Day Eleven: Grenada

Right, a shortie post as I'm busy at work so just enough time to cram this nugget inbetween your eyelids (I just thought that up as I was writing it, you'd never tell!)

Grenada it is then, and what a difference a day makes ('24 little hours....'). From the arid, barren landscape of Isla Margarita yesterday to the greenest place I've ever been to. Grenada is mostly rainforests and extinct volcanos, and again, as we were on the 'Best Of' tour, we were going to see as much of the island as we could in a few hours.

The island itself is known as the Spice Island for fairly obvious reasons, the fact that everywhere smells of some form of spice (or all types of spice, which messes with your head!), tells you where it got its name from.

So, meandering through the islands capital, St Georges, we headed up to another small village to visit a nutmeg station, where around three quarters of the islands nutmeg ends up being sorted through and packed up for shipping to varying countries around the world, including good old blighty. After making some spicy purchases, we headed for the hills, and to a change in weather, as we found out why the rainforest was called the rainforest! The higher we went up, the more we drove into the clouds and so it got a tad wet, but being a hot country, none of us got a slight bit wet when we got out at the Grand Etang Lake, which is formed out of the islands largest extinct volcano, is 1900ft above sea level, so us europeans couldn't really breathe all that well, and is absolutely massive and stunning for a nice photo

The small, red, plant you can see in the bottom right hand corner is an historically significant one, as this was the plant that was discovered by the fella who discovered paint, and its basically a small paint pot, although I'm sure he got sick of painting in red all the time!

From there we headed back down through the vast amounts of banana, nutmeg and cocoa plantations, and on the way back, saw another gloriously odd sight of the Caribbean:

Forgive the smudginess of the photograph, but it was taken through a coach window and it really was that misty out there! Don't you just love the guy with the NASA hat on! To be fair, the people washing their clothes were really nice and kept waving at us, which makes you feel so much better when you're taking a photo of them!

After we got back to the boat, we had a wander round the port, which looks lovely doesn't it:

You'll notice that there is a line of people walking along the quayside, they were made up of plucky Brits and gigantic Americans, who were fascinated at where the quay went, as it seemed to end up at some shops of something, but alas, after 30 minutes of walking in the heat, everyone ended up at.........a Boat Repair shop, yay!!

To be fair it was a very nice boat repair shop, just not what we were expecting!

We were moored away from the main dock, as the american boat had taken up the only mooring, so we got back on board the tender boat and made our way back to the ship for a spot of lunch and an afternoon nap.

The evenings entertainment went up a notch this week, as it was easter week and all the kiddies were off school. Thankfully we hardly saw any of them, as they were disposed of in the kiddies area of the ship, but first up we were treated to the one and only George Michael......

...ok not George Michael, just a short chap who was pretending to be him, but he was very good and he put on a really good show! The main highlight for me that night was the first of two comedians for that week, a giant among...well giants! He is called Colin Cole, and is about 7ft tall and built like a fairly typical rugby player, but has the funniest act I've seen in a long time. There wasn't a single group of people he didn't insult or lampoon on that night. I did try and find a picture or a bio of him, but all his photos are from about 10 years ago and don't show any of his act, which is a bit useless, but anyway if you do get a chance to see him on the conedy circuit, its well worth a visit!

What a big chopper!

Again, a quickie normal bit of the blog, and a photo of the most exciting thing to happen this week, as on thursday we had a visit from the air ambulance. We didn't see any accident nearby and there was nothing on the news, so I can only suppose they wanted to pay us a visit, as they're always flying over here!

We also went to Trentham Gardens for my moms birthday on monday, but as the blog has already mashed together as there are too many photos on this blog, I'll do that in a seperate one, so see above!