02 May 2024

 

St Lucia

We offer a wide choice of cheap flights to St Lucia together with St Lucia hotels, tours and self-drive itineraries.

Dance with a complete stranger? I’d love to!

Caught up in the whirl of the carnival, Frances Hardy finds vibrant St Lucia is the place to lose your inhibitions.

St Lucia - Keeping cool in the pool at Cap Maison St Lucia - Join the party St Lucia - The lush botanical gardens

1 Keeping cool in the pool at Cap Maison 2 Join the party 3 The lush botanical gardens

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT a Caribbean carnival that induces even the most buttoned-up of Britons to abandon their inhibitions.

As the procession pauses beside us, we applaud decorously and suddenly I’m sucked into the eddy of swirling bodies by a cheeky St Lucian with a bare torso and a spangly loincloth.

For a few giddy minutes I’m no longer an observer, but a participant in this joyful, noisy parade and dancing with a stranger. These are the special moments of a holiday: when you feel not so much a tourist as a welcomed guest.

St Lucia’s carnival clogs the streets of its principal town, Castries, for the best part of 24 hours, snaking like some sinuous bejewelled serpent through its heaving streets. The colours are dizzying, the heat broiling and the din headspinning, and we all enjoy it: that’s middle-aged Iain and me, plus Amy and her friend Megan, both 17, who are courteously propositioned by posses of local boys all afternoon.

The colours are dizzying and the heat broiling

St Lucia is an island mercifully untouched by the constraints of political correctness. We watch a glorious pageant of beauty queens who wave graciously at wolfwhistling men in the crowd.

We applaud indiscriminately: the steel band, the women in tasselled bikinis, the gyrating dancers. It’s bawdy, joyful and loud. Street vendors set up their cool boxes and stoves. We feast for £1.50, on chicken wings, curried potato and fried dough cakes.


At the end of the day we rattle back to base in a cab blaring the local ‘soca’ music from its speakers. Our amiable driver Lee-Roy, a special constable when he isn’t chauffeuring, gives the girls a CD. ‘Suzette, Mama said Don’t Join the Fete,’ counsels the chorus of the carnival week hit.

But, of course, we all did – and we wouldn’t have missed it. The St Lucians, it seems, need no excuse for a knees-up, with festivals throughout the year. On a more modest scale, every Friday night there’s the Jump-Up at the fishing village of Gros Islet.

Adhoc bars and food stalls spring up to cater for a horde of guests. By 10pm the main street is heaving with tourists and locals, and a reggae beat pulses out.

Every luxury is on tap

Finding a holiday to suit four people with diverse interests can be tricky, especially when two are teenagers.

We’re guests of Helen & Theo Gobat, who have three grown sons and grandchildren. They know the score. They have developed Cap Maison, a five-star boutique hotel with gasp-inducing views over the Caribbean in the north of the island. Set in lush gardens, it typifies the new breed of smart hotels.

Every luxury is on tap: valets, private chefs, a walk-in wine cellar and spa. And there’s something for everyone.

The girls race down to Smuggler’s Cove beach to snorkel, Iain goes to the gym and I opt for a massage (a complimentary one is offered to every guest) in my room. But Amy and Megan are keen to water-ski.

Their idea of fun is also being towed out to sea at giddying speed by motorboat while sitting on a tyre, called tubing. A day pass to Le Sport resort, a short walk away on Cariblue Bay, secures limitless activities of this sort with like-minded teenagers.


Iain has pottered off to the St Lucia Golf and Country Club to play a few holes. Me? I’m just sitting under a parasol with a cool drink and a good book, by a sea that glitters like cut amethysts.

We all loved St Lucia of course

Marked a must in our guide book are the Diamond Botanical Gardens, Mineral Baths and Waterfall. The drive, in our hired 4x4, takes us along hilly roads that zig-zag through rundown villages, past banana plantations and grand old estate houses. There is a fine view of the twin volcanic Pitons peaks as we switchback down into Soufriere.

At the gardens, hummingbirds buzzing about, we amble through a tropical paradise in which heliconia, tree fern, begonias and peace lilies flourish in the humid heat. If this was a day for the adults, the next outing, to the Rain Forest Sky Rides in Chassin, was aimed at the girls.

The first bit, a sedate glide high above the forest canopy in a modified ski-lift, was a tranquil prelude to the main event: rocketing across a dozen dizzying ravines on a series of zip lines, each more vertiginous than the last.

We all loved St Lucia; of course, we could have simply basked in luxury within the confines of our hotel. But teenagers crave excitement and adventure.

Had they not been with us, we would doubtless have returned blissfully restored and rested. As it was, we also had a great deal of high-spirited fun.

This article was featured in the Oct 2010 DialAFlight magazine. All information was correct at time of going to print.

0330·100·2220i 0330 calls are included within inclusive minutes package on mobiles, otherwise standard rates apply. X 0330 calls are included within inclusive minutes package on mobiles, otherwise standard rates apply. X
 
Close
Close