Castries, St Lucia
Today, we arrived in Castries, the capital of St Lucia.
Our escorting duties today were on a tour titled ‘Land and Sea to the Pitons’, which meant being on the quayside at 8:3am. Our tour buses were the small 22-seater coaches – more minibuses really – typical, it seems, throughout the Caribbean.
It was a long tour, but actually quite a corker. After a brief drive through the town of Castries, we headed along the coast, stopping off at a Batik workshop place (where it rained rather heavily), and a couple of short photo stops, at one of which I bought some local bananas.
We also stopped at a small fishing village called Anses de Reys. It’s worth noting that St Lucia has a strong French, influence; Creole, being a combination of French and African. In Anses de Reyes, it rained… boy, did it rain…
Finally, we arrived in Soufriere, where we spent some time walking through a rather splendid botanical garden, where humming birds whizzed around, before heading to lunch in the Old Mill. After lunch, we were shown around the colonial estate house before being taken down to the harbour where we boarded a catamaran, and three bus groups were combined (including Tracey’s and mine, so we got to enjoy the boat trip section of the tour together).
Speaking for myself; any opportunity to view St Lucia’s famous natural landmark, The Pitons, is always something worth writing home about. As I write this, the precise dimensions and statistics of the great peaks are not to hand, but our guide told us that a hike to the top of the tallest takes about 4 hours. No-one is allowed to climb them without a permit, and then the trip must be accompanied by an official guide.
If there’s one thing that the Caribbean excursions know what to do, it is how to make a group of grumpy cruise ship passengers happy; give them lots of rum punch. The booze wasn’t served until after the 40-minute swim stop, but after that, the rum punch flowed and the passengers got slowly merrier and merrier, and louder and louder… I’m pretty certain that getting the volume of the party music and the flow of the rum punch just right, so that an excursion catamaran pulling into the harbour creates the most impact, is an art form in itself.
This evening, when I went to the Shorex office to see what escorting duties they’d put us down for, if any, I was surprised to discover that they’d put me down for Kayaking and Tracey down for a catamaran trip and lobster lunch. Since neither of us is in the slightest bit interested in lobster lunches, I re-negotiated, giving Tracey the opportunity to do the Kayaking (because she’s never done it before, and I have), and put me down for Nelson’s Dockyard, when we arrive in Antigua, our final Caribbean stop, tomorrow.
Both of us are knackered… so that’lL be another early night then…
