Martinique 1: Getting There

We caught a taxi to the airport at 4:15 in what could generously be called "the morning" on Wednesday. Our flight took off on time (weird), and we saw Martinique's dormant volcano, Mount Pelée, out the window as we came in for a landing over the turquoise waters.

After a short wait in the parking lot, a quick shuttle ride, and a conversation with a Europcar employee who seemed to need to finish typing out the last three chapters of her debut novel as she checked us in, we met our ride for the trip: a little white suv called a Dacia Duster. We'd never heard of Dacia before, but we've since seen the name on every other vehicle on the island, and the car has served us well with its high clearance, luxurious storage space, and forgiving clutch. It's a standard, so B has been doing most of the driving, even though the general consensus is that L is very good at driving stick.

Our immediate impression of our surroundings was that someone had taken all of the infrastructure of France -- the road markings, the weird intersections, the font on the street signs, and big brand names like Carrefour and M. Bricolage -- and plopped it onto a Caribbean island. That's pretty much spot on, of course, but it felt a bit disorienting all the same. Otherwise, Martinique seems to be filled with narrow roads that wind among lush jungly forests, banana trees and sugar cane fields, some colonial buildings but lots of abandoned or half-finished construction, cluttered little yards, and sheep and cows chained to stakes on hills. The uneven landscape seems to have caused everything to be built very close together, creating a kind of frenetic energy even in the hottest part of the day.

We stopped in a nearby mall to hunt for a headphone splitter and some snacks at a Leclerc, then got back onto the highway heading east across the island -- we saw the ocean on the other side only a half-hour later. We picked up a jar of chicken soup from a little catering shop, parked on a beach to get our toes into the ocean, and stopped by another little grocery store before crashing at our airbnb. In between the main roads are a network of twisting streets that look more like driveways, winding up the hills with houses piled up against each other.

We're staying in the top floor of one of these. Our balcony looks over a few yards with citrus trees and sheep that occasionally yell indignantly, and you can see the ocean off to the left. At night, the chirping of bugs or frogs or lizards comes in loudly through the closed windows. The soup was richly seasoned and delicious.