Jewel of the Caribbean- Saint Lucia

Sometimes you have got to go with the flow.

Our last day in the Caribbean and we had no plans except to wander out and see what happens.

By a fluke we found ourselves in a boat with four others heading for Marigot beach.

Raymond, the boatman wanted folk to make up numbers.
And we stepped forward.

"See that rock...that was in the Pirates of the Caribbean, that's where the skeleton was hanging."

Er... I've not seen "Pirates of the Caribbean".

As we approach Marigot Bay Raymond points to the huge villas perched on top on the clifftops.

" See that house up there? that's Oprah Winfrey's...and the one next to it Mick Jagger's and that round house belongs to George Forman (boxing champion)".

We begin to get the picture. We are in the playground of the rich and famous .

And it's free provided we buy a drink from the Doolittle restaurant, and yes this is the place where Rex Harrison made some of the Doolittle films.


By now we have got to know Raymond pretty well and he takes us to Walcott Square on our return from the beach .

The island has produced not one, but two, Nobel Prize winners.

Derek Alton Walcott was awarded Nobel prize for literature in 1992 and Sir William Arthur Lewis the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1979.

Carved on the bust of him in the square are the words:
"A country without the Arts is a cultural desert."

Across the road in the Catholic cathedral a wedding is taking place between a young Puerto Rican woman and a St. Lucian man. The bride's mother carries a golden broomstick though its symbolism is lost on us.

Raymond thinks it's a Puerto Rican custom.

He is aware of the growing discrepancy on the island between the very rich and the locals and he says its getting worse.
"They want to build another five star hotel."
In an attempt to chance the subsject from this very controversial subject I suggest St Lucia, in fact the whole of the Caribbean, deeply religious.

"Yes, that's what keeps us going."