Day 2 - St Lucia (Liam's Caribbean Travel Diary, part 3)
Thus in a way, the trip really began the following morning. Our cabin is double-glazed and air-conditioned, so the full impact of our exotic location only hit me when I opened the curtains, to find the ship already resting at anchor.
Outside, we were in one of a cluster of small bays of bright blue water, surrounded by towering slopes covered in lush vegetation and dotted with villas. Watercraft small and medium-sized scurried around on the water, tens stories below; yachts bobbed at anchor and speedboats bounced over surf of a colour never seen in European waters. It was of a degree of loveliness that it struck the eye as just being unreal - a sensation I've not felt since my first sight of the Austrian Tyrol.
One leaves Salzburg airport and drives out into flat countryside of impossible, unrealistic greenness, dotted with tiny perfect villages like something off a particularly large, tasteless and over-the-top cuckoo clock. Every house of whatever size is a perfect, two-story Alpine cottage, with shutters and window-boxes full of bright red geraniums. Every garden, rustic and implausibly photogenic. Every cow mascara-ed and equipped with a cowbell on an embroidered collar.
It's like an exceptionally expensively-fitted theme park. My immediate conclusion was that the road out of the airport had been artificially landscaped, tailored, Astroturfed and managed to within 2.52cm of its life. Even the mountains framing it in the distance were posed to perfection, like a chocolate wrapper: towering, grey, prettily snow-capped, like a cartoon of ideal mountains.
But over a seventy-kilometer drive, it never stopped. It is all like that. Every town, large and small. How people don't snap and run amok I don't know. Perhaps they're clubbed into insensibility by Austrian retail prices.
My first impression of St Lucia was like that. It is so pretty, so picturesque, so perfect, it doesn't look real. It's like when you see your first living chinchilla: as the little girl in Despicable Me screams, "it is so fluffy I am gonna die!" It doesn't look remotely realistic; it's an expensive stuffed toy. Then it blinks and whiffles its nose at you.
At breakfast, from fifteen decks up on a huge cruise ship, the multiple harbours of St Lucia's tiny capital Castries make you think that the island blew its entire CGI budget up front on the opening scenes and the next couple of hours are going to be a disappointment. It's a cartoon of a lush, forest-covered tropical island: clean, tidy quays, white white white yachts, beguiling villas in the unrealistically-steep hills so lushly covered in vegetation that a deranged model train enthusiast must have got carried away gluing it on. In the distance, a tiny, quaint rustic Caribbean capital with a bustling market, with faint sounds of calypso and pan music drifting up. The air is hot, dense, humid, and it is still just after 8AM.
Then the reality seeps in. There are container ships out there and tugs and cargo craft. There's a (by-local-standards) big, ugly fisheries building on the quay. Some of the cars are shiny American or Japanese monsters, but others are rustbuckets and there are occasional smoke-belching trucks. There are graffiti if you look hard for them.
It is a real place, a busy working capital town, with blatant signs of poverty and unemployment on the streets.
It's just that even allowing for this, it's just so pretty, so picturesque, so appealing, that it still looks like an establishing shot and at any second 007 is going to appear in an Aston Martin and start hunting down the giant undersea base of some criminal über-mastermind. After a few vodka martinis and a night in a casino with a beautiful woman or two, anyway.
And here I am, in the middle of it, gazing spellbound out a huge picture window on the fifteenth storey of what is not merely a large floating hotel but essentially a floating small town, eating a vegetarian full English breakfast.
Some mornings can take a while to swallow. And there were no mushrooms.
- - - - -
Reality always intrudes. In this case in the unappealing form of the most powerful and longest-lasting of the old gods: Mammon. Going up on deck and looking down at the vertiginous drop, what I had taken for a complex of customs, security, immigration and suchlike offices was in fact small village of "duty free" shops by the quay.
I don't know what St Lucian duty rates are like, but a plain cotton shirt was US$200. I hate to think what it is with tax on, too.
They come in XXL, too. Fee fi fo fum, I smell the footsteps of Americans.
