December 10, 2009.

Growing up, I heard many stories about Barbados’Animal Flower Cave. While there were many other places that I wanted to see on the island, we only had one full day left so the Animal Flower Cave it was.

We were staying on the south side of the island and the cave is located on the opposite end in the north. Getting to the cave and back by public transport involved catching a local bus/van, transferring to a larger bus, a wait and transfer at another station, and if I am remembering correctly, a wait at the downtown terminal. It was a bit of a haul that wasted much of the day. If you have the money I suggest a cab or car rental, but since we were on a tight budget that had to get us through a month away from home, I wanted to keep costs down to a minimum wherever possible.

The bus dropped us off some distance from the water’s edge and then it was a walk through a glorious, dry landscape of grasses and cacti to the cave. This was unexpected to me. Prior to the trip I had made a lot of unconscious assumptions about what the landscape/s would be like, and even though I had been to a number of tropical places by then, I still clung to some rather homogeneous tropical botanical tropes that were completely eroded by the end of the month. Just as my trips to the desert have schooled me in how varied and multi-dimensional the arid landscape really is, so do I now realize that plant life in the tropics is not all palm trees and coconuts. It’s so much more than that.

Giant Milkweed (Gossypium) aka pillow cotton.

This landscape in particular was rugged but flat, and quite arid, sustaining all manner of dryland plants from opuntia and agaves, to low-growing succulents and swathes of browning grasses dotted with a Dr. Seuss-like tropical milkweed commonly known as pillow cotton. What’s odd is that we also saw actual cotton growing there, too. The area was extremely windy, a condition that I suspect contributes to the lack of moisture, despite such close proximity to the ocean’s edge.

Once at the ocean’s edge we paid the entrance fee and were taken to a hatch with a ladder that descended below the cliff’s edge. I am not a fan of caves, having read too many books about spelunkers getting trapped in the dark, never mind the countless horror films that have been made about fictional murderous subterranean creatures that lurk in the dark. Fortunately, this cave was well illuminated by a huge opening to the ocean at the opposite end. What I did not like was the height. The cave sits at the edge of a cliff that drops down into rough water. The ocean here tossed and tumbled threateningly, and occasionally some of that water rose high enough to break over the edge, flooding water into a big pool that was the only barrier between me and a death at sea. I stayed well back from the pool’s edge because I had already concocted a story in mind in which a particularly large gush washes in quickly and drags me out into the ocean. We were invited to swim in a rock pool in another part of the cave, but I declined, out of fear, but also worry that I might impact the fauna of the cave.

The ladder we climbed down.

Despite my concerns, I did manage to step close enough to the pool’s edge to look for the so-called animal flowers that make the cave famous. My mother described the cave in such a way that I had painted it in my child’s mind as a magical place illuminated by colourful, fantasy-like creatures. Sort of like a psychedelic 70s black light poster come to life. Sort of like a second instalment of Alice in Wonderland set in the Caribbean with sea anemones instead of mushrooms and rabbits. The truth is that while I did have to drop through a hole to access this new world, sadly, what lay inside was a far cry from the pools of blooming anemones that existed back in my mother’s day. By 2009 the anemones are still here and there, but their population is stocked by divers who bring them into the cave seasonally.

Clerodendron, another Dr. Suess-like beast of a plant.

Before heading out to the bus stop to make our way back to our hotel, I stood at this spot, looking out at the Atlantic Ocean, thinking about Dominica and how in just one day I would be looking out at the same ocean from a completely different island. I couldn’t wait to get there.

Read day 3 here.