More Photos

We stayed at Jolly Beach, a really nice 3* plus property, very friendly and efficient, and the service was fantastic, and facilities excellent. Our room had a beautiful sea view on one of the best beaches and overlooking one of the 2 wedding arbors.The food was also generally very good, with plenty of variety, themed buffets, different salads and soups, barbecue and always a good choice for vegetarians. The entertainment was also pretty good, most of the time, a couple of steel bands, fire eaters/limbo, reggae and soca.The fashion show, although I wasn’t looking forward to it at all, was entertaining as the compere had probably the weirdest possible hairdo I have ever seen. Her already tall stature was increased by almost another yard of a ridged conical hairstyle, you really have to have seen it to believe it. I have never seen anything like it in my life.

Antiguans, on the whole are very tall, and very dark. Even their indigenous variety of “Black Pineapple” is tall and dark. Most of the ones we met were really sweet and lovely people.

On Sunday we got a shared taxi to Shirley Heights to see the sunset, the wonderful view, and experience the usual Sunday night party. It was touristy, but this didn’t spoil the view or the sunset though and the rum punch was good too.

St.John’s itself isn’t pretty by any means. It has a fruit and veg market, an odd large bust statue just sitting in the middle of a square, presumably of V G Bird. Further down is Heritage Quay, the smart bit for the cruise arrivals who come in droves to buy Colombian Emeralds and Tanzanite, and buy knick knacks from the Vendor’s market. It could be anywhere on the cruise trail, they all look the same. This was the only place that we found people to be particularly unfriendly and unhelpful. We found an OK café, which was also a pretty building called Hemmingways, a little further up the main street.

We tried one of the 3 a la carte restaurants, Lydia’s on the beach and surprisingly most of the menu is no extra, the most expensive being lobster at 20USD extra. We had Red Snapper, which was no extra and tasted wonderful. The other two restaurants are Utsav Indian and Bocciolo’s Italian, all have to be prebooked.

We did do the circumnavigation by catamaran and it was all day experience that included lunch. The Wadadli Catamaran, part catamaran and part sailing ship so this was a chance to sample both. This was something I was really looking forward to. I hadn’t anticipated there being two seas to negotiate, the Caribbean and the Atlantic. The Caribbean side was wonderful but as soon as it hit the Atlantic, I felt awful and was really sick. Ann really enjoyed it, especially the sailing, but she did get burnt very quickly on deck. Personally I preferred the calm side where I could just relax and take plenty of photos.

We did try and book a helicopter up but by the time I got round to it, they were full, so for the last three days, we just sat back, read books and enjoyed the white sand, azure sea and wonderful sunsets, and tried lots of different cocktails.