IF YOU’RE THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO’D ENJOY hiking several miles into an overlush Caribbean rain forest, tramping up and down enough mountains and ridges to make your route resemble a seismograph reading, then wandering an ashy, hissing ruinscape where you ford streams of boiling water (carefully, carefully, rock by rock) until at last you come to a bubbling blue-gray cauldron of a lake, about two hundred feet across, that seethes and swirls and steams like something out of a 1950s sci-fi B movie…well, better get a move on. That’s because construction of what’s being billed as the world’s longest cable car system has begun on the tiny, underknown, and ravishingly beautiful island of Dominica, in the Lesser Antilles, to ferry visitors to what for decades has been a hard-won grail for hikers: Boiling Lake, a flooded volcanic fumarole that’s one of the Caribbean’s most surreal spectacles. Backers say it will allow many more people to see the bizarro lake while critics wince at the intrusion of concrete and cable into an otherwise unspoiled landscape.
What most everyone agree on, however (and what this winded traveler can testify to), is that Dominica (pronounced, and no relation to the Dominican Republic) remains as far from spoiled as any island in the Caribbean, if not the world—and because roughly 60 percent of it is forested, with a quarter of the
