Woke up at 5:30 to get ready for our room service breakfast which by this time in the cruise became our main way to have breakfast. We had gotten the menu down by this point and were having fried eggs, bacon, toast, potatoes, juice and coffee. Enough to set us up for the day.
The cruise into St. Thomas was beautiful. Lots of yachts anchored along the way. Small islands dotting the cruise path. St. Thomas is quite hilly and has many houses built into the hills, making for a scenic approach. But as we approached we could tell this was going to be different than all the rest of the ports we had visited. There were already 3 other cruise ships in port and more were expected during the day. St. Thomas is known as THE duty free diamond shopping destination for cruise ships. That's certainly not what we were after so we didn't know what to expect from the rest of St. Thomas.
It was very warm at 8:00 when we docked but we decided we needed a good walk to make up for all the food we'd been consuming on the ship up to that point. We set out at about 8:30 for the 2 mile walk to town. The town is called Charlotte Amalie. It was an uneventful walk but we did see a lot of local happenings while walking that we wouldn't have seen had we taken a taxi or a tour bus. Amazingly though, during the walk we encountered a traffic jam of locals on their way to work that must have been a mile long. Charlotte Amalie is a small, very compact town that bustles with locals even when the tour ships aren't in town. When we got into town, stores weren't open yet and for us it was even kind of hard to determine where the stores were since most everything was locked up and had no shop signs. That didn't stop us from walking all over the place and taking pictures before things opened up and making our way through a vendor's plaza setting up to sell knockoffs of all sorts to the tourists. They were also trying to sell a lot of Bob Marley type stuff to unsuspecting tourists.
When 9:00 rolled around, we were amazed to see all the store fronts on 2 different streets suddenly spring into life by folding back their hurricane protection doors and become diamond shops. There must have been over 100 shops in the small area and at least 95% of them were just selling diamonds and tanzenite. The streets soon became very crowded with tourists and tour buses trying to get people to buy anything/everything in sight. We headed into one of the many alleys connecting the 2 main shopping streets and discovered much nicer shopping alternatives. We stopped at an antique store and I bought some elegant sea horse ornaments that I'd never seen anywhere else. The lady running the antique store recommended that we go to a place in the same alley called Gladys' if we wanted some Caribbean food for lunch. We were getting hungry so we went there and had a delicious meal before moving on for more looking/shopping.
I bought some t-shirts and some very nice pictures that will look great at home. Mike went berzerk and bought a 70-300mm zoom lens for his camera. In hindsight I'll admit that it might have been a good thing to do since it took some great close up pictures later on in the trip.
We wished we had had more time to visit some of the beaches on St. Thomas but this was a short day in this port. About 2:30 we grabbed a taxi and headed back to the ship after seeing nothing more to look at but more diamond shops. When we reached the Cruise Port, we came across a dozen or so rock iguanas sunning themselves in the bolders surrounding the piers. Mike put his new telephoto lens on and shot some very interesting pictures. I wouldn't want to encounter one of those iguanas if they decided to get mean but they seemed to pretty much ignore the tourists and just enjoyed sunning and playing by themselves.
About 4:00, we went to an Indonesian High Tea in the Rembrandt dining room. Very different experience from the previous Dutch High Tea. But very nice at the same time. We had a choice of a variety of Indonesian teas and various types of Indonesian treats, mostly made of rice. The stewards were all dressed in traditional Indonesian garb which made the experience very nice.
That night we went to dinner at the Le Cirque (the Pinnacle restaurant was transformed into this famous New York restaurant for the night) but it was not nearly as satisfying a meal as we had had in the Pinnacle a few nights before. For dessert we both thought we'd have a chocolate souffle listed on the dessert menu. The waiter told us it would take a few minutes because it would be made to order. That was fine, I mean, where were we going anyway? It took 20 minutes. And as soon as we started to eat the souffle we could each tell that it had been burnt. The bottom of each of our souffle cups had burnt chocolate on them, ruining the entire dessert. What a shame. But the rest of the dinner was very good.
Back in the room, while Mike watched the movie Salt on TV, I went to watch a talent show put on by the crew comprised of people from 30 different countries in Southeast Asia. It was a wonderful show, I only wish Mike had gone with me.
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