The day started out with breakfast in Julie’s room. She went to the market the day before to buy us cereal, milk, chocolate croissants, yogurt, and fruit. We then got on the bus for a 2-hour ride through the rain forest at the northern end of Martinique. We eventually arrived in St. Pierre which was the part of the island that seemed to have the most French structural influence. We walked a bit and visited the ruins of the old theatre and prison that were destroyed in Mt. Pelée’s eruption in 1902. It killed 28,000 of the 30,000 people in the town at that time. The 1,900 of the 2,000 survivors died within the next 48, so really there was one true survivor: Cyparis. He was in the dungeon of the jail, so he was burned, but not killed. The type of eruption this volcano has (peleotite) is named after Mt. Pelée itself. The eruption does produce lava outside of the volcano, but causes death within 3 minutes by asphyxiation from toxic gas, or in 1.5 minutes by shock waves causing people’s stomachs to explode. After examining the site, we got back on the bus and rode to lunch on the base of the volcano. We were far enough up that we were in a rainy cloud.
After lunch, we headed 20 minutes back down the mountain to the gorge. At the gorge, we walked down very steep steps to begin our hike. The steps were extremely slippery but when we got to the stream, it got even more difficult to keep balance. With rocks filling the bottom of the stream, every step you took had to be thought out. At times, we were so deep in water we had to swim, only to climb even more rocks. Twice, we had to climb ladders to get up the rocks, however, this was all worth it because our destination was a beautiful waterfall. We stopped to take many pictures of the waterfall and we enjoyed our hike very much, even if climbing the steps on the way back caused us to breathe heavily. We then got on the bus and headed back to the hotel where we showered and had pizza for dinner! Tomorrow is our last full day here and the group is trying to take in as much of Martinique as we have left!
