To the Caribbean With Love: Tropical Grenada

As you sail into St George's on the Caribbean island of Grenada, you're struck by the vegetation-covered high rolling hills that line the water's edge, whose summits are blurred by the mists of hovering rain clouds. The hills are dotted with multi-storey houses on stilts, buildings and the odd church. As you cast your eye along the shore line, your eye goes up and down constantly with the hills' contours.

A small crowd of us met our tour guide shortly after 8.15 am, and off we drove in a mini bus. You soon realise the whole island is hilly, lush, green, and the maximum speed can't be much because the roads curve round the sides of the hills, making it like driving on roads in Wales.

Grenada is an independent Commonwealth country, and my 49th. It has a Prime Minister and a Governor-General who represents the Queen. People from Grenada are Grenadians (and those from Barbados are Barbadians). I told our guide, Peter, an ageing but informative and well spoken Rastafarian, that Grenada reminded me strongly of Cameroon in Africa because of the lush, green vegetation, the undulated landscape, the level of development (not Western), and the African ancestry population.

All through the day, Peter told us of Grenada, its history, people, environment, botany, laws, and its produce. Grenada is the Isle of Spice, boasting spices like cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, bayleaf, and pimento, which we know in Australia as 'All Spice'. After stopping at a nice waterfall, where we were shown a hanging hellicornia, we entered the Grand Etang Forest Reserve, and stopped at a visitors centre.

Grenada uses sugar cane to produce rum for export, and we stopped at a rum distillery for a talk on how it's done. We tried samples of 69% and 75% rum, which was overpowering. We learned that the latter rum used to be exported, but is not possible since 9-11 as it could be used as an explosive. Thus, the 69% rum rolled into production.

By now, we were aware that in this area were sugar cane, rum, mangoes, avocadoes, and bananas, much like Queensland. On Grenada they also have papaya, and so many other fruits and flowers. From the Balthazar Estate, flowers are exported to London for showing in the Chelsea Flower Show.

After a very nice lunch, we kept driving. We saw an abandoned airport at Pearls, Grenada cricketer Devon Smith's beautiful house, and the Leaders Hill cemetery. We stopped at the nutmeg factory in the town of Gouyave where nutmeg is processed. We saw millions of nutmeg fruit.

We stopped at another place and were asked to guess the spices by smelling the leaf. We weren't always successful. One such spice was cinnamon. Peter said if you place half a teaspoon of cinnamon on your breakfast cereal it will help to reduce blood sugar. I learned pimento, or All Spice, goes into making gluwein.

Early morning arrival in Grenada