St Lucia is a world away from the previous islands - the place & the people are distinctly more prosperous & therefore more friendly to visitors. Skipped past the capital Castries & took a taxi straight to Rodney Bay. What a fabulous beach, perfect coral sand, gently lapping warm water and some great beachside bars & restaurants. Swam, read & ate wonderful fish in the palm fringed Spinnaker restaurant. A perfect lazy day in the Caribbean.
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Next morning we woke up in Dominica - the most mountainous of all the Caribbean islands with more rainforest & better waterfalls than anywhere else. It's also a good place for whale watching but has no great beaches.
The capital, Roseau had few charms, the pavements were broken up or non-existent so walking around was awkward & unpleasant. Did find a good bar in Harvey Street but the white faces attracted some persistent begging. Arrived in St Vincent's capital Kingstown, a fairly grubby place so decided on a beach day & took a water taxi from the dock to Villa beach. It was a decent boat taking 15 minutes around two headlands to the southern coast. Some misleading TripAdvisor reviews led me to expect a great beach but it was small & very narrow. The mixed coral & volcanic sand was good but the black streaks made it look like dirty oil stains, but it was'nt.
As more people arrived it got crowded & hawkers were rife but it was great to get beer on the beach but I was disappointed to miss out on the homemade roti that sold like hotcakes. Someone stopped to yell at me but failed to make his point as I had no idea what he was talking about. The weather was sunny & cloudy & then some light rain blew in followed by a torrential squall that emptied the beach - it seemed to come out of nowhere. The boat ride back was very misrable. The ship is maintained to an immaculate standard. Everywhere is spick & span, including all the staff; the only untidy elements are some of my fellow passengers. Staffing levels are excellent so there are always staff around to help disoriented folk, frequently me.
The inclusive food is far superior than I had expected 3-4 courses of excellent quality. Waiters are some of the best I've encountered, the wine selection is great & you can opt for a table for 2, a shared one with 6 others or the same table every night. Deck 15 has a virtual 24 hour buffet dining format which is popular with guests that don't like formal dining arrangements & those that like to eat a lot. With breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner & late night snacks putting on weight is a foregone conclusion. Next day was spent at sea, even though our next port was only a few hours away. We cruised all night, all the next day & the following night, apparently cruise passengers like this as its the time to relax - I just wanted to land somewhere.
Around 3000 passengers were on board & sunbeds had to be packed like sardines although some poolside areas looked more like seal colonies. I've never seen so many overweight, tatooed folk in one place. Our cabin is excellent & the balcony is a neccessity after seeing some inside ones. What a great Gatwick to Bridgetown, Barbados flight on a Thomson charter flight - one of the new Dreamliners. Better seats, more legroom, quieter engines, excellent entertainment system & the food was good for an airline. An unexpected perk of this cruise was that luggage is carried "in bond" so doesnt need to be collected at the airport but is delivered directly to my ships cabin.
MS Ventura is a staggering size & looks more like a row of tower blocksstuck together, if you can imagine thembasking in the sun & floating in the Caribbean Sea. Getting around is more complex than visiting a town city because the layout is 3-D - bars, restaurants, theatres, cinema, library, gym, spa, several pools, sports facilities - all spread over 16 decks. First trip out of Bridgetown was to Carlisle Bay, which is as beautiful as sand & sea can be - powder soft & gently shelving into warm water. Four local Banks beers later & I'm nicely settled into the Caribbean. Off to the Caribbean the day after tomorrow. Better start thinking of packing - what do I need? I see there's a cold front and strong winds arriving here in England tomorrow.
I guess a pair of shorts and a few tee-shirts ought to do it. Maybe a packet of travel pills would be a good idea, seeing as its my first cruise on the high seas. Done. This is a great time of year to be visiting the Caribbean - at least that's what most of the PR blurbs say. Instead of my usual - making my own way - I'm going the tourist way and taking a cruise. I've wanted to explore Caribbean islands for ages but its not the simplist of options when you hate sailing as much as I do.
Island hopping by plane becomes expensive and I'm guessing it would be a hassle at airports. So I'm doing what I never imagined I would - joining a massive P&O cruise ship (the Ventura) in Barbados and cruising to: St Vincent - Dominica - St Lucia - Antigua - St Kitts - Gran Turk – Tortola - Barbados. I have just one day on each of the nine islands, which is obviously insufficient to glean anything really meaningful about the island but what I hope to do is find one special thing about each island. Although that one thing might just be - great beach bar nine times over. I've already ruled out almost everything that's offered on the usual tourist excursion menus - driving around the island in a minibus, the church, the ruins of an old colonial fortification, shopping, a heritage whatever, and one rum distillery should be more than enough for anyone. So it looks like my island exploration might involve - getting in a taxi and saying "take me to the best beach bar on the island". If anyone has been to any of these islands & has any useful suggestion I would love to hear them? I hav'nt posted much recently - because I hav'nt been travelling much during the middle of the year. I've been working on a book & catching up with other work.
I did manage manage a visit to Portugal earlier this month & this is a picture of a wonderful old windmill just outside the town of Silves in the Algarve. The Algarve had unbelievably good sunny weather during early November - better than anywhere else in Europe. Near the end of our trip now. Moored in the centre of Athlone, which is pretty much the centre of Ireland. It’s always been an important crossing point on the Shannon and somewhere nearby are 4,500 year old megalithic tombs. Athlone’s impressive 13th century Anglo-Norman castle is an indicator of the age-old importance of this location as a ford, linking east and west Ireland - Leinster and Connaght.
The town’s army barracks are apparently the oldest continually occupied army barracks in the world. Oliver Cromwell must be involved in this dubious claim to fame - “To Hell or to Connaght ” – move or die. It was the good land east of the Shannon that Cromwell sold or gave to his cronies in England. The dispossessed, landless Irish were forced to move west (to Connaght), and settle in places like the Burren in County Clare - known “to have not wood enough to hang a man, water enough to drown him, nor earth enough to bury him;” (D.M.R. Esson, The Curse of Cromwell). My last pint of Guinness on this visit was in Sean’s Pub, confirmed as Ireland’s oldest pub by the Guinness Book of Records – founded in 900 AD. It’s a pretty good pub but to be honest there’s not much of the original pub left, probably just the foundations, still the Guinness was top notch. Our last excursion from the barge was to the Killbeggen distillery in County Westmeath – created in 1757 and the oldest licensed distillery in Ireland, or maybe in the world, still producing Irish whiskey (note the extra e which distinguishes Irish Whiskey from Scotch whisky). A fascinating visit and some great whiskeys to sample at the end. |