Back in March, a Washington, DC, area couple named Edward Gamson and Lowell Canaday filed a lawsuit against British Airways after they bought an airline ticket expecting to fly to Granada, Spain, and instead got off the plane in Grenada, in the Caribbean.
They would have done well to give Grenada, a five-hour flight from New York (although more often it grows to eight or so, when you look into connecting flights), a chance!
This small, mountainous trio of islands, with an area of 133 square miles and a population of only 104,000, has plenty to offer, from wild monkeys to beautiful beaches to chocolate galore.
Here are our four picks.
Hang around with a monkey
A drive through Grenada’s roller coaster-like roads reveals grazing cows and goats aplenty along the sides of the roads . . . but if you go to the Grand Etang Forest Reserve (a 3,800-acre tropical rainforest and national park), it’s not hard to find a white-bearded, brown-furred mona monkey calmly eating mangoes — and happy to accept a piece of fruit from any person kind enough to feed them. (If you dare — their teeth look sharp. But we’re guessing from the fact that everyone around us was feeding them — and the fact that the area is surrounded with signs saying “Protect Our Mona Monkeys: Feed Them Fruits Only and Stop Hunting Them” — that it’s OK.)
Of course, a trip to the Grand Etang would feel wasted if you didn’t also check out the Grand Etang Lake, a giant, 36-acre freshwater crater lake in a 12,000-year-old volcano. (Alas, according to the ranger I spoke to, no swimming is allowed.)
Walking on cocoa beans
Visitors with clean feet (at least we’d hope) are then invited to “walk the beans”— a process whereby an enormous tray of beans is shuffled around by “walkers.” Dried beans can be peeled and sampled, along with the finished products, like cocoa tea, and chocolate from the Grenada Chocolate Company, an organic chocolate company started by the late Mott Green in 1999, about five minutes away.
And Belmont definitely wins points for the best gift shop on the island: There is a lot of chocolate.
Reaching for roti
Roti is the large, flat, buttery thin bread that originated in India but turned up in the Caribbean in the 20th century as a wrap loaded with spiced potato stew, as well as chicken, fish or beef. Just walk through Grenada’s capital, St. George, and settle into the restaurant that looks most appealing to you and you’ll wind up getting excellent roti.
One of the locals I met said that their favorite was Deyna’s Tasty Foods (Melville Street, 473-440-6795), a cafeterialike restaurant that offers plenty of Grenadian delicacies like fish or turkey stew. But the chicken roti, which sells for $10 in East Caribbean dollars (about $3.70 in US dollars), is a spicy roti roll filled with nice curry flavor, potatoes and practically a whole chicken — bones and all.
Soak yourself
Well, there’s no question that a trip to Grenada involves getting splashed. The beaches are gloriously peaceful, the sea is cool (but not too cold) and the beach bodies (a lot of them at least) are something to admire.
But more than just sitting on the sand, or splashing around in the water, there’s excellent diving and snorkeling. Plenty of the island’s resorts — like the new Sandals, which opened in December and is just five minutes from the airport — include snorkeling and diving jaunts as part of their all-inclusive packages (including scuba certification, if you aren’t already certified).
But if you’re going to go diving, the two must-see sights are the wreck of the Bianca C, a 600-foot-long passenger ship that sank off the coast of Grenada in 1961 (go with a guide — people who have gone on their own have drowned while tinkering through the wreckage) and, a more recent addition, Grenada’s Underwater Sculpture Park, a sculpture garden fashioned out of many different materials (mostly concrete and rebar) by UK artist Jason deCaires Taylor, just off the western coast.