My Cruise Adventures

St. Lucia

The island of St. Lucia is one of the most picturesque in the entire Caribbean. Part of its beauty lies in two rugged peaks right at the ocean, Gros Piton and Petit Piton. We docked at Castries, a beautiful harbor in the caldera of a collapsed volcano.

The tour we booked took us on a bus tour of the island, followed by lunch and a boat ride from the Pitons back to our ship. Our tour guide was a retired military special-forces soldier who looked at least ten years younger than his real age. He was fluent in several languages, something we found on most islands.

During the drive, we stopped several times for photos and shopping. In Anse La Raye, we bought a beer and a bottle of hot sauce.

We visited what is billed as the world's only drive-in volcano, but it most resembled a hot spring with steam vents and boiling mud pits. They had apparently tried without success to drill wells and tap the heat for geothermal energy. Since that didn't work, they ran the whole island using diesel generators. There were large storage tanks for oil south of Castries, which arrived on supertankers from Venezuela and was transferred to smaller ships to serve the other islands.

The Pitons were as picturesque as I had imagined, and there was a tall ship in the bay when we boarded our catamaran for lunch and the ride back. The lunch was varied and included numerous island dishes. I found out that the easier of the two peaks could be climbed via a trail in several hours, but the steeper one required ropes and climbing expertise.

The Pitons looked just as impressive from the water.

On the way back, we could easily see the island's volcanic nature in the rocks at the shore. We stopped for an hour in one bay to swim. I swam ashore, filled a bottle with sand, and returned to the ship. I wish I had brought my snorkel gear as the fins would have helped me get ashore and back quicker.

We visited Marigot Bay but did not go ashore. This bay is very sheltered and all the yachts took shelter here for bad weather. All of the housing on the island was much more expensive than other islands, perhaps because of its beauty.

We finally returned to the ship around 4 PM and I quickly ran aboard to see the destination speaker's talk about Grenada. This was the only island where I had no time to visit an internet cafe.