It must have cost every penny I earned in the whole cruise (god knows how I paid the bar bill) and yet like all of the spotanious spends I’ve made in my days, I can’t remember for the life of me what it cost. A helicopter flight from Antigua over the bright clean Caribbean sea over to Montserrat, a small green island tipped with puffy white clouds.
On closer inspection its as much grey and brown as it is green, and those clouds froth and boil out of the active volcano as it grumbles away to itself. Back in 1995 it woke up with a shout and proceeded over a few years to blast the island with ash and lava and pyroclastic flows and great wreaking clouds of noxious gas. The captial Plymouth was virtually buried alive by ash before the pyroclastic activity burnt what was left to cinders. Like all natural disasters there are odd little patches that seem to have almost escaped damage entirely – but for the majority, the buildings are either skeletons, burnt or buried. Amid one large grey flat expance of seeming nothingness the is a single feature, the spire of the parish church poking up a few feet above the ground. Fortunately the island has a large natural ridge that divides it in two and shelters the inhabitants from the worst of the mountain’s ill tempers. A small village is now the centre of government.
It was a smooth flight, the pilot was an entertaining guide (who I’m conviced would have broken the rules and landed for us if we’d have had enough green between us for a bribe) and from a human point of view – good and humbling. It wasn’t so much seeing sulphur bubble out of the rock face, nor even really the leveling of the city that did it for me, it was when the pilot explained that we were flying over a few square kilometers of Montserrat that had been open water a couple of years before. The island is a fair bit larger than it used to be back in the 90′s, and the idea of solid ground materialising where none existed before put me right in my place.
Worth every penny!
Tags: caribbean, helicopter, montserrat, volcano
