Blog / Random thoughts and musings.

St. Lucia, Day 3

Day 3
We slept in this morning, ate breakfast at the hotel, and then took the local bus south to the capital, Castries. Castries is home to a large trading market (see photos) where the St. Lucians buy and sell local fruits, vegetables, fish, and other foods. Past the local market was the tourist market, where dozens of vendors had stalls set up selling necklaces, tee-shirts, wood carvings, spices, and the like. Pretty much all of the vendors had the exact same merchandise, and pricing varied widely, so going from one vendor to the next helped figure out what a realistic price was for the merchandise. We then wandered around some more of the city and got a good sampling of the local “flavor” before heading back to the hotel on the bus.

The local bus is a great cheap way to get around St. Lucia, but you really have to know where you’re going. The buses are vans, each holding around 10-11 passengers, and they run very frequently. We never had to wait more than 15 seconds (really!) for one to come along. They will pick you up anywhere alongside the road, if you see them and wave. But, they also won’t stop and let you off unless you tell the driver to stop, so you have to know where you’re going and when to get off. The 15 minute bus to Castries from Rodney Bay was only EC$2 per person (about US$0.75). Our taxi on Thursday was US$15 for the same route.

We relaxed at the hotel for a bit, then walked back down to Reduit Beach and had lunch at Pizza Pizza. We weren’t too hungry, so we were looking for something fairly small and cheap that we could split. Not quite having the highest expectations for pizza in the Caribbean, I have to say we were pleasantly surprised. I’m from New York, and am definitely a “pizza snob”, and I really enjoyed the pizza there! We walked down the beach a bit and sat on two lounge chairs until someone came over and said we need to rent them. Since we weren’t planning on staying long, we spread our beach towels out instead and relaxed on the beach reading books for a while. Unfortunately a rain storm came in suddenly so we packed up, but saw that we had perfect timing as the hotel’s beach shuttle was nearby and saved us a mile walk in the downpour.

We decided this afternoon to head to the local supermarket and pick up some food since our hotel room has a fridge. Rather than eat a big breakfast each morning, we got some muffins, OJ, and yogurt to tide us over. It’ll also save us some time since the next two days we are getting picked up in the morning by tour operators for our rainforest tour (tomorrow) and full day sail down the coast (Monday).