. The sun was setting over the Caribbean Sea and there was also a band playing. Most relaxing.

We returned to Rosalie Forest for dinner, which was marvellous as usual, and I’m now having one last Kubuli before bed. Another long day awaits tomorrow.

I have a busy time ahead in my last week in Dominica but I will try to update as much as possible – hopefully with some more beautiful scenery for you to look at.

TTFN

Wednesday of this week gave me a little bit of a break from installation. Tim didn’t need me to go on site with the team so myself and Kemon spent some time repairing PC’s at Rosalie Forest. We set ourselves up a nice workshop and managed to get through quite a few machines. We also had some machines from Grand Fond to bring back to life but sadly we could only repair one of these as they were in a quite a bad state of repair

Once we had finished our repairs, we delivered a PC to the Health Centre in La Plaine which we hope will assist them with their administration tasks. While we were out, we did a little sight-seeing and took in some lovely views of the Atlantic side of the island and also a waterfall nearby.

On the whole, Wednesday was a nice, easy day. Thursday was to prove rather different though.

Thursday saw us at Dominica Grammar School in Roseau to install around 15 workstations and cabling. Tim and his team set about cabling while Kemon and I looked at the machines. We had a lot of trouble with this batch of machines as well as issues with the electricity supply in the school. The power proved to be rather inconsistent when we used the 230V supply (it blew 4 power supplies in the PC’s) so we moved over to the 110V supply which proved to be a lot better. Quite a few of the machines here had been tinkered with by the school technician and I’m afraid to say he had made a little bit of a mess. Much ‘Yorkshire Working-Class Latin’ ensued and for the first time during my stay here, I got a little vexed. We eventually got them finished and headed for home. Needless to say, after a stressful day, I had my ‘beer-head’ on and sank a few Kubuli in the evening.

Friday was my last official day on the schools project and we went to install some machines in the Adult Education Centre. The cabling team were in fine form and had all the points done for us by lunchtime (even though one of the guys had had a few too many the night before and was a little green around the gills. Ady would not have been amused). Kemon and I weren’t hanging about either and we had all the PC’s tested and running with a copy of OpenOffice.org installed.

With all work finished, the cabling team headed off and we went for lunch with Nico who had brought us down to town. We were joined by Jem for lunch and once we had been heartily refreshed, we headed to Orion Academy which is a small public school on the way out of town. We managed to get 7 PC’s up and running for them and we also took away some of the machines from last year which had developed faults (I’ll be back in the workshop later to repair those). Then it was back ‘home’ for a while before we went out for a Friday night in Grand Fond. Needless to say, with it being Friday night, I had a few beers as I would normally do at home. The locals were most welcoming and we even managed to get a game of dominoes going

Hopefully, we’ll get out and about some more this weekend and I’ll have a few more photo’s to share with you

TTFN