January 29, 2018- St. Vincent

Monday, January 29, 2018- St. Vincent and the Grenadines

We awoke to find lush greenery outside our balcony as we were docked at St. Vincent. After breakfast, we made our way to the Wheelhouse lounge to check in for our ship excursion.  From there, we had to wait in the Princess theatre.  There were nearly 200 passengers taking the excursion we booked.  They had a fleet of 21 passenger mini-buses although if they folded down seats that occupied the aisles, the buses could have been packed with nearly 30 passengers.  It was still a snug fit with just 21, but not uncomfortable.  

Our tour guide Elvin Jackson was easy to understand and had a good sense of humor.  The streets of Kingstown are narrow, and people drive on the left side of the street.  There are no traffic lights or stop signs, so the flow of traffic is pretty much a free-for-all.  This is definitely not the place to rent a car casually.  Weather since our arrival has been on and off rain showers with the temperature of 80 degrees.  Not much sun.  

Our first stop was Fort Charlotte, which had a great overlook of Kingstown and the Island Princess docked downtown.  The Fort had never been attacked, but was built with cannons pointing inland because the British were more afraid of the Carib indians than the French Navy.  It was a small but well preserved fort.  It also overlooked the coastline where the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were filmed. Elvin said many of the islanders were hired as movie extras.  It was windy, and cloudy, but as we were leaving, it did start raining pretty hard.

The second stop was the St. Vincent Botanical Gardens, which are amongst the oldest botanical gardens in the western hemisphere, established in 1765.  There was a break in the rain that allowed us to walk through the gardens with Elvin pointing out some of the more interesting or historically significant species.  Captain Bly of the HMS Bounty planted one of the first Breadfruit trees in the Caribbean in this garden.  We saw the St. Vincent’s Parrot and Red-Footed tortoise, which are endemic to St. Vincent. 

Our next stop was a crazy busy lookout over the Mesopotamia Valley, where most of the produce found in the Caribbean is grown.  It was really windy, but there was again a break in the rain that allowed us to go out and get pictures and then get back into the bus.  Seeing all the buses and taxis turning around on the narrow street was a real spectacle.  

We then headed down to the Villa Beach, which was a tiny but scenic beach, where we were served rum fruit punch, made with the local white rum.  As we were leaving, the sky opened up with a tremendous downpour.  We used the Wifi at the terminal to download some emails, but the connections were poor, so we weren’t able to upload pictures.  

We had lunch in the Horizon court buffet and then attended the afternoon Trivia game at 3:30pm.  We teamed up with Bob from New Jersey, as well as 3 new partners- Al, Barb and Doug, who were all from BC.  We came closer to winning this game, getting into a 3-way tie for first place.  The tie breaker question was “How many times does the word “Blood “ appear in Shakespeare’s MacBeth?”.  Our initial guess was 52, but at the last second we revised it up to 152, thinking MacBeth is a really long plan, and an especially bloody one.  Well, it turns out that the real answer was 42.  If we had stuck with our first guess, we would have tied again for first, but we lost.  And the prizes were Princess wine bottle stoppers- something we could actually use.  Better luck next time.  

It was raining really hard as the Island Princess pulled away from St. Vincent.  You could just see sheets of rain rippling across the water, and storm drains from the island turned into waterfalls emptying into the Caribbean.

While walking the decks for exercise, Ben found that there is an open balcony at the aft of Deck 8 where you can look out over the wake.  It may be the only place besides private suites on the stern to be able to see that end of the ship as it traverses the Panama Canal towards the end of the trip. 

We had dinner and tried playing music Bingo.  This turned out to be a lot of work, and required a lot of teamwork.  They handed out bingo cards that had names of songs and artists in each square instead of BINGO letters.  There were 4 cards and each was unique. The host played a rapid sequence of audio clips. If you recognized a song and saw it on your card, you would mark that square. If you didn’t recognize the song right away, 10 seconds later, the name would scroll up on the screen, and disappear off the screen after 30 seconds.  To add to the complexity, there were different patterns that had to be satisfied to call BINGO, and the first team to call BINGO would win, even if multiple teams could call BINGO on any game.  We started as a group of 6, but split into two teams of 3 so that we’d have twice as many chances on the game cards.  You needed one person dedicated to reading the names that scrolled on the screen and two players to scan the cards for the song names and artists and mark the squares.  We have never worked so hard or intensely on a cruiseship game event.  We managed to mark a BINGO, but were out-called by another team by seconds.  The prizes were bottles of champagne for each game.  We don’t think we’ll be doing that game any more because it was so complex and intense.

Because St. Vincent is where the Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed, the ship had a Pirate party following the music Bingo, so we stuck around to see what that would be.  Then club band played Caribbean dance music while entertainment director’s staff were dressed in Pirate gear and engaging people to come up and dance on the stage.  They then offered raffle tickets to anyone who came down to the stage and danced.  Boy, that filled up the dance floor pretty quick.  As it got louder, we took that as our cue to move on.  

We attended the late show in the Princess Theatre which featured a “Female Impressionist” Karen Grainger, who was funny and entertaining.  She did a number of songs by artists like Celine Dion, Barbara Streisand, Cher and Tina Turner while changing wigs and putting on exaggerated stage moves characteristic for each artist.  

Tomorrow we arrive at Grenada, where we have a UTV tour booked.  We will be sharing a side-by-side UTV, rather than riding individual ATV’s like we did in St. Maarten.  We hope the weather will be nicer, but the forecast is for more of the same- 77 degrees with scattered showers.  We’ll have to bring rain gear in addition to water shoes, sun hats, sun screen, sun glasses, beach towels and swim suits.