Windjammer Nude Caribbean Cruise
Bequia
The little island of Bequia (pronounced BECK-wee) offered opportunities for shopping and fine dining and islands tours. None of the excursions in Bequia are clothing-optional, but we were able to go clothes-free while we remained on the ship. Dave and I didn’t see much of Bequia this trip, but we did go into town in the evening to enjoy the famous lobster and garlic pizza at Mac’s Pizza. During the day, we swam off the side of the boat and sunbathed on deck.
We took the island tour on our previous cruise in 2004 and it was very nice. Bequia was a whaling town and their whole economy was based on that. It’s still an important part of the island’s culture. International law permits Bequians to continue whaling. Local law forbids the catching of more than two whales per year because of concerns for the dwindling whale population.
The tour guide came from a family of whalers and he told us that over the past few years they’ve only been able to catch one whale if they were lucky. The whale hunts are conducted in a traditional way, which involves two men in a very small boat waiting for a whale to appear. The boat is powered by oars and the whaling harpoon is thrown by hand. If, prior to the whale’s appearance, the men have whiled away the hours by drinking beer or rum, the whale may in fact be in very little danger.
One of the stops on the tour was to the Old Hegg Turtle Sanctuary. The man who runs it used to hunt turtles for the trade in shells, meat and eggs until he realized that they were becoming endangered. He decided to dedicate his life to preserving them instead. One of the dangers to them is that people tend to raid their nests (for souvenirs or just to eat the eggs) and that was also seriously damaging the population counts. Part of his work is also now educating people about the turtle, so he welcomes tourists to come to his sanctuary to see the turtles and to learn about them. His sanctuary is a small, hand-built facility located literally in his back yard right on the beach; but he does an extremely good job with it. He’s built many concrete tanks for the baby turtles, has them all adequately piped to provide drainage and fresh seawater, he feeds them well and gives them good medical care. When they’re large enough he releases them back into the ocean. It’s very worth going to see!
St. Vincent
At St. Vincent there were several island tours offered. Dave and I took the “Jeep Safari” tour. It wasn’t really a safari in the African Grassland sense, we just got a nice tour of the island by riding in a couple of Land Rovers. It was a great tour, though. We had a tour guide sit in the back of the Rover with us who described local sights and answered our questions about the people, culture, and government of St. Vincent, while someone else drove.
The first thing we noticed as we left the dock and drove through St. Vincent’s capital, Kingstown, was the different way they drove there. They drive on the left side of the street there. The city streets were pretty congested, and although I tried, I couldn’t figure out the rules at intersections. Sometimes we stopped to yield the right of way to cross traffic and other times we got the right of way. There were few traffic lights, and I didn’t see any stop signs. I’m sure they have road rules, but I wasn’t able to figure all of them out just by observation. Once we got out of the city, the drive was a little easier. One thing that was clear was that if you want to pass someone, you give a little toot on your horn to warn them. Generally our driver would toot back an “OK”. There was lots of honking everywhere, but it was all friendly hellos and watch-outs and okays. Very different from American metro area honking!
The island of St. Vincent was gorgeous. I felt that the people were generally pretty nice and polite. One nice thing about this tour, and indeed most of St. Vincent, was that it wasn’t touristy. The people we came across and the things we saw were real people working, going to church, doing laundry, rebuilding homes, and socializing. Where they were set up for tourists, selling jewelry and t-shirts, they tended to sit with their merchandise and let you come to them. They’re definitely not the aggressive mercenaries like you find in Mexico, and we really appreciated that. Some of us bought trinkets or spices but we didn’t feel like we had to do that to defend ourselves!
The crux of the tour was a stop at a waterfall in the forest on the side of the volcano. That was pretty fun. I happened to wear socks and sneakers because I didn’t feel comfortable wearing my Teva sandals when hiking. (I knew there would be some light hiking.) That made things a tiny bit difficult because we had to walk through a couple of streams in order to get up to the waterfall. On the other hand, there were also some slippery rocks we had to get over also, so the Tevas wouldn’t have been good for that either. I ultimately got close enough to the waterfall to appreciate it’s beauty and mist, but not all the way up to it to jump in the pool. The guide seemed to think we were chickening out, but I didn’t want to get my shoes wet, and didn’t want to clamber over the slippery rocks barefoot either. It was okay, I still enjoyed it. A few of the folks who climbed up to the top spent a few minutes skinny-dipping in the pool and swimming under the water fall. The water was cold, though.