Seeing remarkably little to tempt me in any of the shops - especially not the ones selling expensive watches and frankly rather overstated jewellery - I made my way through, relishing the hot humid feel of an equatorial climate on my skin for the first time since I visited Hong Kong a decade and a half ago. Many Brits wilt in the heat like a starched collar in a rain shower, but I spent most of the 1970s growing up in Nigeria. I am no longer acclimatised to it - I've reluctantly re-adapted to cold wet old Britain - but my body remembers. When others exclaim and the sweat springs from their brows so fast that one can almost hear each tiny Heinleinian "spung", I just relax into it. It feels good.
Also, we had air-conditioning. For us, we wealthy privileged whites, we could always retreat into the sub-20° cool to eat, relax and sleep. The locals, for the most part, could not.
Leaving the mini-mall, I faced the next challenge of what was starting to feel more like a video game with remarkably convincing graphics than a movie: Afro-Caribbean taxi drivers, hungry for business and foreign currency.
We struck a deal for about half the cost of a P&O excursion and took a taxi with Junior, a tall, cheerful local with an unexpected passion for Country and Western. His minivan was a tad battered, but he made a good guide.
First, we ventured into Castries in search of some local currency. Its streets and street-markets I found remarkably like equatorial Africa, but the people are (even) more chilled. Possibly they're all either drunk or stoned, actually. It's all much less intense, although still pretty damned intense for all that. The roads are narrow and not terribly well-maintained. The buildings are all a little run-down unless they're so new they've only just been finished - but this is the tropics: if an object holds still for more than a few hours, something is going to start growing on it. Probably several things, actually. The streets near the water were so full of market stalls as to be near-impassable. There were also two fair-sized covered markets in the town centre - one in an echoing dusty corrugated-iron warehouse, one more open-plan in painted concrete. Most of the stalls seemed to be solely aimed at tourists, all selling pretty much the exact same stuff for the same prices... all rather like Camden Market, now I come to think of it
There are African-style woodcarvings. There are seashells and knick-knacks, painted and with "St Lucia" written on them: boats, shoe-horns, bars of soap, rain logs, tiny caricature rasta-men. There are more T-shirts, tropical-style shirts and baseball caps than the mind can comfortably comprehend. If it's not Ethiopean-style red, yellow and green then it's retina-searingly gaudy. This is not a culture whose æsthetic is intimate with the notion of restraint. Here, less is not more: more is more and the more of it the better.
I found one plain white tropical shirt. It had a cigarette burn on it.
The buildings lining the market streets were mostly bars and cafés: exceptionally noisy ones, with very skinny elderly men, cheerfully and gregariously drunk at 10AM, with in the region of ten teeth between every dozen of them but some great hair. Greying dreads on an old man who not only doesn't give a fuck but can't offhand introduce you to anyone who does, either, which makes them no more an affectation than, well, having only one yellow tooth in your grin. These are the very antithesis of an overfed European student with dreadlocks and a pop-rivets through random fleshy bits of their anatomy and a tribal tattoo. A friend of mine refers to dreads on white youths as "cancer of the hair". It's an unpleasant phrase but it's evocative of his disdain. And then again, if you weren't born to it, it's a pretty unpleasant hairstyle, as well.
In the end, I had to quash my innate maleness and ask for directions. I chose an office of the National Lottery. The posters were a joy, written in something resembling patois: so, for instance, the enticement of the luxuries you could afford should you win:
HAM BIRD RUM (... and something)
In case you were unclear on why you'd want these, a rump-fed ronyon advises "I wan ham to fill mi belly" and exhibits a roasting tray with a glistening joint. Behind her, a beaming chap brandishes a handful of banknotes - alas for the materialistic male world-view. Coupled with the popular local brand "Chubby", I suspect, but could be wrong, that this is not a region that has produced many supermodels. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Iman is from Somalia rather than St Lucia.
(My favourite pair of comments on Mrs Bowie: "She's not a real black woman, she's a white woman dipped in chocolate!" "And this is a bad thing why, exactly?")
