The lush, jungle-covered tropical island of St Lucia is one of the most beautiful in the Caribbean, making it a natural hit with romantics and honeymooners. It is famous for its natural attractions, ranging from the soaring twin Pitons in the volcanic south to the sweeping arc of white sand of St Lucia’s main Reduit Beach in the north. This leads to local beauty spot Pigeon Island, which isn’t actually an island at all, but is joined to the mainland by a causeway.
St Lucia also lays claim to the world’s only drive-in volcano, as well as pungent sulphur springs, and the Diamond Falls where the mineral-rich waters are renowned for their therapeutic qualities and bathers can lounge in pools of varying temperatures.
While Soufriere in the south is home to these natural wonders and more rugged terrain, the north is flatter and less volcanic. Here you will find Rodney Bay with its collection of lively shops and restaurants, and the bustling capital Castries.
St Lucia stands out among the English-speaking Caribbean islands for its strong Creole culture – partly due to the fact that it changed hands between the British and the French a staggering 14 times. The Gallic influence has left its mark in place names, cuisine, style and the French patois of the islanders, which can prove difficult to understand.
Arriving
St Lucia’s cruise port is in Castries, at the north of the island. There are two duty-free shopping areas at either end of the port: Pointe Seraphine, which is closer to Castries, and La Place Carenage, a mall filled with shops and restaurants. One of the focal points of this mall is an animation centre which recounts the island’s history with a video and music.
Walking between the two shopping areas takes about 15 minutes, or visitors can jump into one of the water taxis that run between them and costs around $1 (50p).
The highlights listed below are offered by all the major cruise liners that stop here. Cruise passengers who want to arrange their own tours instead of taking one of the cruise liners’ tours can start at the St Lucia Tourist Board website www.stlucia.org/activity which has a list of local companies offering excursions.
What to see/excursions
1. Pigeon Island and Rodney Bay
This beauty spot isn’t actually an island, but is joined to the mainland by a manmade causeway, and boasts more history than any other part of St Lucia. Originally the home of indigenous Amerindians, it has also been a pirate hideout and military base and is dotted with walking trails and historical remains.
These include an 18th century fort built by the British, and Fort Rodney which Admiral Rodney used as a lookout to spy on French ships during the numerous tussles over the island. There are a couple of pretty beaches and a Pigeon Island Museum and Interpretation Centre, housed in a restored British officers’ mess building, which illustrates the island’s history.
Nearby, Rodney Bay is St Lucia’s main resort; a buzzing hub of shops, restaurants, beach bars and hotels that sit by the island’s main Reduit Beach – a curving stretch of golden sand – and overlook Pigeon Island. Named after the British admiral George Rodney who defeated the French fleet in 1780, this lively resort is a 15-minute drive from Castries and consists of Rodney Bay Village,
a pedestrianised area where the bars and restaurants are located, and Rodney Bay Marina, a prime yachting centre. Sunny Isle Vacations (001 758 450 4435, www.sunnyislevacations.com) offers a two-hour Explore Pigeon Island tour from £25
2. Soufriere area
This is St Lucia’s oldest and most historic town, named by the French after the whiff of sulphur that wafts down from the nearby volcano. Situated in the southern half of the island and in a beautiful setting, it is about an hour’s drive from Castries, which takes visitors along a winding road through steep, jungle-covered terrain.
The town itself still contains some original Creole wooden buildings, but it is most famous for its stunning natural surroundings. These include the famous twin Pitons, the world’s only drive-in volcano and its sulphur springs, plus the Diamond Falls waterfall containing mineral-rich waters.CLCIK HERE SEE NATURAL WORLD,IN THIS WORLD WE LIKE NATRUAL BEAUTY
An easy 90-minute drive from Adelaide to the upper peninsula, Yorke has long been a favourite South Aussie holiday playground refreshingly short on east coast-style flash and cash. The terrain is flat, dominated by vast golden fields of wheat and barley. There are no glamorous hotels and very few labrador-equipped Range Rovers plying the narrow country roads.
But history of the maritime and mining persuasions is thick on the ground. Copper was once the currency that lured intrepid adventurers; these days it's fish and crustaceans (including delectable blue swimmer crabs) and plump Cornish pasties, a lingering legacy of the miners who flocked here from England in the 19th century.
In the Cornish Kitchen bakery in downtown Moonta there's a photo of Greg Norman tucking into the local speciality, taking a break from designing his golf course for a planned residential development cuffing the white sand dunes of Port Hughes only minutes south of Moonta Bay.
Change, it seems, is as inevitable here as it is elsewhere along coastal Australia. Large holiday homes usurp ramshackle shacks; McMansions sprout like thistles in bare paddocks, their owners straining for a glimpse of the distant blue sea. Even so, this part of the upper Yorke Peninsula, the so-called Copper Triangle, incorporating Moonta, Wallaroo and Kadina, remains a charmingly old-world holiday destination where days are whiled away in a rather Famous Five fashion: fishing, building sandcastles, messing about in boats.
ELSEWHERE ON YORKE
Surf the southwest corner, where beach and reef breaks include the notorious Chinaman's. Some of the state's best diving is off the Yorke Peninsula. The Investigator Strait Maritime Heritage Trail features 26 shipwrecks dating from 1849.
SA Fishing Adventures offers bespoke deep-sea fishing charters from Marion Bay to Wedge, Kangaroo,
For fishing charters from Port Hughes and Moonta Bay: www.a1fishing.com.au.
Tour Yorke with the Adjahdura Mob based at Point Pearce. Half-day, one-day and extended itineraries available.
The flat coastline is punctuated here and there by long, sun-bleached timber jetties. For South Australians these elegant structures are as redolent of childhood summer holidays as running through the sprinkler or slurping on a Snip (a large ice lolly that seems to have gone the way of the dodo).
Once a hive of export activity, when ketches and windjammers queued to take on board grain and copper bound for Blighty, today, in Moonta at least, the jetty is the preserve of the recreational angler bagging tommies (ruff), whiting, snook and squid. My 11-year-old fishing-mad son is delighted to find almost an entire aisle of the small Moonta supermarket devoted to rod and tackle. In the nearby bait shop he asks the lad behind the counter for a bit of crabbing advice and we leave laden with nets, extra rope and bait (tommies for the crabs, cockles for the fish).
And instructions to buy a rake, apparently an effective way to harvest blue swimmers from the sand (as a gardener, this is something I feel I may be able to master).
Then it's off to the Moonta jetty ("down beach" in Cornish settler parlance), a particularly fine structure with a dedicated swimming area. After patiently tending lines and nets for a couple of hours I am dispatched by sons numbers one and two and their nanna to procure pasties for lunch.
Fear not, angling gourmands. The Moonta pasty is nothing like the drab cardboard-flavoured snack peddled elsewhere. Even the local tourist office has its own ideas on the subject: pastry must be stretchy (use lard), meat (preferably chuck or skirt steak) should have a little fat and be finely cut, not minced, and vegetables (traditionally potato, turnip and onion) should be chipped and layered.
Carrot seems to have crept into the 21st-century version, and vegetables are no longer neatly layered, but even today the Moonta Cornish Pasty (or oggie) is joined at the top with a thick crimp. This served as a disposable handle for miners who were often dealing with chemicals and poisons and had no chance to wash their hands while underground. (It's also quite useful for small boys with bait-smelly mitts.)
The late 19th-century copper-mining boom that made Moonta a briefly prosperous town doesn't feel so very long ago as you wander the sleepy streets.
The central township has been lovingly preserved, the relentless southern sun softened by the honey-coloured stone pubs, shops and miners' cottages. The streets are broad with deep gutters and the town square, shaded by Moreton Bay figs, feels a little like similar colonial outposts in India.
Lying on the outskirts of town, the old mining complex consists of a maze of ruins, abandoned mine heads and tailings heaps. On weekends, Wednesdays and during school holidays a small train, staffed by volunteers, chugs through the rambling wildflower-strewn site where crumbling walls are stained verdigris by lingering copper-sulphate wounds and the ground is strewn with pistachio-green rocks.
Thousands of miners once lived in a shanty town on this site; disease was rife in the early days and hundreds of children, many the victims of typhoid, are buried in the Moonta cemetery.
The train tour takes an hour and our jovial guide is, of course, a self-described "mine" of information, explaining jigging and smelting and alarming small children with Dickensian tales of the "picky boys", 10-year-old lads sorting ore for the princely sum of 11 pence a day.
A museum is housed in the handsome former model school while an old-fashioned sweet shop occupies the mine's post office. The nearby railway station is an architectural gem, built in 1909 in federation style with ornate chimneys and staircase.
History buffs are well served on the upper Yorke, where great care has been taken to document the oft-forgotten utilitarian. There's a farm shed museum in Kadina (as well as a banking and currency museum) and a nautical museum in Wallaroo, where the almost 1km-long jetty is still used for loading grain and the deep-sea port serves as home to the Spencer Gulf prawn fleet.
The Wallaroo foreshore is a curious blend of the historic and industrial, handsome 19th-century buildings and a smelting chimney, enormous grain silos and the various attenuated bulk-loading accoutrements that span the jetty. (From here you can jump a ferry to the Eyre Peninsula, cutting hours off the regular road journey.)
The legacy of the brave copper miners and their families is celebrated every two years at Kernewek Lowender, the largest Cornish festival in the world, with events staged across Moonta, Wallaroo and Kadina (the next is May 15-17, 2009).
The last time I visited the Yorke, many, many years ago when dodos roamed the earth, Snips were readily available and you weren't fined for using a sprinkler on a summer's day, I stayed in a very basic shack in Port Broughton with an outdoor privy and a kerosene fridge.
This time I've upgraded to an uber-modern holiday house, Beach 24b, set on the outskirts of Moonta, a three-minute walk from the beach, amid a sea of television antennas that my boys mistake for ship masts when we first wend our way from the old town.
Slick and spacious with gleaming stainless steel kitchen, wall-mounted plasma telly and press-button everything, Beach 24b has a balcony at the rear to catch the morning sun and a large terrace out front with views to the sea, the perfect spot for sundowners.
The upstairs master suite is enormous and there are two other bedrooms and a downstairs bunk room with a large garage and backyard where son No.2 assembles his various rods and new crab nets.
If you can't be bothered cooking, try the newly opened Henry on George, occupying the old butcher's shop (coffee, decadent cakes and good baguettes courtesy of owners Ross and Sandy who also run The Miner's Couch antique shop in Kadina), the Cornish Kitchen (Ellen Street) for oggies and, for dinner, La Cantina at the jetty, where pizza, pasta and fritto misto make up for our poor catch. (There are also several seafood outlets so you can pretend you have caught your own.)
But the best culinary advice I can give (and this is what I plan for our next visit) is to pack a rake, dredge for blue swimmers and then cook them simply, a la Maggie Beer, in seawater. An activity I imagine is well suited to dusk when the magic of the sun-kissed copper coast is most potent. On the beach near Beach 24b the scene is timeless, more Mediterranean than Australian.
An elderly couple recline in deckchairs to watch the sun set, dogs fossick amid a bank of seaweed thrown up against the low, crumbling cliffs, a fisherman, tinnie pulled up on the sand, cleans his catch while children make finishing touches to their castles of sand. All pause, now and then, to gaze across the flat, copper-burnished sea, the undramatic but strangely beautiful prospect that South Australians treasure strong.
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