First impressions - based on the view from our balcony - are of a pretty, tropical island but I understand that this one is also quite commercialised, of course aiming at the tourist trade.
Paul and I have booked a shore excursion to St Johns - another island in the US Virgin Islands. It's supposedly not as commercialised and is largely a National Park, along with a couple of expensive resorts and some private housing (I gather generally owned by the rich and famous).
It's going to be quite hot today, but the trip is only 4 hours so we should survive. I hope.
If you click on the photo above you can just see an arrow pointing at our cabin. This ship is simply enormous!!
This is the dock at St Thomas just as we arrived.
Same dock a few hours later.
OK, we're back now. It was a very hot day - even the local tour guide commented on the heat. Anyway, the first part of the trip was a 45 minute ferry ride from St Thomas to St Johns. I have no idea why it didn't occur to me to take a seasickness tablet, but as it happened I was ok, although the ride was fairly choppy. The tour guide on the ferry pointed out some homes of famous people etc and also talked a bit about the history of the islands (not much though)
We got off the ferry and into our tour bus - there must be hundreds of these things on both islands - commonly a Ford F100 or something similar with a few rows of seats in the back and a roof overhead, but no sides. Still, it wasn't too uncomfortable. Basically he took us around part of the island, showing us some resorts, beaches, and various bits of really lovely scenery. It was a little too much like an advertisement to try to encourage people to buy houses on the island - I'd like to have been given more information about the history and geography of the island but I can only assume that sort of information isn't really appreciated by the passengers on Caribbean cruises.
There are iguanas everywhere!
Trunk Bay - claims to be one of the 10 most beautiful beaches in the world.
One interesting piece of information - the normal price for milk in the US is around $2 to $3 per gallon; on the island it costs anywhere from $9 to $12. On the other hand, you can get rum for around $3 per gallon on the island.
We then went back to the dock for the ferry ride back to St Thomas. There were four separate tour groups who had caught the same ferry, and we were all supposed to be there in time for the ferry to leave at 2pm, but one of the tours was about 15 minutes late. As it happened, this was a crucial 15 minutes, as a tropical storm started pelting down on us just as the ferry docked. There was no-where to run - and actually I didn't really want to as first because it was so cool. Unfortunately, by the time we got through security, most of us had already gotten pretty wet, and there was a fault in the roof right over the exit door from security and water was just pouring down on us.
Anyway, we finally got onto the ship and back to the cabin, by which time the rain had stopped. We'd have been fine if it wasn't for that 15 minute delay - it's not a huge drama except that it's so hard to dry your clothes on this ship - there's no self service laundry so the only option is to send it off to be washed (not cheap!! - and anyway, you still have to do something with it until they pick it up) or to hang it all around the cabin, which isn't so good for dripping wet things.
We've got all the wet stuff on the balcony for now, but we'll have to bring it inside later as you really can't leave stuff on the balcony while the ship is underway :-)
On the brighter side, when we came back to our cabin we were greeted by some early "Happy Birthday" decorations:
We were all supposed to be on board by 5:30pm today, for sail-away at 6pm. There was always a risk of problems, because the 5:30pm they're talking about is ships time. However, local time is an hour earlier, and as Paul found out today, your phone is just as likely to automatically set itself to local time. I don't know if that's what happened, but I do know that a bunch of about 50 passengers got off a ferry and onto the ship at about 10 to 6. I was a bit surprised that the captain waited for them; I guess it was probably less of a drama here as it's only a fairly short trip to our next stop. They certainly copped a stack of ironic cheers (and actually, some not so polite jeers) from people already onboard. Anyway, we got underway only a little late.
Paul and I are going to try the main dining room for dinner tonight, for the first time. However, we didn't have lunch until around 4:35 so we are going to leave dinner for a while yet :-)
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