Guided to the Boulevard, I found money, in, unexpectedly, a branch of the Royal Bank of Canada (eh?) just off Dennis Walcott Square. It came in the form of EC dollars. This is something else I'd not been clear on before coming here. Many of the islands of the Caribbean are nation states in their own right, but they're mostly quite small ones - lots of the islands have populations in the tens of thousands, if that. So there is this loose federation, the only manifestation of which that is visible from the distant shores of Britain being the cricket team of the West Indies. Apart from being gratuitously misnamed, there is no country of the "West Indies" - as far as I can tell, it's just that most of the islands would struggle to muster an international-grade sports team, so they club together to do it, instead.
Well, they do so with their currency, as well: the East Caribbean Dollar. There were about two-and-two-thirds of these to the US dollar when I visited, making for a brain-straining double currency conversion for Brits: EC$ to US$ then US$ to GB£. As far as most of the locals are concerned, it seems, if you're white and speak English, you're American, and therefore everything a tourist might want is priced in US dollars. They do not, for the most part, know what a pound Sterling is and they don't care, either. I've never been asked if I was American so often in my life before.
Enriched by contact with the local culture, we set off back to our meeting point with Junior. And got lost. And I didn't know the international dialling code for St Lucia so although I had his card, I couldn't call him or text him. With data access at rather more than a dollar a megabyte, I didn't feel like summoning the djinni of Google Maps, either.
In the end, another taxi driver took pity on us and called him for us. He was across the street and had been waiting for us patiently for fifteen minutes.
We re-entered the somewhat air-conditioned cool of his elderly Nissan and got a lightning tour of some of the bits of Castries we'd already explored. Dennis Walcott, it emerges, is one of St Lucia's two Nobel laureates: one for literature and one for economics, I think. This strikes me as a jolly good thing to be proud of.
- - - - -
Junior took us to the local panoramic viewing points - and warned us of the rapaciousness of the gewgaw vendors.
Caribbean hard-sell tactics are interesting. Female vendors just politely ask you to look at their wares, possibly pointing out how lovely they are and what perfect gifts or souvenirs they would make (this bit varies in length somewhat), then fall silent while turning huge imploring eyes upon you and telepathically broadcasting a remarkably loud message about their relative poverty compared to you (optional subconscious message: please ignore my Nikes and cellphone, nothing to see there, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain).
Male ones, on the other hand, bound up with great energy, press your hand, greet you with immense friendliness and no vestige of formality, in melodious Caribbean English - totally unlike the patois they use to address one another - and make a quick effort to befriend you before impressing upon you the vital importance of purchasing a bracelet, hæmatite necklace, Rastafarian personal adornment. No silent pleading here - oh, no, you need these beautiful things. You don't? Inconceivable! You don't wear jewellery? You should! It suits you! Well, never mind (you're probably a lost cause anyway, you can't help it) - get one for your wife/girlfriend/child/significant other/friends, then! No? Did I mention their curative powers? Magnets! Cure anything! Not sick? Nothing to cure? Well it will bring you luck, then! Don't need luck? Ah, well, you must be rich then, and I am very poor, so please, help me out here, please?
Junior took us to a woodcarving workshop with attached art gallery and wet bar. Our guide was young, female, bored as hell, but her patter was perfectly-memorised and delivered flawlessly if with no pretence of sincerity or conviction whatsoever. No, she didn't carve herself, she just worked here.
Summary: the local beer, Piton, is surprisingly palatable and for Generic International Lager it actually has detectable hops, very very distantly reminiscent of Hannover's Jever or home-market Becks. And the art - apart from the traditional stuff, which is presumably contractually-obliged in a tourist resort - is beautiful, often abstract, like a smoother, more organic Henry Moore. (Sorry about the priorities there, but I know a little more about beer than I know about sculpture.)
Next, climbing high into the mountainous spine of the island, Junior took us past the local primary and secondary schools and the local campus of the University of the West Indies. He told us of how the island had been alternately a French and a British dominion a good half a dozen times each. (Although the official language is now English, the older locals speak to one another in Patois, which after a few hours of exposure snapped into partial intelligibility for me like a particularly difficult optical illusion. Hello: "bon zhu". Thanks: "merci". It's good: "say bon". What time is it: "kwel er etil".)
