Day 8--St. Thomas

The day started off very rainy but Ray, our cruise director from South Africa (so it is pronounced DIE-rec-tor) said that it typically rains for about a half hour and then clears up. Sure enough, like clockwork, the rain was turned off so that we all could begin the day.

We had breakfast at Cabanas again, and I must admit that I really really was enjoying their muesli during the trip. I have no idea if I’ve had muesli before, but this stuff was really tasty. I still felt pretty stuffed up, but we had a morning tour that I didn’t want to miss—a trip out to Coral World and then a stop at a butterfly garden.

We got our tickets and headed on down to get on the shuttles for the 20-minute journey to the other side of the island. The shuttle busses were quite something to see. Think about if you took an old VW bus and cut away everything that wasn’t roof or floor and a couple pieces of metal to support the roof—that’s what these were like. Thank goodness it wasn’t raining or we would have been soaked!

Our driver was a man named Jabba (like the Hutt, he said). He pointed out that even though St. Thomas is part of the U.S., they drive European style (i.e., on the “wrong” side of the road). What’s amusing is that their cars are American-style. He mentioned we’d be going on some very narrow roads, but realistically it wasn’t as bad as he suggested, mostly because we stuck to the main roads. We did go up some pretty steep cliffs, but that gave some great views of the island on the way up.

Coral World is a small tourist attraction on the far side of the island. For the most part, the big draw is some of the extras you can pay for, like wading with stingrays or swimming with sea lions. Because we had Lily with us, we didn’t do any of those offerings, but just spent our time wandering around and looking at the exhibits, which meant lots of fish. We were scheduled to be there an hour and a half, and that was plenty of time to see the whole place. About an hour into it, Lily had a total meltdown: screaming, kicking, the works. Yes, she turned two that day. Part of it was that it was incredibly humid, but she also was starting to come down with the “cruise crud” that I was dealing with.

The good news about her having a meltdown was that our tablemates from dinner were there and got to see that Lily does act like a toddler from time to time, so the “perfect angel” at dinner isn’t the sum total of her being.

We got back to the shuttle at the appropriate time, but some of the folks were missing. Jabba explained that he needed people to give their names and stateroom numbers in case his boss asked questions, and people were very happy to do so to head on back.

One great thing about the way Jabba did his tour guide bit is that he didn’t pull punches about what life on the island was like. Down at the docks, it was what you would expect from a tourist trap. Think outlet shopping type of experience in very small specialty stores and you’ve got the Havensight shopping district. Once you drive a few miles inland, things change a lot, and suddenly paradise is a second-world country—not as bad as Haiti or Jamaica or whatever, but shocking to some people on board. Given that I lived in one of the least desirable parts of the DC suburbs for a few years, it wasn’t that unnerving to me. We got stared down by day laborers, got to see a superfund sight that has not been cleaned up yet (but hopefully will be cleaned up soon—according to the sign, stimulus money will fund it), and we saw what Jabba referred to as the ghettos. If you take the back of a semi trailer and divide it in half, put some windows in it, you’ve got one of the ghetto duplexes. What was interesting to see is that the federally funded low-income housing all had solar panels on top, and it looked like they had a water tank on top.

Jabba explained that part of the challenge that the USVI has is that, like DC, they have to pay federal taxes but get no voting representation in Congress, so things can become very bad very quickly there. What happens a lot is that people will come into St. Thomas from countries like Haiti or Jamaica and try to find a bride. If they can get married and stay married for 3 years, they can apply and become a full-fledged U.S. citizen and then move freely to the U.S. Backdoor citizenship marriages are very common, and so while the day laborers are waiting out on the roadsides for jobs, they are also willing to look for a wife among tourists driving by if the opportunity would present itself. I think Jabba’s honesty unnerved some of the people on the shuttle—he didn’t get tipped as well as some of the other transportation services that we saw.

Back near the port, we visited the butterfly gardens. Out front they had a bird show with a half dozen parrots and cockatiels. Lily thought the birds were hilarious, especially the cockatiel that loved to go around and around and around on a stick. After the brief show, we went inside the butterfly garden. We opted not to do the tour part of it, but just wandered on our own. I think that we could have stayed there for hours and Lily would have been happy. She was fascinated by butterflies and loved looking around for the very rare blue butterflies. Unfortunately because it had rained that morning, the ground was pretty muddy and daddy had to carry her, so we only stayed about a half hour. By that point she was getting pretty tired, too.

We went back on board ship, grabbed a bite to eat, and then (since again she was not looking like she needed to nap), took a trip into Havensight to buy liquor (Rum Jumbie…more for the bottle than the rum in it) and drugs (zyrtec for my now fully blown head cold). Thankfully there was a Medicine Shoppe in Havensight, so was able to show my ID and get the meds. The price was certainly a bit of sticker shock. We also hit a few other stores, got the rum, and got some neat food stuff at a gourmet store. Lily fell asleep in the stroller while we walked, and we headed back on board the ship.

Shopping in Havensight was less fun than it was in St. Maarten, partially because there was a second cruise ship in port—one of the Royal Caribbean ones. While we were walking back, we heard the ship do seven short blasts and one long blast of the ship’s horn. From our muster drill when we first got on board, we knew that meant for people to get to muster stations. I don’t know if they were doing a drill (maybe after picking up new people in St. Thomas?), but it didn’t seem that there was an emergency. No clue what the captain of that ship had in mind, but I guarantee that our ship’s horn could totally outdo his horn. I had hoped there’d be a ship horn dual, but no such luck.

That night we were assigned to go back to the Royal Court, but I wasn’t really that hungry. I asked Erwin to go down and take a look at the menu real quick to see if anything was of appeal. He did, and none of it sounded “must have”, so we let Lily sleep as much as she wanted and then headed up to deck 11.

We were too early for Cabanas dinner service, and we really didn’t feel like sitting through a table service meal anyhow, so we grabbed burgers from Flo’s. Although the food on board was amazing, about halfway through it was a good idea to take a break from it. Later on we decided to order room service (the cheese plate) just to see how the experience was. Let me tell you, having free (well, aside from gratuity) 24-hour room service…good grief, that’s awesome.

Room service--Yay!

That night after dinner, we did a bit of wandering around the ship but opted to call it an early night. After we put Lily to bed, Erwin and I each took some time to wander around on top of the ship. By the time it was my turn to go out, we had run into some rough seas. That was the only time on the ship I felt a little weird about the motion (aside from the learning curve the first night). I took the elevator up to deck 11 to get some tea, and it seemed like the elevator was rocking a little too much for my enjoyment. I decided that if I made it up to deck 11 in one piece, I’d walk down the stairs. That was a lot of fun for me because I got to check out some of the great Enchanted Art in the midship hallways. I came back with some chocolate chip cookies, and we got ready for bed. The next day was a sea day, and I wanted to rest up to hopefully feel better in the morning.