An early breakfast and we were in the lounge at 0900 ready to join the tour of Bequia travelling on the back of mostly Toyota open trucks with eight people to a vehicle.
This is not a very large Island and it relies solely on tourism of which there has been very little of in the past twenty months. We had to use the tender to get onshore and went thro the usual security checks and again this location you are only allowed to visit on an organised tour which is authorised by the Government. Prior to the tourism business starting some years ago this Island relied on whaling for a living and on the top of Mount Pleasant thee is plaque recognising the location where a spotter would be stationed to look for whales and then direct the 7 man rowing boats in the correct direction. This practise still continues to this day but it is difficult and o they are only allowed to catch four whales per annum but the most they ever catch is one or two (they say).
But back to the tour we headed up the side of the mountain with very steep roads and the Toyota truck working hard to get up and we arrived at a gum emplacement with the barrels still in place for us to take photos of the historic Island protection . The Island was under British Rule until the mid 1970’s but now has its own Prime Minister and Government.I asked the tour guide if having your own control and PM with local Government compared being ruled by the Brits any better and she said NO , the present Government is looking after itself and not the people, where have I heard that before.
From there we were taken to a rehabilitation facility for Turtles and there were quite a few from babe’s up to Big Brother size and Jennifer spent quite some time with the Boss who was explaining how he became involved in this role for protecting the turtles, he was a very interesting chap and I think American by origin and is now 82 and he really enjoys his work safeguarding live animals. Whether it was part of his farm I don't know but there were quite a a lot of goats who came from the hill to greet the tour party perhaps expecting food, who knows.
From there we then visited Mount Pleasant, as mentioned earlier and then rushed back down the hill to get back to the ship for lunch and and us to get ready for the beach afternoon.
We had the buffet lunch and perhaps Noel ate the wrong Sushi as on the tender going back to shore there were some unexpected rumblings.. anyway to late to return but we again boarded the Toyota truck taxis and and drove for about fifteen minutes to the small beach where chairs had been laid out where we spent about three hours before returning the the ship. We had noticed earlier on our Island tour that quite a few of the beaches were covered in a special type of seaweed which smelt really bad and not possible toe sit on or swim from, apparently the Island is working to overcome this.
We arrived back at the ship around 1745 and headed to the cabin for a cuppa. For reasons of safety Silversea don't allow kettles and/or tea making equipment in the cabin as in the past few years there have been a number of dangerous fire incidents with people leaving the kettle on and it catching fire and so the room service provides the tea. We thought we had booked the Japanese Seishin restaurant for tonight and then remembered it was for tomorrow night and so looking at all the restaurant menus on the cabin TV we opted to go back to the Grill as the filet mignon was so good we
had to try again.
The serving staff and the manager Jordan went out of his way to make certain my salad and ret of the food was not contaminated with anything that might upset Noel although he was still suffering from the earlier problem. Perhaps not the best thing to do was to try out a a red Shiraz which was really nice but came back to bite me later. Well back to cabin for an early night as we were both very tired.