Roadside shacks sold beer and rum, both heavily advertised around the island. Some were as simple as a table and a roof to keep the sun off; some at junctions or corners, some the middle of tiny hamlets, mere clusters of houses. Some were multiroom buildings, with dark interiors, the denizens grinning out with smiles more gap than tooth.
Junior, it seems, does not drink rum. He used to, but he had given it up, and now is quite critical of it - it destroys lives, he says, people just drown their sorrows in it and let their lives drift away past them. He doesn't mind the local beer, but didn't drink so much of it.
Junior pointed out the difference between French and British eighteenth-century architecture using the example of an old armoury, so often-repaired it was a patchwork quilt of masonry: the French built in stone, the British in brick. He also pointed out guava trees growing out of a bank near the university campus. Perhaps prompted by my reminiscing about picking guavas from the tree as a boy in Bendel State, he stopped the vehicle, leapt out and picked one for me. Ripe, slightly crunchy, and more flavoursome for its semi-wildness than any from Deepak's in Tooting.
And then we went to another scenic overlook: looking down upon Marigot Bay. Up on the hill above the cove was Junior's home; the frequency of indecipherable patois greetings hollered out the window increased still further. He dropped us at a café at the overlook while retiring to hang with some friends in the bar.
The view caused a slight change of plan, as it was so very lovely from high above, with some two-masted sloops riding at anchor and hotels sprouting directly out of secondary forest, that it seemed like a good idea to pass on the rum punch and go down to the beach. We got back in the car. As we drove off, I noticed a pungent smell. "Someone around here smoking some herb," I remarked to him quietly. "Yeah," he replied with a grin, "me. You a smoker?"
I denied everything, of course.
We drove down to the waterside of Marigot Bay.
I have never in my life seen anywhere quite so lovely. I have hiked through thick Norwegian forests in late summer, high above the fjords, picking wild strawberries, and I have sailed those fjords in autumn, as the forests blush and glow. They are enchanting, majestic, but not welcoming. I have hiked high in the Rocky Mountains in autumn, and sat in a hot tub with some artisanal beers and a stack of new novels on a deck in the middle of the Colorado pinewoods. I have ridden cablecars to some of the peaks of the French Alps in midwinter and exulted in the clean majesty of the mountains. I have paddled along creeks in equatorial African rainforest.
But Marigot Bay is the closest thing I have seen to paradise. So lush, so verdant, the water so clear and blue, the beach huts backed with a handful of discrete modern hotels half-concealed in forest.
We took a ferry across the bay to Mango Beach, but I misunderstood the boatman's instruction to ring the bell on the dock when we wanted to return. I rang it immediately, as the bar was closed and I have a vague thought of getting a drink. A late-middle-aged Englishwoman, formal but politely welcoming appeared, and invited us into her home. An old inn, she and her husband have converted it into a bed-and-breakfast, converting eleven small rooms into just five larger en suite ones. They gave us iced water (and free Wifi) and told us buying the place a decade earlier and of their former guests, including Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17 and the last man on the moon. Apparently, the NASA post-mission crew vacation was taken at Marigot Bay; Cernan liked it so much, he returned later with his wife. John had a model of an Apollo lunar lander discreetly displayed on his bookshelves.
Later, we went down to the beach, via a boardwalk through a vestigial mangrove swamp - but my first ever mangrove swamp, and any wetlands are enticing to a field biologist, past or present. And what a beach! Two sides of a spit, one sheltered and facing the inlet to the bay, one facing the ocean. Bordered by golden sand and sheltered by palm trees, it had a shack selling drinks and a sketchy bench - just the one. A hotel and restaurant lurked in the distance. The whole place is inaccessible by road, backing onto rainforest. (Rainforest is a great deal more decorative and appealing from a discreet distance, even as a biologist. The general principle is that everything in the forest is either [a] edible, [b] poisonous, [c] might try to eat you or [d] is inanimate scenery. These categories are not mutually exclusive.)
On the beach, men wove hats and baskets from palm leaves - and tried to sell them to us; that or bananas - and had intermittently uproarious conversations in creole French, while children played in the shallows along with a few tourists.
