Our House

We have been at our new base in Soufriere for nearly three weeks now – how time flies! Soufriere is in the middle of the West coast of St. Lucia ; right in the heart of the Soufriere Marine Management Area (SMMA) around which my work is based. Soufriere is also right next to the most iconic structures in St. Lucia: the Piton mountains. They are really grand with steep sides and the stick right out of the sea and the (already quite mountainous) landscape. There are a few hotels in town and a couple of resorts nearby but mainly it is a quiet, local town. Tourists arrive to the dock on catamaran sailboats and get straight onto buses which take them to the various land based attractions in the area.

Our apartment is just on the outskirts of town in a nice ‘estate’ of big houses. It’s part of the downstairs of one of these big houses and is really nice. We have two bedrooms, a small bathroom (with hot water) and a large living room/kitchen. We have kept the luxuries of cable TV and there’s WiFi internet every so often! And the rent is pleasingly cheap. Our view is less dramatic than in Castries as we are inland. But instead we can see one of the many lush, green St. Lucian mountains rising up in the distance.

One of the attractions that we have visited so far is just down the road from us. The Diamond Botanical Gardens, waterfall & mineral baths is a 5 minute stroll along a road surrounded by trees. The gardens themselves are filled with lots of colourful flowers and interesting plants. It’s also really peaceful and a nice place to spend a Sunday afternoon. We spent all out time taking photos of the flowers and watching the birds fly around. The water in the falls contains chemicals from the volcano and rocks upstream and deposits give it an orange tinge. The waterfall is a movie star – it was featured in a Superman film. Although we didn’t partake there are two artificial pools where you can bathe in the mineral rich water. There were originally baths there since the time of Louis XIV but these were destroyed in the French Revolution.

Today we went to two of the other main attractions near to Soufriere. First was the sulphur springs or as it is known in the brochures: “the World’s only drive in volcano”. Although it is a an active volcano because there is hot magma inside it isn’t your traditional cone shape. Instead it’s a caldera which is a big basin many km across. At the spot we visited there were boiling pools of water and mud; fed by both fresh and sea water. It was raining too so there was lots of steam about. Nowadays there is a viewing platform but in the past guides took people out onto the rock. That was until a guide fell in to his waist in boiling mud (although he did survive this ordeal).

After the volcano we went to the springs and mud bath. Here was a big pool with hot sulphurus water that was coming from those in the volcano. There were many advantages to going on a rainy day. First we almost had the place to ourselves (being quite early before the busloads of tourists helped too), second the water was flowing and so didn’t get too hot. We also had some fun covering ourselves with the light grey mud which is meant to be great for your skin. We left it to dry and then washed it off in the pool. Getting out of the warm water and into the wind and rain was really difficult.

Our next stop was the Morne Coubaril Estate. This estate is owned by a family that live on Martinique. We were shown some traditional houses and how cocoa beans, sugar cane and coconuts are processed to make all manner of useful things.

Finally we went to a restaurant that had a buffet lunch with lots of yummy Caribbean food. I tried everything including breadfruit and plantain. The desserts were the best though. There were homemade cupcakes, cheesecake and bread and butter pudding. They also had tamarind sweets that were great and reminded me of the Philippines!

After our funday sunday it's back to work tomorrow.

Abi
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