Firstly let me begin  with an amendment. It appears working in general gets in the way of regular blog posts. This is why I was very excited to have a whole half day off yesterday to write at my own leisure on these wonderful islands that I have been discovering. 

Sadly I leisurely discovered a fantastic cocktail bar and after acquainting myself quite thoroughly with a wide range of rum infused cocktails I retired to a hotel room promptly fell asleep and woke up at 12:30am with a splitting head ache and quite possibly unfit to operate heavy machinery, or in my case a laptop.

Today I have been solemnly working hard and reflecting as best I can on the last week in this neck of the woods. Perhaps a good place to start is with a map.

My god this map hurts my eyes. I must furiously type so it will disappear off the top of my screen. If you look in the middle right you will see the red writing denoting the US & British Virgin Islands.

If I remember correctly these islands were last Virgin in about 1620<– Piratical knowledge.

General Observations

The weather here is very invigorating. It is very warm, it rains at least once a day and there is always an afternoon breeze.

Rum tastes far far better in the Caribbean.

Reggae sounds far far better in the Caribbean.

Caribbean people sound so awesome.

This was one of my first interactions with some locals. Our yacht is quite large and there was only 10 or so meters clearance between us and a section of the marina. A boat went past behind us and this is what we heard. My best phonetic typing.

Whered jooo b wonting da oool moooan?

Excuse me?  

Whered jooo b wonting da oool moooan?

At this point I worked out he was talking about a hole and we started to look for our second mate.

It turned out they were just taking the piss about putting a hole in our stern.

Lovely 😀

The traffic walk lights are green men moonwalking. Perhaps they are martians?

Confusingly people drive on the left side of the road in left hand drive cars.

There are a lot of Catamarans here. Catamarans are the most commonly chartered boat here. I have already started scheming a small bare boat charter with a few of the crew. It could be a devilishly good time.  

With the Catamarans there are a lot of Captain Rons.

America America America

We are now in America. The US Virgin Islands. There are the foundations of America here. We have K-Mart, Radio Shack, Hooters and a lot of large cars driving on quite a small island.

There is a French quarter here. Having spent a bit of time in France I think a quarter is a manageable amount of French for a city, any more and it gets out of control. My ideal city would be a quarter French, a quarter Italian, a quarter Spanish and a quarter New Zealand. 

The Americans I have met here fall into three very broad categories.

Cruise ship customers. Passing through, wide eyed and often advanced in years

Long time island residents, look a bit craggy have large eyebrows

Recent island life stylers, still very American but probably will start getting craggy and vague quite rapidly.

We get very busy here tomorrow until Sunday but I will make some notes as we go and will see what comes about.

Ciao!