Mine was only a fleeting visit. To quote one of the best TV theme songs ever, it was "fun fun fun in the sun sun sun." I can see how even after visiting the moon, this is somewhere that would stick in your mind.
[Edit: movie reference corrected!]
Outside, we were in one of a cluster of small bays of bright blue water, surrounded by towering slopes covered in lush vegetation and dotted with villas. Watercraft small and medium-sized scurried around on the water, tens stories below; yachts bobbed at anchor and speedboats bounced over surf of a colour never seen in European waters. It was of a degree of loveliness that it struck the eye as just being unreal - a sensation I've not felt since my first sight of the Austrian Tyrol.
One leaves Salzburg airport and drives out into flat countryside of impossible, unrealistic greenness, dotted with tiny perfect villages like something off a particularly large, tasteless and over-the-top cuckoo clock. Every house of whatever size is a perfect, two-story Alpine cottage, with shutters and window-boxes full of bright red geraniums. Every garden, rustic and implausibly photogenic. Every cow mascara-ed and equipped with a cowbell on an embroidered collar.
It's like an exceptionally expensively-fitted theme park. My immediate conclusion was that the road out of the airport had been artificially landscaped, tailored, Astroturfed and managed to within 2.52cm of its life. Even the mountains framing it in the distance were posed to perfection, like a chocolate wrapper: towering, grey, prettily snow-capped, like a cartoon of ideal mountains.
But over a seventy-kilometer drive, it never stopped. It is all like that. Every town, large and small. How people don't snap and run amok I don't know. Perhaps they're clubbed into insensibility by Austrian retail prices.
My first impression of St Lucia was like that. It is so pretty, so picturesque, so perfect, it doesn't look real. It's like when you see your first living chinchilla: as the little girl in Despicable Me screams, "it is so fluffy I am gonna die!" It doesn't look remotely realistic; it's an expensive stuffed toy. Then it blinks and whiffles its nose at you.
At breakfast, from fifteen decks up on a huge cruise ship, the multiple harbours of St Lucia's tiny capital Castries make you think that the island blew its entire CGI budget up front on the opening scenes and the next couple of hours are going to be a disappointment. It's a cartoon of a lush, forest-covered tropical island: clean, tidy quays, white white white yachts, beguiling villas in the unrealistically-steep hills so lushly covered in vegetation that a deranged model train enthusiast must have got carried away gluing it on. In the distance, a tiny, quaint rustic Caribbean capital with a bustling market, with faint sounds of calypso and pan music drifting up. The air is hot, dense, humid, and it is still just after 8AM.
Then the reality seeps in. There are container ships out there and tugs and cargo craft. There's a (by-local-standards) big, ugly fisheries building on the quay. Some of the cars are shiny American or Japanese monsters, but others are rustbuckets and there are occasional smoke-belching trucks. There are graffiti if you look hard for them.
It is a real place, a busy working capital town, with blatant signs of poverty and unemployment on the streets.
It's just that even allowing for this, it's just so pretty, so picturesque, so appealing, that it still looks like an establishing shot and at any second 007 is going to appear in an Aston Martin and start hunting down the giant undersea base of some criminal über-mastermind. After a few vodka martinis and a night in a casino with a beautiful woman or two, anyway.
And here I am, in the middle of it, gazing spellbound out a huge picture window on the fifteenth storey of what is not merely a large floating hotel but essentially a floating small town, eating a vegetarian full English breakfast.
Some mornings can take a while to swallow. And there were no mushrooms.
- - - - -
Reality always intrudes. In this case in the unappealing form of the most powerful and longest-lasting of the old gods: Mammon. Going up on deck and looking down at the vertiginous drop, what I had taken for a complex of customs, security, immigration and suchlike offices was in fact small village of "duty free" shops by the quay.
I don't know what St Lucian duty rates are like, but a plain cotton shirt was US$200. I hate to think what it is with tax on, too.
They come in XXL, too. Fee fi fo fum, I smell the footsteps of Americans.
Seeing remarkably little to tempt me in any of the shops - especially not the ones selling expensive watches and frankly rather overstated jewellery - I made my way through, relishing the hot humid feel of an equatorial climate on my skin for the first time since I visited Hong Kong a decade and a half ago. Many Brits wilt in the heat like a starched collar in a rain shower, but I spent most of the 1970s growing up in Nigeria. I am no longer acclimatised to it - I've reluctantly re-adapted to cold wet old Britain - but my body remembers. When others exclaim and the sweat springs from their brows so fast that one can almost hear each tiny Heinleinian "spung", I just relax into it. It feels good.
Also, we had air-conditioning. For us, we wealthy privileged whites, we could always retreat into the sub-20° cool to eat, relax and sleep. The locals, for the most part, could not.
Leaving the mini-mall, I faced the next challenge of what was starting to feel more like a video game with remarkably convincing graphics than a movie: Afro-Caribbean taxi drivers, hungry for business and foreign currency.
We struck a deal for about half the cost of a P&O excursion and took a taxi with Junior, a tall, cheerful local with an unexpected passion for Country and Western. His minivan was a tad battered, but he made a good guide.
First, we ventured into Castries in search of some local currency. Its streets and street-markets I found remarkably like equatorial Africa, but the people are (even) more chilled. Possibly they're all either drunk or stoned, actually. It's all much less intense, although still pretty damned intense for all that. The roads are narrow and not terribly well-maintained. The buildings are all a little run-down unless they're so new they've only just been finished - but this is the tropics: if an object holds still for more than a few hours, something is going to start growing on it. Probably several things, actually. The streets near the water were so full of market stalls as to be near-impassable. There were also two fair-sized covered markets in the town centre - one in an echoing dusty corrugated-iron warehouse, one more open-plan in painted concrete. Most of the stalls seemed to be solely aimed at tourists, all selling pretty much the exact same stuff for the same prices... all rather like Camden Market, now I come to think of it
There are African-style woodcarvings. There are seashells and knick-knacks, painted and with "St Lucia" written on them: boats, shoe-horns, bars of soap, rain logs, tiny caricature rasta-men. There are more T-shirts, tropical-style shirts and baseball caps than the mind can comfortably comprehend. If it's not Ethiopean-style red, yellow and green then it's retina-searingly gaudy. This is not a culture whose æsthetic is intimate with the notion of restraint. Here, less is not more: more is more and the more of it the better.
I found one plain white tropical shirt. It had a cigarette burn on it.
The buildings lining the market streets were mostly bars and cafés: exceptionally noisy ones, with very skinny elderly men, cheerfully and gregariously drunk at 10AM, with in the region of ten teeth between every dozen of them but some great hair. Greying dreads on an old man who not only doesn't give a fuck but can't offhand introduce you to anyone who does, either, which makes them no more an affectation than, well, having only one yellow tooth in your grin. These are the very antithesis of an overfed European student with dreadlocks and a pop-rivets through random fleshy bits of their anatomy and a tribal tattoo. A friend of mine refers to dreads on white youths as "cancer of the hair". It's an unpleasant phrase but it's evocative of his disdain. And then again, if you weren't born to it, it's a pretty unpleasant hairstyle, as well.
In the end, I had to quash my innate maleness and ask for directions. I chose an office of the National Lottery. The posters were a joy, written in something resembling patois: so, for instance, the enticement of the luxuries you could afford should you win:
HAM BIRD RUM (... and something)
In case you were unclear on why you'd want these, a rump-fed ronyon advises "I wan ham to fill mi belly" and exhibits a roasting tray with a glistening joint. Behind her, a beaming chap brandishes a handful of banknotes - alas for the materialistic male world-view. Coupled with the popular local brand "Chubby", I suspect, but could be wrong, that this is not a region that has produced many supermodels. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Iman is from Somalia rather than St Lucia.
(My favourite pair of comments on Mrs Bowie: "She's not a real black woman, she's a white woman dipped in chocolate!" "And this is a bad thing why, exactly?")
Guided to the Boulevard, I found money, in, unexpectedly, a branch of the Royal Bank of Canada (eh?) just off Dennis Walcott Square. It came in the form of EC dollars. This is something else I'd not been clear on before coming here. Many of the islands of the Caribbean are nation states in their own right, but they're mostly quite small ones - lots of the islands have populations in the tens of thousands, if that. So there is this loose federation, the only manifestation of which that is visible from the distant shores of Britain being the cricket team of the West Indies. Apart from being gratuitously misnamed, there is no country of the "West Indies" - as far as I can tell, it's just that most of the islands would struggle to muster an international-grade sports team, so they club together to do it, instead.
