Web Logs
3/26/2004 - Cinnamon Bay - Day 2, part 1
In case you missed it, see parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5
On the second morning we took off after a hasty power-bar-breakfast to hike the Reef Bay Trail. It was a 5 mile excursion that offered encounters with the island's wildlife, vegetation, and sugar cane ruins, and best of all, ancient petroglyphs. It's a fairly comfortable hike with a well maintained trail and plenty of well-paced placards explaining the sites.
Reading all these signs I was struck by how little of the plants and wildlife were native. Bats are the only native mammals, but the settlers dropped off deer, boars and donkeys for food and mongooses to kill off poisonous snakes (there were no poisonous snakes, but the mongooses did a good job decimating the island's ground-dwelling birds).
Almost all the notable plants seemed to be imported, with the exception of the Bay-Rum tree or Cinnamon Tree for which the island is named. This is largely due to the Dutch clearing almost all the forests on the island in the 1700s to make way for sugar cane plantations. At its peak, there were over 109 such plantation in operation.
Notable Was
- The Golden Orb Spider was everywhere, much to Will's dismay. Large, beautiful, and apparently quite harmless.
- Hermit Crabs are pretty much everywhere on the island, but they seemed especially common on this trail.
- We spotted a lone mongoose down by the petroglyphs.
- The massive Kaporov Tree (or "Silk Cotton tree") with its huge buttresses almost had a fantastical look to it.
- The Sand Box Tree (or "Monkey Pistol Tree" or "Monkey-No-Climb Tree") with its spined trunk and explosive seed pods was by far my favorite.
- The Turpentine Tree (also known as the "Tourist Nose Tree" - peeling and red).
- The Wild Pineapple.
- The infrequently blooming Century Plant.
- Plenty of old ruins along the way.
 Kaporov Tree |
 Century Plant |
 Turpentine Tree |
 Wild Pineapple |
 Golden Orb Spider |
 Ruins on the trail |
 sandbox Tree |
