Dive into Dominica's realm of fire

Jungle mist-ique
Back topside, my afternoons slip by quickly, filled with island explorations. I spend an afternoon hiking up to Trafalgar Falls, a pair of large cascades a 20-minute drive east of town. As the sun sets, long amber beams still glow on the falls. I swim in the clear, cool river and then soak in a nearby thermal spring. My head resting on a mat of yellow mango leaves, I look up at the steam misting through the forest in golden sabers and know exactly what those Hollywood scouts must have felt when they arrived in Dominica: This is the Caribbean before it was “the Caribbean.”

On another afternoon I decide to take the easy way up to the mountains. I join some cruise ship passengers on the Rainforest Aerial Tram, an open-air, eight-person gondola ride into the forest canopy. Our guide, Nyhomie Darraux, laughs when the already brooding skies open up and rain sheets down.

“We’re a very wet island,” she admits. “We have more than 365 rivers, one for each day of the year, all fed by an annual rainfall of 400 inches. Where other Caribbean islands import and ration water, we have a surplus.”

Of the island’s energy, 40 percent comes from hydropower, she says. “Stand still too long on Dominica,” she warns, “and you’ll grow roots.”

I peek down at a quilt of giant tree ferns, their unfurled fronds in the center as brown and wooly as monkey tails. These aren’t the cute little potted ferns you see hanging in syrupy airport lounges; these prehistoric survivors tower four stories above the forest floor. And even they are dwarfed by the true gargantuans of Dominica. All around us, mahogany, gommier and wild chestnut trees, their trunks bound and burred in epiphytes and vines, soar another 50 feet toward sunlight above the canopy.

The incredible thing about this forest, Nyhomie tells us, is that it was nothing but a muddy slope back in 1979. That was the year Hurricane David detonated like an atom bomb over Dominica, leaving three-quarters
of the 75,000 inhabitants homeless and stripping the verdant hillsides bare. But less than three decades later, Mother Nature has reclaimed the forest, and it thrives as if the storm never happened.

Sitting at the open-air bar at Castle Comfort Dive Lodge later that evening, I chat with owner Derek Perryman about Dominica’s enduring mountainous terrain.

“The mountains are what have kept us so pristine,” he says. “You look around at the steep mountains, and it’s no wonder that Dominica was the last of the Caribbean islands to be colonized. That’s why even today we have escaped tourist development — why we are still untouched.”

It wasn’t just the mountains, though, that kept the colonists at bay. The shadowed canyons were a refuge to one of the last surviving bands of Carib Indians. Killed and enslaved throughout the archipelago they once ruled, the Kalinago — as they call themselves — retreated to Dominica. In 1647, an estimated 5,000 used the island as a base to launch raids on islands as far away as Puerto Rico. Less than a century later, however, the tribe had been decimated by massacres and disease. The last 400 melted away into the interior. Today, 3,000 Kalinago hold onto a small piece of territory in the far northeast of the island, the largest remaining Carib settlement in the world.

Swimming with the Devil
The day before my departure flight, I do a morning dive at a site called Champagne with Brad Fagan, a local divemaster. Dropping in at 70 feet, we make our way into the green sunlit shallows near the shore. It’s unlike any dive I’ve done so far, and it takes me a minute to figure out why. Then it hits me. This dive site is a desert. There are no sponges, no corals, no fish. But there is movement up ahead. Fizzing. Champagne bubbles.

Brad leads me to a narrow canyon where streams of effervescence percolate up from the shattered rock floor. It’s like the earth has blown an O-ring, releasing a slow, steady leak of gases from deep within. I remember what Derek had told me about Soufriere Bay. We were talking about my hike up to the Boiling Lake, and I had mused how cool it would be if you could actually dive it.

He laughed. “You know those tall cliffs along Soufriere Bay? Those are the rim of a volcano that is 2,000 feet deep. When you’re diving in Soufriere, you’re diving inside a volcano.”

I glance at my computer, and a quick press of a button tells me the ambient water temperature is a tepid 82 degrees, the same temperature it has been all week while I’ve dived Soufriere Bay. I swim down to a fist-size hole trickling gaseous globes, and in a move that I’m sure voids my warranty, I cram my computer deep inside. A simmering flush pours over my arm as I count to 30. When I withdraw the gauge it reads 110 degrees. Not bad at all. Probably a good 100 degrees cooler than the Boiling Lake, though.

So, if I can’t dive in the devil’s swimming pool, then at least I can dive in his Jacuzzi. And it’s still one hell of a dive.

Special thanks to Arienne Perryman, Discover Dominica Authority (discover
dominica.com), Mark Steele, Beau Rive (beaurive.com), Anne and Cuthbert Jno. Baptiste, Papillote Wilderness Retreat (papillote.dm), Sam and Glenda Raphael, Jungle Bay Resort & Spa (junglebaydominica.com), Derek and Ginette Perryman, Castle Comfort Dive Lodge (castlecomfortdivelodge.com), Dive Dominica (divedominica.com) and Ken’s Hinterland Adventure Tours (kenshinterlandtours.com).

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