St. Lucia - Wednesday, 9 February 2005

We loved St. Lucia!  It is a magnificent volcanic island with mountains and a rain forest.  This was the only port that we had to tender into, as we had to anchor at sea.  The sea was rather rough and it poured, but we loved it just the same!  We took the tender in after breakfast to our first shore excursion, a 4WD Safari.  It was lightly raining when we arrived, so they put just the top part of the roof down, leaving the sides up. We went into the mountains, where we stopped for beautiful views and also at a farmer's house in the middle of nowhere.  You could throw a dollar in a calabash bowl to try fresh fruit cut in front of us.  The drizzling rain had stopped, so we tied the roof back up at this point.
         

We traveled back part-way down the mountain and stopped to make a 15-minute hike on a forest trail to a waterfall.  At this point, the sun was out, we were hiking, and we were hot!  We drove a little further downstream to a natural pool where we could swim if we wanted.  As with nearly every shore excursion throughout the Caribbean, we were offered the requisite rum punch!
     

We passed by huge banana plantations, where they explained the process to us.  A banana plant flowers only once, producing many "hands" of bananas before dying.  So, each plant has a younger one already growing next to it in preparation for the next cycle and is likely to have the "stump" of a cut-down parent plant beside it as well.  Once the bananas are formed, blue bags are put over them to protect them from garden pests and to keep them from ripening in the sunlight, as they must ripen on their way to the grocery stores.  The pests are bugs; there are no monkeys on St. Lucia.  These bananas are sold to European countries, not to America.
     

Our last stop was a view of the beautiful Marigot Beach, where the original 1967 Dr. Doolittle movie (with Rex Harrison) was filmed.  Other films that had some or all scenes shot at St. Lucia include Superman II in 1980, White Squall in 1994, and Pirates of the Caribbean in 2003.

On the way back to the dock, it poured!  No, that needs emphasis: it POURED!  We were totally drenched, soaked to the skin!  We had an hour and half between shore excursions and had originally planned to stay in town, but we were too wet!  We tendered back to the ship, peeled off the wet clothes in the bathroom and jumped in a HOT shower to warm up.  No time for lunch as we put on dry clothes and rushed back to the tender. We felt so much better in dry clothes, and the rain let up for most of the afternoon.  Our afternoon tour was "Scenes of St. Lucia", beginning with a stop at Caribelle Batik, where we watched them create beautiful batik materials.  To do batik, they paint patterns on cloth with wax, then dye the cloth, then add layers of wax patterns and dying again, until all of the colors are present.  Then the wax is boiled out, revealing the layers of colors.
 

Most houses have solar hot water heaters on the roof:

We went to La Swiki, a restored sugar mill, where they explained the process used to make sugar.
       

We stopped at a plantation house with a great view, where we tasted (and bought) banana chips, breadfruit chips, and plantain chips.  All were similar to potato chips and very crunchy.  The banana chips were not like ours at home, which are sweeter.  Breadfruit is a large round fruit grown in tall trees, which is used like potato in the Caribbean.  The plantain ships were our favorite, and we ate several bags on this trip. Here are views of the harbor and our ship out in the ocean, along with the tender that we used to get back and forth:
   

Looking back on St. Lucia as we left: