Still in Rodney Bay

Wind Charger
Bob and Elizabeth Frearson
Sat 5 May 2012 21:18
We awoke again this morning to the trilling of the swallow like bird who uses the adjacent boat as his singing post.  Lovely. 
As suspected Lawrence’s tomorrow yesterday doesn’t actually occur until Monday but Ulrich is back (hooray) so common sense has returned and the ineffectual Richard can go back to dozing in the sunshine. 
With nothing to be done about the dodgy engine until Monday, and not having to hang around waiting for Lawrence who wasn’t going to appear, we decided to get a bit of sightseeing under our belts.  We hired a car (which took a long Caribbean time because the colleague had gone off with the licences book and the printer would only print smiley faces) and headed off with 2 different maps certain that we would find our way despite the warning that there weren’t many signposts on St Lucia.  There aren’t any signposts on St Lucia!  Our first intended stop was the zip lining in the rainforest which we found more through luck than judgement (marked in one place on one map and somewhere different on second map).  Having completed this feat of exploration, we found it was closed today because of “the lack of tourists this time of the year”. It will be open tomorrow apparently, if this isn’t a Lawrence tomorrow.
We then made our way to the turtle watching beach but never found it and ended up going round in a big circle back to the village of Babonneau which does appear on both maps but in different places.  On the way we saw some classic St Lucian homes with piglets, chickens, dogs and even a cat with a litter of kittens.  By this time we were desperate for a bit of lunch so headed to the purportedly touristy outskirts of Castries.  We found the Plantation House – closed, the Batik Centre – closed - in the Historic Area of Morne Fortune (on just one of the maps). 
In despair we just headed down hill until we bumped into the island capital Castries, which is hard to miss and parked in a somewhat dodgy street.  However the dodgy street led us to the Cathedral (we just popped in because there was a funeral going on, 80 year old government official with 14 children apparently according to the chatty man beside us and his small boy who had a box of chicks – alive.  The singing was amazing and added to the incredible atmosphere of a packed church decorated in a traditional West Indian way), the amazing market with hundreds of people selling an identical array of fruit and veg and was close to a local restaurant which once you had got past the razor wire and smelly loos turned out to serve the best,  most delicious fish we have had in the Caribbean. It only costs £10 for 4 beers and two enormous platefuls. I asked what fish it was.  The waitress replied dolphin.  I thought she was kidding.  She wasn’t, argh.
We found our way back to the marina and are now flopped under the fans gathering some energy to go out this evening.  It seems such a good opportunity to go further afield with the car and to be quite honest, once you have eaten in every restaurant in the Marina complex a change would be good.