St. Lucia -- The Sights Part 1: The People and the Towns

There's so much to blog about! Not only our St. Lucia trip, but three birthdays (Elise, Forrest, Jonas), a 2nd place Pinewood Derby win, Elise's school musical, and Ethan getting cast in his first big part in a high school play. Somehow, I'm going to try to tackle all of it before Easter rolls around and I get completely swamped, but the St. Lucia posts are going to be biggies all on their own. I decided it would be best to break the trip down into a few different posts: "St. Lucia Sights"(in at least two parts, I'm discovering as I write this all out) and "St. Lucia Experiences." A day-by-day blow-by-blow would simply take too long.

Not that these posts won't be super long, of course. I can't help it. You might just want to click through the pictures and save yourself the screen time. (Seriously! I'm mostly writing all of this down for myself and for my future posterity who will be held in thrall to detailed descriptions of their great-great grandparents' twentieth anniversary trips.) So without further ado . . . St. Lucia!

This is a glimpse of the beautiful island of St. Lucia outside the airplane window. For those of you who are interested in a little history: St. Lucia is an island in the eastern Caribbean. Venezuela is its closest non-island neighbor:

It's about 200 square miles and its center is covered in dense forest. It is famous for its mountains, most notably two tall peaks called the Pitons.

Forrest and me with the Pitons in the background

St. Lucia was originally inhabited by indigenous people called the Caribs, but when the Europeans arrived in the early 1500s, many Caribs were wiped out due to exposure to European diseases, as well as the Eurpoeans' propensity to enslave and then work to death many of the native people with whom they came in contact. The European settlers soon brought African slaves to the island to work on plantations as well, and it is from this African heritage that most native St. Lucians descend today.  (There's also a smattering of Indian heritage, also stemming from  Britain's desire to colonize the world.) The French and English fought over St. Lucia for years, and the island changed hands between the two countries 14 times, with the British ultimately claiming it in 1814. Although the national language is English (all the signage, commerce, etc. takes place in English) there's a decidedly French influence as well: not only are most of the place names French (Soufriere, Gros Islet), but native St. Lucians speak what they call "patois" (pronounced "patwah") a French/English/local Creole language that we American English speakers can't understand at all. One native St. Lucian told me that many of them speak patois at home, and it's not until they get to their British-style public schools that they start to learn English in earnest.

The people of St. Lucia are really beautiful. Nothing like sitting in a scuba boat with a bunch of shirtless 20-something St. Lucian men to make a person realize how much the tourists' freckly, pasty, puffy, hairy, sun-burny Northern European bodies were not, in fact, the genetic lottery winners on planet Earth. (I am generalizing here, of course, since I'm married to a prime specimen of Northern European good looks who is aware of the fact that I can admire the St. Lucian physique without being at all threatened. :-). I took a few candid photos of some of the local people, which horrified Elise ("Mom! Did they think you were stalking them or something?") But, for most of the photos, I had the camera with me in the car and was clicking and clicking out the window at all sorts of stuff. And I used a zoom. Just so nobody's horrified:

I loved the big blue turban on this woman's head. There are all sorts of women walking around dressed in business attire, too, especially in the bigger cities. I saw a lot more women in business attire than I did men.

Not our scuba boat! I snapped this shot from the beach outside our hotel. I'm guessing these guys were heading out to do some fishing.

The owner of our hotel, Colin, and the two very helpful women at the front desk.  So friendly, and gave us so many excellent insider tips.  

Two older women I snapped from our moving car. I loved all the color in St. Lucia: the clothes, the paint colors, the green green foliage, the flowers.

There was lots of dreadlocks and tie-dye: the island had a more Jamaican feel than I was expecting. And yes,  as this home shows, there was also a lot of poverty.

The terrible disparity between the poverty in the small towns as opposed to the luxury of some of the super-ritzy resorts was really disconcerting. Although part of me was glad to be contributing to the local economy, another part felt really guilty about the unfairness of it all. I'm very, very glad, though, that we decided to be brave and rent a car so we could see more of the "real" St. Lucia; in fact, zipping along the narrow streets, driving on the wrong side of the road (that British influence again), trying to negotiate all the hairpin bends on the steep mountain roads without killing ourselves, taking a wrong turn and getting lost in a small neighborhood full of banana plantation workers traipsing to the fields with machetes at their sides (and staring at us like we were the craziest white people they'd ever seen) -- those were some of my favorite experiences of the whole trip. Well, okay, I could have done without the grasping-the-door-handle-closing-my-eyes-and-saying-a-prayer style of driving . . . but now that we're home, and alive, I'm glad we did it. The vast majority of vacationers in St. Lucia either arrive via cruise ship or stay at all inclusive resorts, leaving only when a tour bus pulls up to transport them to the next tourist spot, but if anyone I know is heading to St. Lucia? I'd recommend they do it our way (of course!). Provided that they have guys like Forrest or Darrin who are willing to drive. I never could have done the driving myself. Oh no.

Here are a few more shots out the car window:

There were crosses and memorials etched into the sides of mountains all over the island. I thought of them as Forrest honked the horn while we rounded a hairpin bend to warn any oncoming traffic not to crash into us.

Not a lot of signs in St. Lucia. Very few street signs, a handful of speed limit signs. I think the Hairpin Bend signs were among the most common of all.

One of our favorite signs. Wonder why they can't rent out that house???

And here's a few shots of the biggest city in St. Lucia, Castries, where the cruise ships come in to port. We were only 10 minutes or so outside of Castries and mostly drove through it, but did spend one day going to the local fruit market and visiting the maze of booths set up to sell souvenirs to the cruise ship passengers:

Darrin and Katie checking out the papayas. My favorite local fruit were the guavas -- you eat them rind and all.

Some local fishing boats in the bay.

A cruise ship docked in the bay. Every day there was at least one new ship, and this one was on the smaller side.

And that's enough for today. Tomorrow I'll delve into the flora and the fauna, the ocean and the flowers, the mountains and the lizards. All that beautiful stuff.