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Published: July 27th 2018
It's my last full week here, time has definitely flown by. Just trying to catch up with a few touristy things before I go next week.
On Tuesday, it's 2-4-1 drinks at a bar in Rodney Bay, so we all went there - me, the girls, the boys and some new medical students from Cambridge and Leeds. We had a great time and had quite a few daquiris. We even made it onto the bar's instagram page, because the waitress took a photo of us.
Today, we went on a boat cruise. Some of Errol's family were having a family reunion, and as part of it, a lot of them went on this boat cruise. They were really nice and said Errol and I could come along as well. So we sailed down to Soufriere, went to see the waterfall, the mud baths and a coco plantation, and then stopped off to swim before sailing back.
The waterfall looked very nice, and you could stand under it, but unfortunately today was quite cloudy and rainy, so it was kind of cold, and the waterfall water was absolutely freezing. It's also very high pressure. So it's a
run in- run out kind of thing. It might be really nice on a really hot day.
The mud bath was the same sulphur spring I went to before, but this time I'm sure it smelled even worse and my clothes really stink now.
We had lunch at the coco plantation, which was very nice, and then they gave us a tour. It was pretty interesting to see. There's a reconstruction of an 18th Century Carib village. Each 'house' was made up of 3 separate huts. One hut was a bedroom that would fit 8-12 people in. You'll see in the photos that it's tiny. There is usually one bed for the parents, then all children slept on the floor. Another hut was used as a living room, and a 3rd hut that would be set back from the others was the kitchen. It would be set back, because the way they cooked food produced a lot of smoke. There was also a really large building, which was like a social club for all of the village, but only the men would have been allowed in there, whilst the women stayed at home.
Then we went to
see how coco beans are prepared. It's a really long process. The coco fruit tastes similar to peach, and inside it has the beans. These beans are then pressed and fermented for months, with the juice that is squeezed out becoming coco vinegar. Then the beans are placed on large trays and dried in the sun for weeks. Once dried, they taste like very very bitter dark chocolate. They are then coated with a kind of oil, which is mixed into the beans by someones feet. Then it's ground into a paste, which is rolled into a stick and is called a coco stick. That can be used to make coco tea or hot chocolate, or then further processed to make chocolate bars. It's a lot of faff for some chocolate. Apparently most of the coco beans from St Lucia are exported and used in Hershey's chocolate.
Then they showed us how they get cane juice from the sugar cane. They have a donkey tied to a kind of mill. When the donkey walks around, it turns two rollers. You place a sugar cane in the roller, and it squeezes out the juice. The juice can be boiled to
Screenshot_2018-07-26-16-00-03
Got ourselves on the bar's instagram. Love their captionmake molasses, which is then used to make rum here. Afterwards, the donkey gets the leftover sugar cane from the roller as a treat.
We went to see a man opening coconuts, and he gave us all a fresh coconut to drink the water from, and we got to eat some.
After the plantation, we went back on the boat, and sailed down a little way to quiet beach. The boat got as close to shore as it could, then we had to jump off and swim to the shallows or to shore. It was nice to cool off, and fun to just jump off of a boat. Then we climbed back on and sailed home. It was all a lot of fun, and I got some really good views.
Only 9 more days left here!
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