Well, they do so with their currency, as well: the East Caribbean Dollar. There were about two-and-two-thirds of these to the US dollar when I visited, making for a brain-straining double currency conversion for Brits: EC$ to US$ then US$ to GB£. As far as most of the locals are concerned, it seems, if you're white and speak English, you're American, and therefore everything a tourist might want is priced in US dollars. They do not, for the most part, know what a pound Sterling is and they don't care, either. I've never been asked if I was American so often in my life before.
Enriched by contact with the local culture, we set off back to our meeting point with Junior. And got lost. And I didn't know the international dialling code for St Lucia so although I had his card, I couldn't call him or text him. With data access at rather more than a dollar a megabyte, I didn't feel like summoning the djinni of Google Maps, either.
In the end, another taxi driver took pity on us and called him for us. He was across the street and had been waiting for us patiently for fifteen minutes.
We re-entered the somewhat air-conditioned cool of his elderly Nissan and got a lightning tour of some of the bits of Castries we'd already explored. Dennis Walcott, it emerges, is one of St Lucia's two Nobel laureates: one for literature and one for economics, I think. This strikes me as a jolly good thing to be proud of.
- - - - -
Junior took us to the local panoramic viewing points - and warned us of the rapaciousness of the gewgaw vendors.
Caribbean hard-sell tactics are interesting. Female vendors just politely ask you to look at their wares, possibly pointing out how lovely they are and what perfect gifts or souvenirs they would make (this bit varies in length somewhat), then fall silent while turning huge imploring eyes upon you and telepathically broadcasting a remarkably loud message about their relative poverty compared to you (optional subconscious message: please ignore my Nikes and cellphone, nothing to see there, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain).
Male ones, on the other hand, bound up with great energy, press your hand, greet you with immense friendliness and no vestige of formality, in melodious Caribbean English - totally unlike the patois they use to address one another - and make a quick effort to befriend you before impressing upon you the vital importance of purchasing a bracelet, hæmatite necklace, Rastafarian personal adornment. No silent pleading here - oh, no, you need these beautiful things. You don't? Inconceivable! You don't wear jewellery? You should! It suits you! Well, never mind (you're probably a lost cause anyway, you can't help it) - get one for your wife/girlfriend/child/significant other/friends, then! No? Did I mention their curative powers? Magnets! Cure anything! Not sick? Nothing to cure? Well it will bring you luck, then! Don't need luck? Ah, well, you must be rich then, and I am very poor, so please, help me out here, please?
Junior took us to a woodcarving workshop with attached art gallery and wet bar. Our guide was young, female, bored as hell, but her patter was perfectly-memorised and delivered flawlessly if with no pretence of sincerity or conviction whatsoever. No, she didn't carve herself, she just worked here.
Summary: the local beer, Piton, is surprisingly palatable and for Generic International Lager it actually has detectable hops, very very distantly reminiscent of Hannover's Jever or home-market Becks. And the art - apart from the traditional stuff, which is presumably contractually-obliged in a tourist resort - is beautiful, often abstract, like a smoother, more organic Henry Moore. (Sorry about the priorities there, but I know a little more about beer than I know about sculpture.)
Next, climbing high into the mountainous spine of the island, Junior took us past the local primary and secondary schools and the local campus of the University of the West Indies. He told us of how the island had been alternately a French and a British dominion a good half a dozen times each. (Although the official language is now English, the older locals speak to one another in Patois, which after a few hours of exposure snapped into partial intelligibility for me like a particularly difficult optical illusion. Hello: "bon zhu". Thanks: "merci". It's good: "say bon". What time is it: "kwel er etil".)
Roadside shacks sold beer and rum, both heavily advertised around the island. Some were as simple as a table and a roof to keep the sun off; some at junctions or corners, some the middle of tiny hamlets, mere clusters of houses. Some were multiroom buildings, with dark interiors, the denizens grinning out with smiles more gap than tooth.
