St. Lucia - Mud bath
15 March 2012
We hired Junior to take us on a tour; our first stop was at the nearby volcano, "Sulfur Springs". Hot water comes straight from the volcano into two huge mud baths. You cover yourself in mud and watch the wrinkles wash away, so they say. After trying to get all the mud off us, we headed to "Diamond Botanical Gardens". These are very beautiful gardens with a small waterfall and some naturally hot baths built by Louis the 16th (the water here is filtered so is clear, not muddy). Once we got back to the boat we decided to set sail the next morning. Soufriere is a picturesque spot, but we found that some of the local people were overly aggressive, which made us very uncomfortable. For example, each time we arrived at the dock in our dinghy, someone would approach us to hire them to watch our dinghy. The dock already had a security guard, and we would let them know that our dinghy was locked so should be safe. Then we headed down the dock to drop our garbage in a nearby dumpster and got stopped by three men saying that it is this man's job to carry the garbage to the bin and that we must pay him so much money (the dumpster was only 30 steps from where they stopped us).