Castries, St. Lucia
Today, we arrived in Castries, St Lucia.
Once again, we hadn’t been assigned any tour escorting duties (yeeeey!), so we had the whole day to ourselves.
After having a leisurely breakfast, we began our day in Castries, by taking a walk around the town.
Once we’d fought our way through the enthusiastic, but slightly annoying, taxi drivers, all telling us that when we were ready for a taxi, they’d be our man, and that a trip to the beach would only cost us five dollars each, we headed towards the centre of town, where there is a cathedral and a couple of landscaped squares. Castries is a busy, typical Caribbean town, with bustling markets and colourful characters, but when we took out our cameras to capture all that hustle and bustle, Tracey discovered to her frustration that her camera’s SD card was missing (still in her laptop). Since I’d only brought out my small camera and not my video camera as well, I didn’t have a spare to offer her, which meant that we had to retrace our steps, back through the pushy and annoying taxi drivers, to the ship, to retrieve it. Once Tracey had reappeared on the quayside, SD card safely tucked away in the camera, we had to fight our way, for a third time through the throng of taxi drivers… Tracey was not a happy bunny…
We visited the cathedral and pottered around one of the squares that featured some magnificent trees, before navigating our way to a park we’d seen on the small map we’d obtained from the Tourist Information desk in the port terminal. We were a little underwhelmed by the park when we arrived there, expecting something a bit greener and… park-like… Still, it completed our circumnavigation of the town, from which there were only a couple of options remaining; we pottered around the market for a while (where I bought a hat to replace the one I’d lost in Bequia) before heading back to the ship (and through those taxi drivers yet again) for lunch.
After lunch, we walked to Viggi beach, which is about 25 minutes on foot from the port and runs the length of Castries Airport’s runway, where we spent the whole glorious afternoon swimming and snorkelling to the sound of small aircraft taking off and landing.
Finally, we walked back to the ship, had dinner and then spent the evening in Chef Robby’s Bar on the quayside, enjoying a drink and gorging on the free wi-fi (the password for which was ‘Trump911’, which we thought was quite funny…).
Tomorrow, we will be visiting our final Caribbean port before heading East, back towards the Azores and home…
