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| Noah Regrets and Buckskin Lily at Shirley Heights Overlook, Antigua |
Greetings, all, from somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean! As promised, I will be blogging weekly for the next seven weeks. Noah and I spent the first week of our cruise island hopping. After boarding our ship, the Royal Princess, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on February 2, we spent the first two days at sea acclimating to our new environment. That was followed by four consecutive days of island adventures.
First stop was Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas in the U. S. Virgin Islands (on February 5th). If you've been following our adventures, you know we had just visited this island last week while on our 7-day "fill-in" cruise between the Panama Canal and South America. During our first visit, we took an island tour and got the "lay of the land." So...on this, our second visit, we knew exactly what we wanted to do: go snorkeling at Trunk Bay on the nearby island of St. John (also in the U. S. Virgin Islands).
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| Trunk Bay Beach, St. John, U. S. Virgin Islands (stock photo) |
Sadly, there are no photos of our excursion that day because of issues with the Go Pro. (The photo above is a stock shot of Trunk Bay from the Internet. It looked just like that--except there were a LOT more people when we visited). However, I can still give you a quick run-down of events. Our trip involved a taxi ride to the Red Hook Ferry Dock, a 20-minute ferry ride from St. Thomas to St. John, then another taxi ride to Trunk Bay--and on the way back we had to do all of that again in reverse order!
The big draw for us was the snorkel trail at Trunk Bay. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a bit of a let down. There were supposed to be cement markers with plaques on them leading snorkelers along the trail and describing things of interest. Like this:
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| Snorkel Trail markers |
Sadly, only two plaques were extant, and they were covered with sea plants, making them unreadable. The snorkeling wasn't the best, either. The water was rather murky and there wasn't much sea life to observe, though we did see an eel and a large green puffer fish. Those were the highlights--along with the pretty white sand beach.
The next day (February 6th), our port was St. John's, Antigua--not to be confused with the island of St. John in the Virgin Islands that we visited the day before! In Antigua, we took an independent tour of the island with a local guide named Earl. For $20/person (discounted because of the cruddy weather), we got a 2 1/2-hour tour that ended up being a 5-hour tour. We saw everything there is to see on Antigua.
One of the first landmarks we visited was St. Barnabas Anglican Church which was built in the 17th century and is one of the oldest church buildings in the Western hemisphere.
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| Buckskin Lily in front of St. Barnabas Church, Antigua |
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| Buckskin Lily & cannon at Nelson's Dockyard, Antigua |
From Nelson's Dockyard, we were driven to Shirley Heights Lookout which was the site of a military complex. Remains of the fortifications and other buildings are still standing and/or falling down--depending. Here's a pano of English Harbor from the heights:
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| English Harbor from Shirley Heights, Antigua |
And a picture of Noah at the magazine:
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| Noah at the magazine |
Here's a picture of the inside of the magazine (because I think it looks neat!)
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| Inside of the magazine, Shirley Heights, Antigua |
We finished up our tour of Shirley Heights with a visit to the Dow's Hill Interpretive Center where we watched a unique multimedia presentation on Antigua's history. Earl then took us on a drive through the agricultural district and along the beach before returning us to the cruise dock. It was a long, but interesting day.
The next day (February 7th), we were in Barbados. I wasn't feeling my best for some reason, so I took it easy and relaxed on the ship. We did venture out to the cruise terminal and the craft market. I bought a new dress for wearing to dinner & a few bottles of good, strong ginger beer (non-alcoholic, but chock full of spicy, gingery goodness)...and that was about it.
Finally, our last island before actually reaching South America was Trinidad which we visited on February 8th. I was feeling much better and really wanted to visit the bird sanctuary to see the scarlet ibises that live there. Our research on the bird sanctuary said you needed to make reservations ahead of time (which we hadn't done), but undaunted, we debarked and got to work figuring out how to get there. After a few false starts, we found a lady in the tourist office who was able to call and secure us a spot on a tour boat. She then hooked us up with two other ladies from the ship who were going to the same place, so we decided to go together and split the cab fare.
Here I am about to hop on the tour boat at the sanctuary:
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| Buckskin at the Caroni Swamp Bird Sanctuary, Trinidad |
We cruised through the mangrove swamp looking for birds:
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| Caroni Swamp, Trinidad |
And were lucky enough to see several scarlet ibises (the national bird of Trinidad). It was a bit tricky getting a photo of them, but I managed to get one decent picture:
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| Scarlet ibis in Caroni Swamp, Trinidad |
We also saw a number of other birds including egrets, herons, and flamingos.
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| Egret, Caroni Swamp, Trinidad |
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| Heron, Caroni Swamp, Trinidad |
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| Flamingo Trio, Caroni Swamp, Trinidad |
We also saw a couple of boa constrictors up in the trees. Here is the best photo I was able to get:
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| Tree boa, Caroni Swamp, Trinidad |
Finally, here's my attempt at being artistic: it's some mangrove prop roots reflected in the still swamp water:
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| Mangrove prop roots reflecting in the water |
And...that's all folks...for the first week of the cruise, anyhow! Next week we will be stopping at three Brazilian ports: Fortaleza, Salvador, and Rio de Janeiro with some sea days in between each (Brazil is a rather large country, I've come to discover. It's 5th in the world in terms of area, so it will take a while to get to all of it). Anyhow, until next time, keep having fun!
Bye for now!
Love,
Buckskin Lily
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