Castries, St. Lucia

 

Castries, St. Lucia

Okay.  Full confession:  I need to reclassify these islands we are visiting.  Yes, they are in the Caribbean Sea, but technically they are called the West Indies (thank you, Christopher Columbus).  Your atlases will be more correct than I have been.  I will work to correct this.

As we awoke this morning, we once again turned on the TV to the ship’s camera and we watched as we approached our next W.I. island, St. Lucia and her capital city of Castries (cas TREES), another colorful place with volcanic mountains rising everywhere.

Our cruise director came on the PA system as we breakfasted, saying that due to Covid rules on this island, guests may only go ashore if they participate in a “bubble” tour which means the tour must be hosted by our cruise ship or sanctioned by St. Lucia’s Ministry of Tourism.  Huh.  To identify ourselves as guests from a cruise ship that was fully vaccinated, we were given white wristbands as we disembarked.  Jerry and I were scheduled for a private tour of the island, we were carrying all the paperwork from this tour that we found on viator.com (not through our cruise ship), and were told to go through the port terminal to get permission to proceed.  Luckily, everyone wearing official security clothing on this bright Sunday morning was welcoming and helpful, even calling our driver on their own cell phones and having him come to the door of the terminal to pick us up.  Whew.

Our driver’s name was Dillon.  He looked about 28, and he was more a taxi driver than a tour guide, but we managed to ply him with enough questions to learn about his home country.  The island is a series of volcanic cones (plugs), yet is also a caldera.  We drove up and down and up and down, with hairpin turns that sometimes caused us to wait for longer vehicles to complete their turns before we could.  One of the ports is a caldera (inside of a volcano that has collapsed into itself) creating its nickname, “the drive-in volcano”.  Size of the island is 42 km x 22 km with a population of about 184,000.  Without stops, it takes about 3 hours to traverse the island. English and Creole are spoken on the island with the islanders utilizing Creole among themselves.

Soufriere (soo FREE), the former capital (90 minutes by car from Castries) that is not quite so modernized, named for the sulfur springs resembling Mammoth Hot Springs.  Two items on the springs resembling school desks have sensors inked to Trinidad which is 222 miles to the south.   People living near here refer to “living on the edge” which applies to the people living near the active part of the volcano and the whole island where at least two corners of most houses are on stilts to keep them level on the narrow super steep hillsides.

We visited the volcano but did not swim in the hot springs.  It rained a little on and off then soon became a steady drizzle.  We stopped outside a botanical garden but with the now steady rain and having been to a number of organized botanical gardens not to mention walking in natural botanical settings for the past several weeks we chose not to go in.  We visited a nice waterfall but chose not to swim.  We hadn’t brought swim wear on this tour but we’ve been there and done that several times already.  I think our driver was a bit disappointed we didn’t participate more fully as he was running out of things to show us and felt our tour should be longer.  We pointed out that we were making the choices and were perfectly fine with what was happening.

Back to the boat, 26 miles and 1 ½  hours away.  Yes, the road is really curvy.  It was Sunday, and as we had discovered in other ports, nothing was open.  Even the cruise terminal stores were mostly closed.