Friday 5th February

St Lucia

The sun came out first thing this morning and cast its magic over our day. St Lucia (they call it Saint Loo-sha) looked as lovely as we could have hoped as we travelled over it on our bus tour.

It felt more prosperous than Antigua - we saw teams of people mending roads even though they were already in pretty good condition. It seems a peaceful, gentle, happy place although, to be fair, maybe that was partly because it looked so very good in sunlight.

The bus set off at 8.30am down the western side of the island, with a couple of stops for photos and toilets along the way. The guide in our bus was unusually interesting and informative and, at our stop at the Botanical Gardens really came into her own with her

explanations of the vegetation we could see around us. There was a table laid out with many types of local fruit, half of which we probably couldn't have confidently identified, which she took us through in a sort of 'Show and Tell'.

The island has a gently active volcano on the south-western coast at La Soufriere, with bubbling, sulphurous mud pools and a pervasive stench of Hydrogen Sulphide - it's one of those rare occasions when Gill envied my lack of sense of smell. Everyone else seemed to

find it hard to cope with but, frankly, it does worry me that one day I'll be found somewhere flat on my face, suffocated by the noxious gas that everyone else fled from but that I was unaware of.

Near La Soufriere on the coast is a World Heritage Site. Les Pitons are a pair of jagged peaks 2,000 feet hight and covered with trees - very impressive, as I hope my photos will show! At lunchtime we boarded a catamaran that was to take us back to the Constellation in the capital, Castries. First we had a surprisingly delicious buffet meal before setting off, stopping in a quiet bay on the way back for those who fancied a dip. This was a tour that Gill found heavily recommended in her guide books, and we can only agree with the journalists responsible - a cracking day out.

This evening we set off at 6pm for Barbados, even though it's only 100 miles away and we don't arrive there for fourteen hours. Gill thinks that maybe these ports of call aren't quite as peaceful as we'd like to think once dusk falls and that for safety reasons the cruise lines prefer to pull out before dark. I think she must be right, even though the cynic in me still wonders if another factor might be that they want passengers in the on-board shops and casino spending lots of cash - these facilities have to be closed when the ship's in port.

As for the casino, the Methodist in me recoils from the sight of huge numbers of one-armed bandits and gaming tables. Scarily, yesterday's bulletin for passengers proudly announced that over $57,000 had been paid out in winnings on this cruise so far!