St. Vincent & The Grenadines

Today we were the lone cruise ship in port. We did not book a tour for this island – if we ever come back here, we will definitely take one.

We started our day off with a lovely surprise on our balcony. As we were sitting there enjoying our coffee, I noticed something lying at the edge of our balcony. Since there was some fresh “bird poop” on the balcony, we thought that it was a dead bird. It turned out to be a dead fish! We presume that it was dropped by a bird flying overhead. An interesting first!

St. Vincent is a small, agricultural island – completely volcanic, although there is evidence of living coral along the other side of the pier where we docked. Apparently there are also sea urchins in that area as you can see from the sign.

We chose to walk into the town, which is called Kingstown. We needed some cash and the ABM onboard is broken. Graham stopped a local on the street where the bank was and Ronnie decided that Graham should not be pushing me on the extremely uneven sidewalks that frequently ended briefly and did not provide a ramp. I quickly found myself being pushed along in the street directly at traffic – quite disconcerting and, at times, a little frightening, however, I survived. Ronnie spent about 2 hours with us showing us his city and his culture. We saw places that I’m sure that most of the people on the ship didn’t see. He took us to the local market – much of what they grow and sell, we didn’t recognize. It is obvious that this country has a thriving agricultural economy. St. Vincent exports produce to many of the other Caribbean islands and apparently grows about 90% of the world’s arrowroot.

Ronnie also took us to the local fish market, the Anglican church and through the middle of a political demonstration – have no idea specifically what it was about, however the signs indicated that there is a piece of legislation being voted on today that many islanders do not agree with. 

Back at the ship, I scheduled another massage and spent part of the afternoon being pampered. Dinner and the casino – no dancing tonight. The casino was kind to Graham, but not so kind to me. We are, however, shill playing with Princesses’ money. 

Last night, I was fortunate enough to be drawn as the Wild card player in the Blackjack tournament. I was the only woman at the table (with the exception of the dealer). While I didn’t win, at the end of the tournament I was still at the table and I still had chips. There were only 4 of us left out of 7, so I guess that I “held my own”. Free T-shirt, yah!!