Dolly Parton sighted in St Lucia

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St Lucia is a single island situated to the north of the Grenadines and south of Martinique. It has seen a number of recent resort developments which are turning this island into one of the Caribbean's trendy package tour destinations, but it's still a long way from being overdeveloped. Much of the island is rural, with small coastal fishing villages giving way to a hinterland of banana and coconut plantations folded into deep valleys topped with rich, mountainous jungle. It has a population of around 180,000, and while the official language is English, many on the island communicate in Creole French. We visited St Lucia once on each of our cruises - on the first cruise we docked initially at Marigot Bay, midway up the west coast of St Lucia, before moving south to Soufriere in the early afternoon, while on the second cruise, we set anchor at Rodney Bay, on the northern coast.

Soufriere:
Here we took on the excursion 'Soufriere Tour and Caribbean Coast', a 5 hour bus tour covering much of the island. This was probably our least appealing excursion of the trip to date, maybe exacerbated by the fact that it was raining for a fair part of the day, and perhaps contributed even more by the fact that we had partied with a group of Brits until 2am that morning. With the ship docking initially in Marigot Bay, we took this day tour that finished at Soufriere, thinking this might be logistically clever, but I'm not sure we were! The first part of the tour was an hour’s drive straight down to Soufriere for a mediocre lunch at a local restaurant, prior to meeting up with the similar afternoon excursion group, who paid half the amount we did and advised they had a great lunch on the ship. This was followed first by a drive to the Diamond Botanical Gardens, pleasant enough but not dissimilar to the gardens we had viewed on earlier excursions; then we drove up to the base of the volcano, La Soufriere, where we viewed a moonscape of barren earth emitting clouds of sulphur-smelling steam (kind of a poor man’s Rotorua!); this was followed by a visit to some mineral baths, where the mud coating was supposed to make you feel ‘ten years younger’ but this was cut short for many participants due to time constraints (so maybe they only got five years!); and finally, to add insult to injury, we drove 20 minutes south of Soufriere to a craft centre, only for the Germans on board to band together and advise “we don’t want to buy souvenirs”, so drove back along exactly the same route (a totally wasted 40 minutes) back to the ship. I think that had we felt sharper it would have bothered us less, but it really pissed off those who were pulled out of the mineral baths early and unable to complete their 'treatment'. Anyway, the day was pleasant enough, but will make us have a rethink about our planned excursions on next week’s cruise. The real bonus for us was the late afternoon activity, just as the boat was sailing out of Soufriere Harbour. They unfurled the clipper out in full sails and took us out in the tender to take photos. Not only were we able to get these shots with afternoon reflections in the water, but I was able to get some pics of the ship with the background of the Gros Piton (one of the pair of Pitons, the trademark landscape view of St Lucia, which bear some similarity to a certain singer/film star referenced in this blog's title!). This was a nice way to finish up the first leg of our cruise, as we then set sail back to Barbados.

Rodney Bay:
This was our first landing on the second cruise, after Soufriere had been the final destination on our first cruise, so we had been to and from Barbados between these two visits. Rodney Bay is on the northern coast, flanked by a series of beaches and home to a number of resort-type hotels, ranging from pretty flash to crumbling and closed down - I suspect that the presence of the former, built recently, is the cause of the latter. Apart from the beach, there was a massive marina, with an enormous number of very expensive yachts, so there is some serious loose change hanging around these parts. Tenders from the ship offered us two options - to the beach or the marina, both of which we did, but there was nothing noteworthy to report from either location.

Our next destination will be Martinique, a country that we visited on each of our cruises, and in fact the only location where we doubled up on visits.

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Beautiful Ship
Great shot