Tortola and St Lucia

Barbados 21/4/07
West Indies vs England
Absolutely an awesome day of cricket, the best yet!!!!! Apparently Steve was on TV, we were in the second row from the field. It was great to see Brian Lara’s last game but we were disappointed he didn’t bat for long.


Day at Sea
We attended an AST dinner where Dickie Bird was guest speaker, he told some great stories of his cricket and umpiring career and also took questions from the crowd, what an awesome character. Kerry O’Keefe also told some more stories, it was a great night.

Tortola – British Virgin Islands
What a gorgeous island. We jumped in a taxi and our driver, Gene, took us for a great trip around, unfortunately it was cloudy and we couldn’t see very far to the surrounding islands but we could appreciate the beauty. It’s only a small island and rather than have lots of small houses dotted over the hills they have 2 or three storey apartment blocks that actually look like very large homes, it’s impossible to tell, from a distance, which is a house or an apartment. BTW there are chooks everywhere here, all the islands have some chickens around but here they are in the streets, in the shops, bars and restaurants, mother hens with a brood of chicks on every corner, we even saw cats and chickens hanging out together, Alex would love it here.

There are lots of English and Americans who own homes on the island and live here for parts of the year, it’s also a very popular sailing destination. After our tour we went back to Cane Garden Bay where there was an Aussie vs Safa beach cricket game with some locals also joining in. We met a Canadian guy who was sailing around the islands and dropped into the bar for a drink, this is his 10th sailing trip. In true Aussie style, after a few too many drinks by some lads, there was a nudie run across the beach. Then the rain came, it bucketed down, the taxis came at 4.30 to take us all back to the Galaxy and it was a very hairy ride. The roads are quite narrow with sharp bends, now as its British they drive on the left side of the road, also, it’s much cheaper to buy American cars so they also drive on the left side of the car. This, however, comes in very handy on these roads when passing another car and avoids the driver overestimating the edge and crashing down an embankment. We also caught the taxi back with a 2 other Aussies and 6 very pissed Afrikaans Safas, they sung their native songs all the way home which was great fun even though we couldn’t understand the words.









Day at Sea
We bought the UK Sunday Times and devoured it today, it’s so good to read a newspaper. We get a news flyer on the ship but its all American news and mainly sports.

Saint Lucia
Australia vs South Africa
Anzac Day, we had a dawn service on the ship and there were a couple of WWII veterans onboard which was great.



Crap seats at the cricket, all of us were in the sun all day, not happy. Anyway we got the result we were hoping for, pity there wasn’t more of a fight, thankfully Ricky and Haden got out so Roy could come in and hit some decent shots and make it interesting. Ricky is a great cricketer but boring as bat poo. Kerry O’Keefe predicted that Gilchrist would score a century, haha. The Galaxy anchored at Rodney Bay Mariner instead of the port and we got tenders into shore. We spent the night at Saint Lucia but the last tender was at 10pm so you couldn’t really go all out on shore. All the bars were packed at the Mariner and many people couldn’t even get a drink so going back to the ship and partying there was a better option anyway.





We did our regular taxi tour yesterday, it’s a very mountainous island, windy narrow roads. We visited a couple of seaside fishing villages crammed in narrow valleys, the houses are small and tightly packed, the people use very clean shared bathing and washing facilities which avoids the streets become open sewers. Our driver, Junior, took us to a great bar and we ate fabulous chicken roti for lunch. The local beer is Piton which is pretty good, it’s named after the famous twin peaks, Gros Piton and Petite Piton. We made our way down the island to view the Pitons and see the sulfur flows, boy did it stink but was very interesting.