We meet at 5:40 and started hiking through the forests, farms, and eventually hit 5 different beaches over 3 hour hike. Along the way he gave me some great information on nature in St. Lucia and I was able to sample many different plants including fresh banana, citronella, cinnamon, plums, sugar cane, and several other things that were all delicious. The banana's especially in St. Lucia were delicious and it's amazing the difference in banana fresh off the tree vs what we get in the store which is picked days or weeks before it's ripe and ready to be eaten.
Some pictures of the beaches / views along our sunset hike are below.
After the hike we ended back at Lorraine's and after a quick lunch met up with Peter my tour guide and driver for the afternoon. We started by heading to Vieux Fort which is the southern most city of the island and the top of hill with a great view of the entire island. St. Lucia is beautiful with the clear blue water and lush green vegetation everywhere, pictures from this view point are below.
After taking some pictures of the island we drove to Soufries on the western side of the island and on the Caribbean coast. Our first stop was sulfur springs and the worlds only drive in volcano. Like many islands in the Caribbean St. Lucia was formed by volcanic eruptions but unlike many of the other islands the volcano on St. Lucia is still active. Even more unusual is they let you actual drive into the crater of this volcano and check it out close up. After buying tickets my driver dropped me off in the crater and a tour guide escorted me to see this:
The volcano is still active but certainly not expecting an eruption anytime soon; talk about bad PR if tourists got caught in an eruption! The steam you see are scalding hot gases being released containing various elements including sulfur which discolors the rocks and turns them into something quite beautiful you will see later. The water / liquid in you see bubbling is very hot, with most pools between 200 and 400 degrees.
Also in Sulfur Springs are the mud baths which were apparently featured on a recent episode of The Bachelor with a couple Jake & Vienna; having never seen the show I have no idea if this is true... Anyway the water coming out of the volcano is infused with various minerals / elements that allegedly have healing properties for any number of ailments including skin issues. I asked my tour guide if that included sunburn since I was a lovely shade of red after a couple of days in the St. Lucian said. She said absolutely which was good enough for me so I headed down to the mud baths and changed into my bathing suit. Below are a couple pictures of what the mud baths looked like.
I slowly eased my way into the mud baths not knowing exactly what to expect with dark volcano water infused with lots of gases / elements. What I found was incredibly hot water that I could barely stay into. I tried getting into the water slowly starting with my feet, calves, knees, etc and found I could only get up to about my waist before it was so hot I had to get out and let my skin recover. This frustrated me immensely and tried different approaches again and again but just couldn't stay in the water for any length of time. I found the security guard and asked her if people actually get in the mud baths or am I just such a wimp the hot mud water is too much for my skin. She looked at me like I was crazy and said “Nobody gets in during the heart of the day, water is much too hot... People go in the early morning or early evening when the water is much cooler.” After hearing that I wondered why nobody mentioned that to me when entering the mud bath area but that was water under the bridge at this point.
However, I still wanted to test out the medicinal properties of this water / mud which supposedly work by coating your body with this mud at the bottom of the pool. I found a water bottle and used it to scoop the mud from the pool and liberally coated myself with the magic healing mud. The security officer was nice enough to take the picture below with my thick coating of mud.
Quick shower to wash off the mud and I was off to my next destination, the Soufries Botanical Gardens and Diamond Falls. The botanical gardens were beautiful and featured tropical plants and flowers native to St. Lucia. Below is a picture of one my favorite tropical flowers in the garden.
Also in the Soufries Botanical Gardens is Diamond Falls which is probably the most famous waterfall in St. Lucia. The water here is the same water that is infused with the sulfur and mud from the volcano and the chemicals in the water are the reason the rocks around Diamond Falls are discolored. Notice the bright colors behind the falls and how dark / muddy the water is.
After leaving Diamond Falls we headed to a couple view points to see the Pitons of St. Lucia. The Pitons are two volcanic plugs that were formed many years ago by volcanic activity and are pretty high mountains for a tropical island. There are two pitons Gros and Petit both over 2000 feet tall. They are both UNESCO world heritage sites and quite beautiful. Below are a couple shots of them including a sunset picture of Gross Piton. I had hoped to hike Gros Piton on this trip but it's a far more difficult hike than I had imagined and would probably take 6 hours with a couple thousand feet of elevation gain in a short hike.
Sunset overlooking the Caribbean.
After sunset, Peter and I drove back to Lorraine's where he dropped me for the night and made plans to meet back up at 5 AM for my last day in St. Lucia. As always thank you for reading my blog and if you have any questions or comments please post below or email me at chris@pricelessperspectives.com
Great pictures..keep 'em coming ! St Lucia is beautiful !
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