Port 29 Castries, St Lucia

by Ed · March 8, 2022

Good morning! We slipped into Castries harbor on Sunday morning, Mar 6th, 2022. The harbor is buried deep in the island, so we get to see a lot of homes and businesses on the way.

Near the port we see a brand new Welcome Center at an old dock, but this appears to be a resort with all of the little bungalows behind it.

There are four new office buildings to our left (only one is seen in this picture) and a few new buildings along the dock on the right side. One of these is our terminal building. Joy is looking for the market we once knew here. A lot has changed!

St Lucia is in a lockdown mode, like St Vincent. No one can go outside of the terminal building without being on a sanctioned “bubble” tour or with a sanctioned “bubble” taxi. I have a tour to go to my first-ever zipline ride! The bus drives us almost due east into the mountains (the road twisted and turned so much I’m not sure why I think east). We finally arrive at:

The guys who show up to greet us make me feel like I just stepped off the bus and in to boot camp.

Then we got busy, signing the appropriate waivers and getting our equipment on and adjusted properly.

Equipment includes hairnets since we are wearing helmets that someone else wore before us and will wear after us. So stylish!

Don’t I look dashing?

Our team is half of the bus, or 6 people. A nice size for a group! We are soon all set with our zipline gear!

I’m all set to go!

But first, read all the R&Rs:

And all the safety rules:

You’d think they would point these out before we sign the waivers…

We’re ready to rock! This is Deandre, one of our guides. We were informed they are not going to give us the zipline test that was advertised. They (the guides) felt it to be a waste of time for adults – let’s just do it!

We have a short walk uphill to the tram starting point.

Each tram car can hold nine people. Four rows of two and one seat in the back. We had Jesse in the back, and Deandre and Kaitlin as assistants, so we were full! This picture is the group ahead of us.

My seat mate is Deandre!

The foliage is fairly dense, so it is easy to see the slot where the aerial tram cars travel.

We have a 35 minute ride. Jesse talks the entire time about the island, the government, the agreements this company has to lease the land, the company itself coming up on its 16th anniversary, and interesting tidbits like the vine growing up this first tree is the leander vine (I can’t verify this by that name). It is a life saver because when it is mature every three feet of vine will hold 1 liter of water. The vine up the second tree is vanilla! Every plant in a rainforest does what it needs to do to get to sunlight.

Heliconia are abundant here!

And tree ferns are tall and wispy with only one or two layers of leaves. Tall and beautiful!

We arrive at the top of the tram, and Jesse prepares us for the next part of the journey…

… we get to walk over to the first zipline. It was downhill at first, then went up almost as much and took about 3 minutes to traverse.

Finally we arrive at the first platform. Another group is still on the platform, so we wait. Another group comes up behind us. It isn’t the other half of our bus, so Jesse lets them go ahead of us to keep our bus together. We wait longer.

Our first run is a 300 ft line.

We finally get on the platform and Jesse explains what will happen. We first step on the platform and hold on to the lower cable…

…he will hook us up, one, two, three (lower trolley, upper trolley, safety harness)…

…then we sit down into our harnesses, and it feels soooo good…

…then when they tell us to go, cross our ankles and go yippee!

On the other end raise your feet to clear the platform, and stand up on the platform and they will unhook us! Simple? Got it?

And he turns around and yells “yippee!” as he slides down the zipline!

Deandre hooks us up, one by one. We run lines 1, 2, then this shorty at 3.

We have another shorty at 4.

On 5 he tests us. We aren’t allowed to hold on to our T-handle (that allows us to “steer” to keep our feet going straight ahead of us) to see how well we can control ourselves on the wire. Deandre lead us off with a full 14 second run to the other end, in full control. Three of us made it 9 seconds (including yours truly), two made it 4 seconds, and one was out of control from the very start and never recovered. 0 seconds.

6 was another nice long run.

Then on 7 Jesse asked us to go backward if we were comfortable doing so. The platform on the other end is pretty high and he prefers to run it backward. Most of us do it that way! It was interesting not being able to see when the end of the line was coming! I forgot to take pictures of people going backward off the platform. Grrrr…

Finally, 8 was our last and longest. Jesse allowed those of us who did 9 seconds free earlier to hold a camera phone if we wanted. I did! So I have a video of my last run. Not terribly exciting since I’m not a screamer like everyone is in the movies. But fun nonetheless!

Here’s Pete going down 8, and a screenshot of my video as I’m approaching the end of 8. The block on the cable and red rope are the breaking system they use to slow us down.

Then the pain. Remember that pad that we got off the tram? Well, we’ve been descending since then, and now we have to climb back up to get back to the tram! The photo below is a fraction of the climb and is one of the two last steep verticals. Needless to say, it was a long climb! Jesse kept reminding us we could stop for breaks, but we plowed through.

Back on the tram we had another 35-minute ride. This gave me time to dry out from the climb. Helmets no longer required.

We had a lovely view of the Caribbean to our left…

…and the Atlantic Ocean to our right. We could actually see whitecaps with our eyes, but the camera didn’t capture them. It’s hazy down there.

I like this view looking straight down 120 feet!

After reaching the starting point we took a break, had a taste of tamarind juice (wonderful!), and boarded the bus for the return drive.

Here are a few of the interesting things I saw that I missed this morning.

I was going for a shot of the sign on the telephone pole – “Pork and Black Pudding on Sale”. I almost missed it because the bus turned the corner really fast. I am glad though, because the rest of this image is really puzzling! I have no idea what those three pads are for! Some kind of game?

As we approach port we get our first glimpse of Insignia!

Then I see an intersting scuplture in the center of the upcoming roundabout. At first I thought it was a rowing team with the boat not represented, but now I think it appears to be a four step rowing sculpture.