Day 2 St Vincent - Morning
The Mesopotamia Valley

We'd heard that we should check out the Mesopotamia Valley, so we drove northwest out of Kingstown to a high ridge.   Looking back as we drove, we could see the Caribbean, as well as the many houses the covered the hills on this long south slope above Kingstown.

Reaching the top, we looked over into the Mesopotamia Valley.   For a more detailed view, click on the photo. (Note ocean faintly in distance on right.)

We dropped down into the valley, passing a lot of banana fields and eventually reaching the town of Mesopotamia.

We asked about which roads drove up the length of the valley.   This was the first we tried, and it did come to a beautiful spot.

A grass road continued.   We turned back to try another route.

Libby took these two photos as we passed a banana plantation

We took a different road up out of Mesopotamia which drove up into Richland Park.   The road followed the top of a ridge with great views in each direction.   That's our little black Rav4 parked while we shoot.   As this was a holiday, so there was little traffic, and there were a lot of people around who would normally have been working at this time of day.

We asked the owners if we could photograph this wall, and they were either pleased or amused, I'm not sure which.  But they were happy.

Libby was beginning to figure out her camera, and took all but two of the next 14 photos.

Click on photo for another perspective on this father-daughter scene

In the Richland Park hood

Armstrong with his daughter Shamara.   Armstrong read us perfectly, and launched into an exposition on horticulture on St. Vincent.  In the process we sampled three native fruits which were lying around.  He and Shamara had been leaving to sell bananas when we wandered into his neighborhood, so I asked to buy some, and he gave me a tour of his business while Libby shot the four photos above.  For more photos of this wonderful person and his adorable daughter, click on either of the two photos below:

We continued on up to Montreal Gardens, one of the tourist attractions in the area, which we had been told would be closed because it was holiday.


Two friends on a ridge sequence

We reached Montreal Gardens, and it looked like this from the outside.

We took Armstrong's advice and followed a road which looped to the north to another ridge before dropping back into Mesopotamia.   There was a particularly large number of abandoned and wrecked cars on this road.   We saw only one other vehicle (a delivery truck) on the road in the 20 minutes we were on it.   There were only two houses on the road, one at each end of it.   Other than that, wrecked cars.

It's true that the road wasn't in great condition.

For some reason, Libby interprets this roadside carving as a memorial to victims of this road.

This lodge was on top of a ridge on the north border of the Mesopotamia Valley.   A road runs off over the ridge, and winds through down to Georgetown.

There are several reasons for controlled burning like this, such as preventing insect infestation.  This is only crop fire we saw on our trip.

Heading back down to Mesopotamia, and then Kingstown, as we still have the west coast ahead of us.

We were hit by a torrential rainstorm while heading through downtown Kingstown.  
I was curious what would happen if I turned off the wipers, and I liked the effect, so I asked Libby to take a photo, and this is was it.

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