St. Lucia Day #3

Welcome back to my Sandals Grande St. Lucian trip recap! Still with me? Thanks for hanging in there!

Day 3 was definitely our busiest day on the resort. In my last post, I mentioned that we did a few excursions that were not owned and operated by Sandals, and on this day, we did one that Sandals at least endorses. The others were just random people on the beach. 

Thank the good Lord we didn't end up sold into slavery. 

I thank these muscles for that:

{His, not mine. Obvs}

Back to the tour. We did the Simon Say's tour. I linked to the TripAdvisor reviews. If you read any bad ones, ignore them. It was awesome! Also, I know that's a typo, but that's the way they spelled it. Drives me a little bonkers to have that on my blog, but I want need to be accurate.

This tour picked us up on one of the piers at the resort (next to where BIL rented the Hobie Cats). It took us first on a tour of some of the inlets around the island, then snorkeling in Anse Chastenet, then onto to see Petit and Gran Piton, the twin mountains of St. Lucia. After that we went to Soufriere to see the drive-in volcano, and then the owner took us all to his house for a lunch of local food. 

I have a bajillion pictures from this day, so I'm going to do my best to hit the highlights. If you are considering a trip to St. Lucia and want to see more pics, email me at MrsMatched at gmail dot com and I'll get some to you! 

{Us on the boat}

{Wise words, Simon. Wise words}

{View of Sandals Regency La Toc}

{The boat owned by the "richest local." He apparently is in real estate sales and development.}

{I soooo wish I could remember the name of this inlet. It was the prettiest place on the island!}

This is a resort that they call "Check In, Check Out." It looked super nice, but the developers didn't take into consideration that there was no beach for it! People check in, realize there's no beach, then check out and go to a different resort. Oops.}

This inlet, being the prettiest on the island, is home to a few celebrities. The movie Dr. Dolittle was filmed in this area (the original, not the Eddie Murphy version). Here are some pics I took of the houses that supposedly are owned by celebrities.

{Can you make out the circular roof of the house on the left? That's George Foreman's house.}

{This HUGE house- it even looked huge from our FAR distance- was still under construction. You might be able to faintly see some scaffolding around it. Rumor has it that it's being built by Oprah. This is as close as I'll probably ever get to Ms. O!}

Our first stop was snorkeling in Anse Chastenet. 

See those black sand beaches? That's from volcanic ash. There are two exceptional things about this beach for me. 

1) There's a resort up on the mountain that rents for $2K/night. That's not all inclusive. That's nothing but a roof over your head, but that does NOT include walls. It's an open air resort, meaning that there is no wall separating you from the sea air. Loves that, but I also think $2K/night deserves 4 walls!

2) We have a good friend of ours who used to own a bungalow on this beach. Can you imagine??? The reason he no longer owns it? His ex-wife got it in the divorce. Lucky girl.

{This is where we snorkeled for the first time. It was a different experience than I was expecting. I thought the fins would make swimming a breeze, but I felt like they just weighed me down. I ended up grabbing a life jacket and putting it under my belly and just floating on the surface. MUCH more relaxing and fun that way.}

After Anse Chastenet (and a rum punch refill!), we headed out to see the St. Lucia landmarks of the Piton mountains. The local saying is that St. Lucia is the only female island.  Why? 

 

Here are the boobies:

{So now that's all I see when I look at those mountains}

We then headed to Soufriere, which if memory serves, is the capital of St. Lucia. I'm not 100% sure that's true, but it certainly seemed like the biggest city we saw while we where there. Castries was also a larger city, and I think that's where cruise ships disembark. I have heard some bad things about the Caribbean, and my travel agent told me that those stories typically come from people who have been on a cruise and been dropped off in some city and told to fend for themselves. After experiencing a resort vacation, and seeing what some of the cities would be like if I were dropped in the middle of them, I can see why some places get a bad rep.

 {This is Simon, owner of Simon Say's Tours}

{There was something about the American-looking Texaco sign and the Welcome to Soufriere sign that struck me. I had to have a pic. 

Fast fact about St. Lucia: There's a huge oil storage facility on the island that's owned by Hess oil. Which means Hess controls/owns all the oil and gasoline on the island, but there are no Hess stations on the island. That's a lucrative business, I imagine!}

{We saw this pirate ship a TON while we were on St. Lucia. Part of the second Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed here, and to capitalize on that, a company created pirate tours of the island. They came near our resort almost every day, shot off cannons and let people off the boat to hike to an old abandoned fort. I wish I had taken that tour, but it didn't pick up at our resort. We would have to go into one of the cities to be picked up. I'm sure that could be arranged easily, but we didn't do it. I regret that. I think this would have been really cool. But I'm a big Pirates fan, so maybe that's just me.}

Here's the Hubs and I in Soufriere.

Next we headed to some mineral baths. 

{There were 3 baths to dip in (#2 on the left, #3 on the right, no pics of #1) and they got hotter as you went. I thought these were hot, but I hadn't seen nuthin' yet!}

{This was a waterfall in bath #3}

On our way to the drive-through volcano, our driver suddenly stopped, jumped out of the van, and cut down a big cocoon-looking thing out of a tree. Turns out it was a cacao tree! This seed thingy is where chocolate comes from! We all tried some, and it tastes NOTHING like chocolate. More like a gooey SweeTart.

Now on to the drive-through volcano. 

I now know what Hell feels like.

We dipped ourselves into this boiling water pool. Honestly. So hot you wanted to hurt someone. Hot. OMG HOT. Curse Word Hot. Why-am-I-doing-this Hot. 

HOT.

We got out of the scalding water and went up to the area with the gray buckets. In there were bars of volcanic pumice that we covered our bodies with.

Seck-say, eh? 

Then we went BACK into the boiling water to wash this stuff off.

Nutso, I tell ya. 

Note to any future St. Lucia visitors. They told us 2,387,498 times not to wear white. There was a girl there who wore a completely white bikini. Idiot. I guarantee that thing is a dingy gray now, never to be white again. If someone tells you NOT to do something that many times, heed their advice.

{Hubs and I minus a few layers of skin, standing in front of an active volcano. See the steam? Apparently you used to be able to walk in it, until someone fell through. Eek.}

After the volcano, it was off to Simon's house for lunch. I remember rice, chicken, a pasta-ish salad, and bread. I think there was more but I don't remember it. They served a non-alcoholic punch, and all of use drank a few servings of that and bought a Piton from them to top us off. 

{Sis and I outside of Simon's house. What a view! His house was also surrounded by mango trees. How awesome would that be???}

On the way back to the boat, our driver had us stop at a roadside stand to buy local stuff. My BIL bought some homemade caramelized coconut candy. It was yummy! Wish I still had some!}

{View from the roadside stand}

We got back on the boat to go home.

 {A bat cave. The noise from this thing was deafening!}

That's the end of the tour (except for a little party on the boat when we got back to the resort). I have a video of the ride back home, but it's so wind-filled that it's probably too annoying to watch. If anyone requests it, though, I'll post it. 

I'll cut this post off now, since it's already a mile long. To get a feel for the boat party, download this song. Let me tell you, when the song says "Jump on the Boat" there was a PAR-TAY! 

You can also watch this video. This song was our St. Lucia anthem!

Hope you enjoyed this! I'll be back with more later!