St. Lucia: Into the darkness and beyond!

We hopped into a tiny propeller plane at Nelspruit for a one hour ride south to Durban. There we picked up our rental car ready to plot through Durban rush hour traffic and scoff at the people who thought we were mildly insane to drive 3 hours to St. Lucia in the dark. Turns out we were mildly insane. Our 3 hour trip took 5 hours with a couple of detours. One detour to get burgers from a fast food joint (Steers) which is ridiculously good. The second detour was to get unlost. We missed the final turn sign into St. Lucia because we were distracted by the bright lights of KFC and missed the poorly lit road sign. By the way, KFCs are abundant here! We've seen maybe one McDonald's in the entire country. Sorry, tangent.

We finally arrived to the Santa Lucia B&B to the sweetest host Rika and a palatial, well stocked room (meaning they provided excellent sherry wine!). Rika and her husband Francois van der Mewre were a highlight of our time in St. Lucia. They pampered us the way grandparents do, and never let us leave without home baked muffins, allowed us to pack a lunch from their kitchen goodies, provided a cooler with ice, chairs, and towels and so on.

Our first full day in St. Lucia, we took a self drive trip through an ecological reserve and spotted more animals (we're pros now!). Highlights were the Vervet monkeys and their playful babies. These monkeys must be like squirrels to the locals, because nobody stops to look at them except for us Americans.  Unfortunately there appeared to be considerable commercial logging in the area.  As well as historic remnants of logging in the reserve as evident by many stumps amidst the grasses.

We had a picnic at Cape Vidal's beach and wore swimwear in the middle of South Africa's winter. Before the tide came in, we dipped our feet in the Indian Ocean (first time ever!) and checked out the tidepools. The next day we stretched our legs and took a morning walk to another beach where we saw hippos and crocs in the lagoon. In the afternoon, we went on a boat ride - a must do activity in the area. We got very close to the hipppos in the water, and crocodiles lounging nearby. Brian got a few awesome pictures of hippos "yawning"-they're actually posturing. Yikes on those teeth! Best lesson we learned on the boat ride is that St. Lucia Estuary is a World Heritage site because it is the only place in the world that encompasses 5 eco systems.

And that's about it. It was a warm and relaxing couple of days.

N&B

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