Although Martinique has many things to show to the usual tourists we decided to just take it easy and spend our time in this French island by visiting the towns by ourselves and try not to melt under the scorching afternoon sun. Here in Fort-de-France we walked in this tourist market where tens of vendors sell pretty much all the same stuff and because they all sell the exact same stuff they understood that the first one to catch the incoming tourists gets the sell. We couldn’t walk 5 feet without being aggressively welcomed by three of them at the same time. After 4 minutes, Danielle and I couldn’t breathe anymore and had to leave and wait outside that tourist gauntlet while Claudette seemed to have quite a good time! We actually had to deal a very similar situation in the many town markets selling fruits and vegetables where our white skin makes our wallet as attractive to the local retailer as our veins to the local mosquitoes. The funny thing about this is that everyone seems to believe that we are multimillionaires travelling in our super yacht and they are very good at inflating the prices when it comes to it. However, they quickly learn the reality that we are non-working people on a very limited budget and we simply don’t buy if it’s too expensive. When we feel the price is inflated we usually offer about half of what they ask and most of the time we get it..
Fort-de-France was a surprisingly active city with many stores and most importantly it had a McDonalds! After over 4 months of fast-food craving I could finally satisfy my needs of North-American diet under the sacred golden arches with Danielle rolling her eyes. And if we exclude the fact that their pop machine was broken and they had only Coke to drink and also that the women washroom was out of order and both genders had to share the same washroom the big macs actually taste the same!.
The anchorage in Fort-de-France was very uncomfortable so we quickly moved to Le Marin on the south side of the island of Martinique. Le Marin is the local Mecca of sailboats with hundreds of catamarans and monohulls belonging to charter companies anchored in the huge bay. With such a charter community comes a good selection of boat stores and services. Of course we are still far from the USA but still we could find the few parts we needed and just enjoyed this calm and protected environment surrounded by all these huge sailboats that make Chocobo look like a 2 bedroom apartment in the middle of luxurious mansions! .
For Danielle’s birthday we paid ourselves a treat at the Mango Bay restaurant with a full service meal and the best dessert we had in years. Look carefully at the picture on the table you can see the huge sundae I had and Danielle’s “Couli au chocolat”. Just this was worth going there as good ice cream is hard to find unless you’re ready to pay the big price for it. Again, being multimillionaires living on a mega yacht there is nothing too good for us! .
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Here we wanted to show you a special tree. If you look closer between the branches you can see many big green fruits. This is the bread fruit and although it is a fruit it tastes very like potatoes once boiled. It is very abundant in the area hence very cheap at the market. After boiling it you mash it with some Massalé spice you bought at the market in St-Pierre, Martinique and you get one of the best side dish you can dream of. 