Island Tour...

Today, we had the chance to take a tour around the island with a local driver / tour guide. I've got to say, this was probably the best money we've spent on this vacation so far as far as activities go. Buck Island was pretty sweet, but getting to drive around this island with a local guy for 5 hours as he explained almost everything to us was amazing. 

We made a stop at the local botanical gardens, at which point, he got out of the van, and walked around the gardens with us showing us different native and non-native plants, explaining the history of the place we were walking around (it was an old sugar plantation), and telling us what plants and trees we were looking at. Now, I don't know how long this guy has been at this tour guide business, but he basically told us about everything, and his depth of knowledge about the local fauna was pretty deep. I mean, the man knew everything. The different palm trees, the different ferns, the different plants, and so on and so forth.

Now, it was not just the plants this guy knew everything about. He knew everything about everything on the island. Buildings, when they were built, when they were re-built, when this thing happened, when that thing happened, and I mean, for 5 hours he pretty much talked to us non stop. Again, it was pretty great. Being a history kind of dork, it especially appealed to me. When we decided to come down here for this wedding and honeymoon/vacation all rolled into one, we were going to rent a car, and do this little tour on our own. That would have been a bad mistake I think. We would have missed about a million things that our driver was telling us about. Aside from that, driving on the left hand side of the road, with a left hand drive car, is still a little freaky to me, but I digress about that. I'm sure that I could handle it if I needed to, no doubt about it. I just have a hard time seeing cars coming towards me.

After the gardens, we motored over to the Cruzan rum distillery, where we got a quick run through of the rum making process, and like most alcohol making processes, little has really changed since people started making these spirits. Well, technology now makes it a little easier, but the process is the same really. Molasses, sugar cane, water, and yeast makes up the rum, and that's it. Sure there is some fermenting and cooking going on, but basically mix them all together, add some heat, and then let it sit. And by letting it sit, I mean letting it sit on wooden barrels from 2-14 years, depending on what kind of rum they want to crank out. The storage rooms for the barrels were pretty impressive. Large racks holding 10,000 barrels of rum, and that was just one storage shed. I think that they said there were 10 more on site somewhere. So, somewhere out there, there was 100,000 barrels of rum sitting around waiting to get un-bunged and bottled. The most interesting thing they told us was that a lot of the rum they make there doesn't even get bottled there. They take the basic alcohol mix, pump it into huge tankers, and then ship it to the US, where other distillers will age it, and then sell it as either Cruzan rum, or something else. Next time you're looking at a bottle of rum, check the back to see where it is made. If it says that it was made in the Virgin Islands, or the West Indies, then it was Cruzan who actually made it. Yeah, it's pretty damn good stuff. Best part of the tour of course, was at the end, where we get free drinks. Only one drink unfortunately, but hey, I'll take free drinks any day of the week. Also, if we had been so inclined, we could have purchased 6 bottles of really good rum, for $43 bucks. We don't have enough room probably to pack up, and take home the stuff that we DO have already, so we decided that maybe it was best that we didn't buy any rum at this point in time.

We made a sweep through Frederiksted as well. It's a much smaller town than Christiansted, but still nice. They do have a deep water port, so the big cruise ships can dock there, and belch forth their passengers onto the shores. There weren't any ships in harbor when we got there, so it was pretty darn quiet for the most part. Something else interesting about Frederiksted, and Christiansted is that they are preparing down here to basically refurbish the 2 towns completely, and to restore all of the buildings, or as much as possible, and to bring them back to their original or better shape than when they were built. I'm pretty sure that this is going to take awhile, but I think it would be great if they did. They have a lot of old buildings down here, that hold a lot of historical significance and it's kind of sad to see them crumbling and falling down all over the place, so hopefully, they can get that done over the years. 

There was also a tour through the rain forest section of the island. There was not a lot out in that section of the island, but it's plush, and green. And what was really kind of weird to me, was that there were bars out there in the rain forest areas of the island. We were driving along this sort of rough dirt/paved road, and we came upon a couple of bars. One where there were beer drinking pigs. Yes, I said beer drinking pigs. Apparently, what happens is that they start serving beers, and they bust the pigs out, and the patrons purchase beer for the pigs as well as themselves. From what our guide was saying, a pig can down about 2-3 cases of beer, each. Now that is some good drinking people, some really good drinking. That's almost as good as a frat boy on a Saturday night.

Anyway, the day was pretty sweet. The tour, even sweeter. If you ever come down this way, get a guided tour, it's worth the $45 we paid, and then some, and as I mentioned before, there were tons of things we would have missed had we not gone out with a guide, he was essential to the enjoyment of this little tour for certain.