Wednesday 18th November

Up early today as we had to all go through US Immigration as we had arrived at St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. All went well & we were off the ship by 9 to find, surprise, surprise, another area of shops promoting the same range of goods as we had seen at the last ports. We were accosted by Franco who told us of his super value island tour & called in his wife who was driving the taxi truck. She took us into town & arranged to meet us there at 11.15. One of the oddest features of the island is that they drive on the left but all the vehicles are LH drive. The good news is that the roads are too narrow to overtake but it is all a bit weird.

After a hard hour looking at diamonds, jewellery & watches etc we had a coffee unfortunately in the inevitable poly cups & wandered empty handed to the meeting point for the island tour. Brenda drove & Franco did the commentary which was very illuminating. The island was collared by the Danes after passing through French & British hands & was another great slaving centre for the sugar industry. It was sold by the Danish Government, along with 2 others to the US in 1917 for $25million, as they were worried that the Germans wanted to buy them.

One of its most famous inhabitants was Francis Drake, who could watch the movement of the Spanish ships & at this point we could see several of the neighbouring islands. On the grass just below we could see a local iguana about 80cm in length grazing & most handsome he was. At the very highest point of about 1100m there is another viewing point at the edge of a huge shopping barn selling down market clothes & souvenirs. Unfortunately the heat haze was quite pronounced but the view was spectacular.

d*** was pleased with himself as he climbed the 99 (103 actually) steps, to see Black beard's castle, without too much trouble. It surprised us that only 6 of us did the climb out of about 20 on board the taxi truck. The reward was to sample some of the local flavoured rums. We tried banana rum which was very pleasant.

Eventually we reached Coki Point, one of the island’s beaches & here we left some behind before returning to the ship via a huge K-mart to allow others to buy local grog. It was an excellent excursion for us geriatric travellers.

In port were 4 cruise ships, 2 from NCL, 1 Royal Caribbean & on the other side of the town, a Holland America ship in splendid isolation. Also there were 5 mega yachts including Rising Sun which is 138m in length. The island, like so many others in the Caribbean, seems to be entirely dependent on these floating holiday camps for its income & it was interesting to hear, from people on other ships, that it is all built on the short cruises taken by Americans from the east coast ports.