Renting a car in Dominica proved to be a little difficult. The only international agency that actually answered the phone was Budget, and they explained to me that at Christmas time, they don’t really do reservations – they could do a “tentative” reservation, but it really depended on whether people returned cars. So, from our guesthouse we called around, and no one had cars (including Budget) until we reached the last agency on our list – Valley Rent a Car. They rented us a car for about $50 a day. It was a Suzuki Escudo, an automatic 4WD jeep in reasonable shape. The power windows on the drivers side didn’t work, and the car looked pretty beat up and made some strange noises, but it got us through some pretty scary driving. The agency picked us up at our hotel and took us to the rental agency (on the outskirts of town) and it took us about 10 minutes to arrange everything.

When we returned the car, we did it at the Melville Hall Airport, about an hour away from Portsmouth, and 2.5 hours from Roseau.  They didn’t charge us for this service, and we were surprised that it was so easy to pick up from one location and return to another.