St Lucia

Blue skies, blue sea, sunny day . . . . oh, I have already used that opening. Welcome to St. Lucia, one of the Southern most islands of the Caribbean. According to the tourist guides, it’s very popular as both a family holiday destination and a romantic paradise for honeymooners.

I am here to tell you that that may be true if you are staying at Sandals, or one of the other major resort areas on the island. But, you don’t really get to see what the island is really like there. You need to do what we did, and that’s walk into Castries from the ships dock.

We were there on a Sunday so naturally everything was closed. It’s about a 30-40 minute walk around the harbor from the ship to get into city center. I will say that the people of the island we extremely friendly. Virtually everyone we passed on our walk greeted us very politely and asked if we were enjoying the day. To be honest that was somewhat surprising as we had never encountered people quite so friendly before on the islands.

The town itself while not really dirty per se, felt grungy and rundown. Even the government buildings were not in the best of shape. It was quite obvious that while the tourist dollar is very important to the island, it’s not getting down to the local people. We both felt quite sad and while we are not shoppers, almost wished that the stores were open as we probably would have bought something just to put a few dollars into the economy where it was actually needed.

Right at the dock where the cruise ship docks is a duty free zone with several shops. These are primarily the usual gang of diamond dealers, watch dealers, and general jewelry that even at duty free shops is well above anything that I am willing to pay for. But, hidden around in several locations there are little kiosks selling the local Piton lager for $3 US for two bottles. At 5% alcohol content it was a pretty decent tasting beer. So we put our money into the local economy there by sitting under an umbrella and quaffing a couple.

We are now on the NE heading sailing towards the Canary Islands. The next few days are at sea so my posts will try and provide a little more detail into the life aboard the Prinsendam.

Until tomorrow, Cheers!