St. Lucia is another volcanic island in the arc of West Indies volcanos. Practically speaking, that means mountains, waterfalls, and cliffs punctuating the rain forest. We also visited non-volcanic islands, which are typically flatter, lower, and made up of limestone and coral rather than volcanic rocks. I will point out some of the features when we get to that point in the blog sequence.
Front-on view of our cruise ship, the Viking Sea, moored in the harbor at Castries, St. Lucia. There was one other cruise ship in port at the time, and we were told that this was almost the end of the cruise season for this part of the world. Most of the West Indies depend on tourism to support their economies, but don’t see many tourists during hurricane season, which runs from June through November. Cruise season starts in December and runs through March, more or less, and this brings money to the islands.Looking down at our ship (not the freighter!) and the harbor from a nearby ridge. Castries, the capitol of St. Lucie and home of this harbor, seemed prosperous compared to some of the other places we visited. The community was busy, we saw lots of construction in progress, and the roads were in heavy use. Of necessity, most West Indies ports are multi-purpose, with cruise ships, fishing boats, pleasure boats, and freighters all sharing close proximity. Few ports had the massive cranes for containerized cargo that we see in large industrialized harbors, so smaller cranes on board or adjacent to the cargo ships did the loading and unloading.Chapel in a Dominican Monastery on the ridge overlooking the harbor. Every community we visited had a Christian presence in the form of Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Pentecostal, or nondenominational churches. Typically, if the British had colonized the island, Anglicans would have a strong presence. If it was French, then it would be Catholic. The people we met were polite and almost always genuinely friendly, and it was a pleasure to talk with them. Perhaps more so for the extroverts than the introverts, but that’s human nature.In case we were not already getting enough time on the water, we took a tour on a large catamaran south along the coast to see the Pitons (more about this in a moment). On our way, we passed a port for tankers, and a tank farm for oil and refined petroleum products. This serves as a transfer point for oil, diesel fuel, gasoline, etc. that arrives here by large tanker and then goes by smaller tanker or barge to other islands. Many of the villages along the Yukon River, for example, get their electricity from diesel generators, and the fuel comes in by barge once or twice a year. Electricity for much of the West Indies is generated in a tropical equivalent of the Yukon’s situation: diesel generators with fuel brought in periodically by barge or small tanker. The day may come when mini-reactors replace diesel generators for this kind of local application, but we are not quite there yet.Here are the Pitons (pronounced “pee-tons”). These are old volcanic plugs that resist weathering to stand above the sounding landforms. Think of Shiprock, New Mexico, but in the tropics and near the sea rather than standing in a desert. The ride along the coast to get here involved a bit of rocking in the swell, but was not really rough. And we got to see a large leather-back sea turtle, but I was not quick enough with the zoom lens to get a decent shot. But at least we saw it! By the way, the white triangle in the lower left of the photo is the front of one of our boat’s twin hulls.Interesting patterns in the cliff as we sailed back up the coast. These look almost like some kind of giant petroglyphs, but they are natural rather than man-made. The rocks are volcanic in origin, I think, and may be some kind of ash-fall tuff from an old eruption, now cut away by the sea.Tropical beach resort in an almost-hidden bay, south of the tank farm. Lots of clean air and lots of clean water.We were tempted to stop in, but our tour had a schedule to keep. From here our catamaran went back to Castries, and that night we set sail for Barbados.
