For our first day, we headed straight to the heart of Guadeloupe National Park and hiked in the tropical rainforest in the morning, and then climbed the volcano in the afternoon.

The air was steamy and moist, and the assent to the volcano fairly straight up, even though we picked the trail marked “easy.” It strikes me that in the U.S. an easy trail would be handicap accessible, while here it was an hour of stairs. The air was so sauna-like that breathing was more of a problem than the elevation gain, and we were drenched when we got to the top. This leads one to wonder what was the difficult path was like.

All the plant life to me was fascinating, and I loved the shapes, and the glossiness of the leaves, the abstract compositions, and the apparent healthiness of the verdure.

Coming down off the mountain just in time to do those hairpin turns in the dusk, I turned the car to chase the sunset down to the shore. We missed the best of it but the afterglow was still marvelous. On the way back, we got in such a horrendous traffic jam, I shut off the car multiple times on the highway to spare the heat of the clutch from burning my foot. With a mountain range down the middle of that wing of the island, the perimeter road is the only way back, and we got stuck in local traffic returning to the urban areas at the end of a weekend. No matter, a great audio book to the rescue.

Expending so much energy hiking, this was our best food day of the trip. We ate in the National Park for lunch, and near our AirBnB for dinner. At lunch, the fish was bream, and at dinner, marlin. Both were varieties we’d not had before, with passion fruit and creole spices in their preparation. At dinner, we split the fish, their version of avocado toast, as well as a dessert we’ll be dreaming of for a long time. It was called “Do You Want Pistachio or Chocolate,” and the green pistachio flavored cake was filled with molten white chocolate tinted green. Oh my! It was so good!