APRIL 2017 - ST LUCIA. AS THE TOURIST BROCHURES SAY, "SIMPLY BEAUTIFUL"

Our last island stop is Saint Lucia, 27 miles long and 14 miles wide.  We fly a little over 100 miles from Barbados to Castries, the capital

and, with our hire car (of which more later), stopped into town; founded by the French of course, in 1650, as Carénage ("safe anchorage") when the island was purchased by the goveror of Martinique, but renamed in 1756 after the marquis de Castries, commander of a French expeditionary force to Corsica that year. Between 1803 and 1844, the British made the town a major naval port and built fortifications on Morne Fortune, the mountain  overlooking the harbour.  

The Cathedral of Immaculate Conception

overlooks Derek Walcott Square, currently filled with commemorations for the recently-deceased Nobel Prize winner

Lots of different kinds of boats in town...

and you realise how huge those cruise-ships are when you see them from the hilltop

A great island for picturesque coffee stops - Pigeon Island National Landmark 

(this wasn't a coffee stop but who can resist a graveyard sheep and a rainbow tombstone)

Mamiku Gardens is a scenic botanical spot. A friendly gardener kindly points out a hummingbird nest. Impressed if you can spot it...

 OK, here she is.  

As we travelled back to town (steeply downhill - St Lucia is very hilly), the car started to make a worrying, cyclical noise; D diagnosed the disc brakes.  Metal on metal is not good sound, so we stopped at the bottom of a hill in a tiny little middle-of-nowhere spot called L’Abbayee.  No luck with the phone number for Marcus at the rental company, nor data roaming to send an email, so we split up and knocked on doors.  D walked down the street and met a pastor outside his home; he was kind enough to allow D access to his wifi to send an email. Meanwhile S was befriended by a pastor’s wife 3 doors down (whose brother is another pastor across the street - but neither was D's pastor!). Got that?  Between them, our new friends reached the rental company and, almost certainly faster than we could have achieved, got us an appointment at a garage about a 1 mile away, not encouragingly called Mr Sean’s Car Wreckers.  Happily, Mr Sean was super-professional and it only took half an hour for the car to be sorted.

Next stop along the west coast was Soufrière (pop 7,935), founded by the French as the island's original capital (descendants​ of plantation owners of French origin apparently still live in the area) but, after the British invaded - shortly after the French Revolution - and St Lucia became a British colony,  they made Castries its capital. (Napoleon probably got some stick for that as Empress Josephine spent much of her childhood in Soufrière, on her father's plantation, and was fond of the area). 

The area is most famous for the mountainous volcanic plugs or spires called the two Pitons, which feature on every tourist brochure for St Lucia you'll ever see,
 

even when hijacked into less...er professional...renditions. 

A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Gros Piton, which you can apparently climb (we gave a lift to a guide: 2 hours up and 2 down), is 798m (2,619 ft) high; Petit Piton (dangerous to climb) is 743m (2,438 ft); they are linked by the Piton Mitan ridge. 

From this height, there was a great view over the bay down to town

and, back to earth, supper was enjoyed on our apartment verandah

Looking for some more views, the Tet Paul Nature Trail

was a tough old climb
 

and they certainly built up the the panorama you're going to get once you've made the effort
 

Sure enough

And our guide explained that the surrounding lands are owned and occupied, and farmed, by a collective of famiies (including her own) which also operates the Tet Paul
 

That walk justified a treat lunch at the super-smart, $10,000 per week Ansa la Chastanet - the food and service actually wasn't great but get that view (and the other visitors)

They also rent out snorkels and fins so we have half an hour each (no underwater pics I'm afraid but excellent-looking chimney stack coral and shoals of trumpet fish in very very clear water). A double Piton shot on the way back

Soufriere means sulphur mine so it's not surprising that one of the town's prime attractions is the Sulphur Springs Park, a reminder of the volcanic origin of the island  It promotes itself as the 'World’s Only Drive-In Volcano' - in fact, since a guide recently trod too heavily on the cauldera and fell up to his waist through the crust, you can now only approach behind safety barriers to observe the bubbling mud and rising egg-scented steam from the lunar landscape.

 

I'll spare you pictures of us broiling in the hot baths

and splashing on the 'health-enhancing', foul-smelling mud (whose aroma lingered for days afterwards!) 

Last day, we completed crossing the island (we'd flown into the north but BA flies out of the south).  Behind us is Maria Island, a bird sanctuary and, to the left, the southern-most tip.