Day 4 St. Lucia

View of St. Lucia from the ship.
St. Lucia reminded me a lot of Japan with the green covered hills, the humidiy, bamboo, the narrow streets, and the ditches off to the side of them.

Another brightly colored building with a Japanese style shingled roof.

We went on a tour to Lushan forest and medicinal garden in the morning.
This is what most people on the island used to live in. Basically a grass hut with dirt floors and walls made from woven tree branches.

The kitchen displaying bowls homemade out of coconut shells or clay.

Our tour guide Janelle spoke creole and taught us many words for the different huts and plants we saw. This is what a typical "restaurant" looked like back in the day.

The people here seemed very open about sexual things and Janelle wasn't a bit uncomfortable telling us about the various plants in the garden. I bet you didn't know that bay leaf could act as an herbal viagra, or alleviate mentrual cramps did you? Or that ginger can actually slow sexual libido? I bet you also didn't know that they named a tree "Bwa Koko Kawet," when roughly translated means "turtle testicals." And Janelle definitely wasn't afraid to explain why they call the flower below the "sex flower." I was quite taken back by her forwardness, but had to laugh about it.

Ooohhh....deep in the rainforest.....

Coconut shells decorating the garden.

A pile of coconuts. Janelle asked Mike to break one open over a rock and then we got to drink the coconut water inside and then eat the flesh of the coconut. Janelle also let us sample various fruits from the garden including grapefruit, mango, wax apple, and golden apple.

Our taxi took us to this local beach before heading back to the ship for the day. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of it.

This island was beautiful but it was also quite an eye opener for us. There were so many people living in poverty in little shacks with tin roofs. We were bombarded by people everywhere we went begging for us to buy something from them. They thrive on the tourism. It kind of made me feel like a douchebag because I just got the impression that some of the people looked at us like rich snobby "whiteys" from America, especially when we couldn't buy stuff from them. This was the one part of our vacation I had a hard time with. A feeling of not truly being welcomed by the locals in Barbados and St. Lucia was something Mike and I both experienced. And seeing some of the living conditions there made us very sad.