St. Vincent's Rainforest Caribbean Island: St. Vincent March 6, 2000 by Wayne & Karen Brown

When we stopped our car to look at the spectacular view, kids suddenly surrounded us! We were the only white Americans around, and the kids wanted to meet us and find out what we were doing. The youngest was four years old and the oldest was 12. Some of them had just gotten out of school for the day. Some were playing cricket using a palm frond and a tennis ball. We had fun talking to them. They liked seeing the digital picture we took of them.

We drove another hour until we turned up a dirt road that passed through a banana plantation. The road got worse and worse and narrower and narrower. Fortunately our car was high off the ground, otherwise we would have gotten stuck! The road finally ended at a small clearing in the rainforest. After driving on that road we understood why we were the only ones here! We heard birds chirping all around us as we looked for a way to walk through this dense jungle. In a short time we found a trail, so we took all our cameras and started our hike through the rainforest.

The rain forest was green, dense and thick with trees. Even though the sun was shining bright, in the rainforest everything seemed to be in the shade. Plants grew on other plants, which grew on plants! Rainforests are similar to coral reefs in some ways. Both rainforests and coral reefs need sunlight and space to grow. Rainforests and coral reefs grow in nutrient-poor areas and there is intense competition for any available space. Rainforests are also highly diverse and productive ecosystems. Like coral reefs, rainforests are very fragile and can easily be destroyed by humans.

The Monkeypod plant is one example of a plant growing on a plant. We had never seen a monkeypod before, and we don't know how it got its name. The monkeypod grows on trees. It starts growing when a seed drops out of a bird's mouth and lands high up in the tree. The monkeypod attaches itself to the tree and grows from the top down. It has lots of long vines that hang down from where it is growing up in the tree. The vines wrap around the tree strangling and killing the tree.

After hiking for about 45 minutes we came to a rushing river that flowed over an old lava bed. All of a sudden the river disappeared over some lava! We were standing at the end of a beautiful waterfall. This waterfall, Trinity Falls, was 60 feet high! It goes from a single river, splits into three waterfalls, then flows together and makes one final waterfall. We met some local teenagers who had some small spearguns and they showed us what they had caught. In their bag were crawfish and huge shrimp that they had speared in the pools of water at the bottom of the falls. Dive with us tomorrow as we explore the coral reefs of St. Vincent.

As we drive along the leeward (west) coast of St. Vincent we see St. Lucia in the distance. Can you find the Pitons of St. Lucia poking up into the sky?

When we stop to take pictures a group of kids gather around to meet us and ask what we are doing. One of the girls still has on her school uniform.

We set our camera on a rock to get this photo of us hiking through the rainforest.

You can see how dense the rainforest is. As plants compete for growing space we see plants growing on plants that are growing on plants. It seems like every square inch is growing with plants.

The vines you see hanging down are the monkeypod plant. As the monkeypod grows and grows these vines will finally strangle and kill the tree that it is growing on.

Trinity Falls. Can you find Wayne standing on a rock next to the falls? Can you find the boys with spearguns next to the water?