Junior, it seems, does not drink rum. He used to, but he had given it up, and now is quite critical of it - it destroys lives, he says, people just drown their sorrows in it and let their lives drift away past them. He doesn't mind the local beer, but didn't drink so much of it.
Junior pointed out the difference between French and British eighteenth-century architecture using the example of an old armoury, so often-repaired it was a patchwork quilt of masonry: the French built in stone, the British in brick. He also pointed out guava trees growing out of a bank near the university campus. Perhaps prompted by my reminiscing about picking guavas from the tree as a boy in Bendel State, he stopped the vehicle, leapt out and picked one for me. Ripe, slightly crunchy, and more flavoursome for its semi-wildness than any from Deepak's in Tooting.
And then we went to another scenic overlook: looking down upon Marigot Bay. Up on the hill above the cove was Junior's home; the frequency of indecipherable patois greetings hollered out the window increased still further. He dropped us at a café at the overlook while retiring to hang with some friends in the bar.
The view caused a slight change of plan, as it was so very lovely from high above, with some two-masted sloops riding at anchor and hotels sprouting directly out of secondary forest, that it seemed like a good idea to pass on the rum punch and go down to the beach. We got back in the car. As we drove off, I noticed a pungent smell. "Someone around here smoking some herb," I remarked to him quietly. "Yeah," he replied with a grin, "me. You a smoker?"
I denied everything, of course.
We drove down to the waterside of Marigot Bay.
I have never in my life seen anywhere quite so lovely. I have hiked through thick Norwegian forests in late summer, high above the fjords, picking wild strawberries, and I have sailed those fjords in autumn, as the forests blush and glow. They are enchanting, majestic, but not welcoming. I have hiked high in the Rocky Mountains in autumn, and sat in a hot tub with some artisanal beers and a stack of new novels on a deck in the middle of the Colorado pinewoods. I have ridden cablecars to some of the peaks of the French Alps in midwinter and exulted in the clean majesty of the mountains. I have paddled along creeks in equatorial African rainforest.
But Marigot Bay is the closest thing I have seen to paradise. So lush, so verdant, the water so clear and blue, the beach huts backed with a handful of discrete modern hotels half-concealed in forest.
We took a ferry across the bay to Mango Beach, but I misunderstood the boatman's instruction to ring the bell on the dock when we wanted to return. I rang it immediately, as the bar was closed and I have a vague thought of getting a drink. A late-middle-aged Englishwoman, formal but politely welcoming appeared, and invited us into her home. An old inn, she and her husband have converted it into a bed-and-breakfast, converting eleven small rooms into just five larger en suite ones. They gave us iced water (and free Wifi) and told us buying the place a decade earlier and of their former guests, including Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17 and the last man on the moon. Apparently, the NASA post-mission crew vacation was taken at Marigot Bay; Cernan liked it so much, he returned later with his wife. John had a model of an Apollo lunar lander discreetly displayed on his bookshelves.
Later, we went down to the beach, via a boardwalk through a vestigial mangrove swamp - but my first ever mangrove swamp, and any wetlands are enticing to a field biologist, past or present. And what a beach! Two sides of a spit, one sheltered and facing the inlet to the bay, one facing the ocean. Bordered by golden sand and sheltered by palm trees, it had a shack selling drinks and a sketchy bench - just the one. A hotel and restaurant lurked in the distance. The whole place is inaccessible by road, backing onto rainforest. (Rainforest is a great deal more decorative and appealing from a discreet distance, even as a biologist. The general principle is that everything in the forest is either [a] edible, [b] poisonous, [c] might try to eat you or [d] is inanimate scenery. These categories are not mutually exclusive.)
On the beach, men wove hats and baskets from palm leaves - and tried to sell them to us; that or bananas - and had intermittently uproarious conversations in creole French, while children played in the shallows along with a few tourists.
Mine was only a fleeting visit. To quote one of the best TV theme songs ever, it was "fun fun fun in the sun sun sun." I can see how even after visiting the moon, this is somewhere that would stick in your mind.
[Edit: movie reference corrected!]