A great tour on St. Lucia

A house on St. Lucia

As Alie can’t handle the Caribbean heat anymore, I went on-line and booked an air-conditioned car and driver to show us some of St. Lucia.

Mathias in St. Lucia picked us up in an air-conditioned van with room to take our wheelchair if we should need it later.  He spoke good English, was knowledgeable about what we were seeing, took us to a local restaurant in the mountains to have lunch [pointing out on the way a large tourist trap restaurant frequented by buses], took us to a botanical garden which we effectively had to ourselves not with a busload of other tourists, pushed Alie’s chair over the difficult spots – and would have pushed it all the time had we wanted – and knew the names of the flowers, fruits and seeds we saw in the garden.

---

Click on photos to enlarge and see captions.

Experienced cruisers often prefer to book their own tours although there are advantages in booking through the cruise lines, especially for those with less experience.  We booked our own about a half dozen times over the last twenty years but did so depending on the particular circumstances, not as a regular thing.  There were a couple of less successful tours with drivers who were not used to showing people around, but the others were very good.

In Lisbon after negotiating a price; the driver not only gave us a good tour, he helped us avoid the long line to get Lisbon’s famous Pastéis de Belém from the same place that has been making them since 1837.  In Samoa, our fabulous driver told us all about his family’s customs and took us places not offered on other tours.  After taking a small group tour in the Azores arranged by the cruise ship, we asked the driver if he would come back in the afternoon to take us to a different area; it was a wonderful tour to places tour buses never reach.  In St. Thomas, we took another cab whose driver primarily took us to the standard places but was willing to stop where we wanted and let us have as much time as we wanted at those stops.  A driver in Grand Turk knew every person on the island and to whom the goats and burros by the road belonged.  A woman cab drive in Nassau took us to a combination of places offered by no other tour.  A driver on Aruba took us to a village to see a wonderful display of murals, letting us off at one end of the main street and picking us up at the other so that we did not have to backtrack.  In Santiago, Chile we also booked a tour on-line.  Waiting in our hotel lobby, we watched a crowd of other tourists line up for a bus.  When a man came in to call for us, I asked how many there would be on the tour, and he replied, you, myself and our driver. For the next two days, he was our private guide taking us everywhere from a high mountain restaurant and resort to the highlights of the city.  In Buenos Aires, a tour booked online combined famous spots with lesser known, overnight hotel rooms in the city and at Iguazú Falls, airfare to the falls and a small group tour there and transfers from the port and later to the airport after our stay, all for less money than the cruise line was charging just for a daytrip to the Falls.

Date of our St. Lucia visit: 28 Dec 2023