When I see tall things in the distance, one thing pops into my head:  I must climb that.  I was perusing my sister’s photos of her own St. Lucia vacation when I stumbled upon the Pitons of St. Lucia.  Like a mismatched set of gigantic fangs, Gros and Petit Piton rise out of the Caribbean Sea on St Lucia’s west coast and are its most recognizable landmarks.  They are so important to St. Lucia, in fact, that they named their own indigenous beer, Piton, after them.

I flew into St. Lucia on a late afternoon REDjet flight on Friday, a flight all of twenty minutes, knowing only where my hotel was located and that it had balcony views of Petit Piton.  Unlike the United States, finding a cab is never an issue; they will find you, and quickly.  I knew the price was set at US$65 from Hewanorra Airport to Soufriere, so I got a kick out of my cab driver when he told me “It’s $75 but, for you, i’ll knock it down $65”.  So nice of him to charge me regular price!  But as the drive progressed and we began talking, and I learned that he goes by the name “Cow”, we bonded as much as a taxi driver and tourist can.  I learned that he owns 4 acres of banana trees as well as driving the taxi van 7 days a week, and that he has three daughters from four different wives.  That is one busy man, I thought to myself.

Cow offered to drive me to Gros Piton the next morning, but I would have to be ready by 6:00 a.m.  Of course one of the two nights I was in a spacious, comfy, air-conditioned hotel room I wouldn’t even be sleeping for more than five and a half hours!  Soufriere, however, is settled in between beautiful, lush mountainside opening up onto a quiet fishing bay, so when I woke up at 5:30 a.m. with light clouds rolling over the jagged mountaintops and the sun illuminating just enough detail, and it was definitely a sight worth seeing.  All I had to eat was a bag of peanuts that morning, with two water bottles packed for my climb, before my guide Shem and I began the ascent of Gros Piton just before 7:00 a.m.  It was a good thing we left so early, though, because even by the quarter mile mark, I had sweat pouring down my face while Shem had not even broken a sweat.  I guess that’s the difference between casually keeping in shape and hiking a 2,619 foot peak everyday.  The trail consisted, at first, of inclined packed dirt with a few areas of steep broken rock that would have to be navigated with use of all four limbs.  As the path hit the half-way mark and continued upwards it morphed into steeper switchbacks with crude earthen stairs and wooden railings nailed between especially steep sections.  If it had been just me, I would’ve taken my sweet time, but Shem was under the impression that a young man of my age was capable of going faster than I wanted, and thus I pretended to be hardly winded when we would stop for breaks.  With aching limbs, I reached the summit look-out point about an hour and ten minutes after we began, and there it hit me that it was completely merited to be so winded, because I was really, really high up.  The view was stunning:  You could see nearly the entire length of the island, with many of its uneven peaks shrouded in early morning clouds.  Soufriere was just a cluster of houses behind Petit Piton across the bay, and you could see numerous sailboats jetting around the west coast.

The way down was a bit easier, and in the fifty minutes it took us to descend from Gros Piton’s glorious heights, I learned a little bit about my guide, Shem.  Although I didn’t ask his age, he must’ve been somewhere between 17-19 years old, and had graduated from school in Soufriere.  Shem lived near the base of the Piton and had four brothers and two sisters, but he was a middle child.  He had been working as a guide on Gros Piton for two years, hiking the mountain at least once, if not twice, daily.  He told me the fastest he had ever climbed Gros Piton was in 55 minutes, but the slowest was with a group of older tourists who took 4 hours to make the climb!

Traveling to unfamiliar destinations is exhilarating, but, at times, it can be just as frustrating.  Upon coming back to town, I needed to take out money for my celebratory post-hike meal, but of course Saturday was the day where the Bank of St. Lucia in town was inconveniently switching its location to a waterfront building.  The ATM would not be operable until Monday.  Cow had to pick up a couple in the northern capital city of Castries at 12:00, so I had to take an hour drive north with him, take out money in Castries, and take a public bus an hour back to Soufriere.  Exhausted, dirty, and desperate, I stumbled into Archie’s bar and restaurant around 1:30 p.m.  and had the best chicken rotis and salad of my life.  Despite my limited time in St. Lucia, the only activities I could muster the energy for the rest of the day was to nap on the beach, nap in my hotel room, eat dinner at Archie’s, and wander the town streets and talk with some locals until around 10:00 p.m.

Sunday I played the typical tourist role, with Cow taking me and a couple from Arkansas around to the drive-in sulfur volcano just outside of Soufriere along with a trip to Toraille Falls.  It made for some good picture taking, to be sure, but it did not have nearly as an authentic, organic feel to it as did yesterday’s hike up Gros Piton.  Cow agreed to drive me over to the east coast for some sightseeing before my afternoon flight back to Barbados, and I even got a dip in at a beach down the road from the airport before my 5:00 pm flight.  I wouldn’t recommend cutting one’s time that close, however, as I enjoyed myself at the beach so much I almost missed the cut-off for check in.  All in all, a great weekend away that I would recommend for anybody — well, anybody who enjoys challenging physical exertion, that is — and a nice break before my head is buried in the books for midterms at UWI!

It was one of those rare days when simply sitting on the beach, soaking in the sun, wasn’t going to do it for me.  Tomorrow would be Friday, devoid of classes, and thus I had an empty day with which to work.  I have already scoured much of the west and south coasts, enjoying the beaches, restaurants, and nightlife, so if I was to go on a self-labeled “adventure,” it would have to be somewhere in Barbados’s unspoiled northern or eastern highlands.  Immediately, I recalled North Point, the northernmost point in Barbados, where the serene Caribbean meets the broiling Atlantic.  The images of the windswept, rocky plains of northern Barbados sliding off dramatically into the choppy Atlantic, stretching for hundreds of miles before one’s eyes, held my attention, and thus my destination was decided.

Having received no signs of interest in going amongst the other exchange students, it became apparent that I would be doing this trip to North Point alone.  Strangely, however, I cherished the opportunity to take a bus ride out into the middle of what seemed like nowhere by myself and just see where the day went.  I asked a lady at the bus stop when the Connell Town (the small town closest to North Point) bus was due to arrive, and she gave me an incredulous look. “You ne’er see dem tourists try’n go to Connell Town!”

The Connell Town bus came an hour after I reached the bus stop, and as the bus chugged north, the Bridgetown sprawl turned into the posh “Plantinum Coast”, which then turned into hilly countryside, dotted with modest, brightly colored houses scattered along the road.  I felt myself getting excited; this was unexplored territory, and certainly off the beaten tourist path.  Again, I had to ask the assistance of a lady on the bus to determine when, exactly, I should get off the bus to make it to North Point.  Getting on the right bus is never the hard part — it’s determining where you should get off that has proven to be somewhat troubling.  She pulled the overhead cord, alerting the driver to let me off, and the bus came to a squealing halt next to a dilapidated gravel road.  She pointed down the path, telling me that was North Point.

I hopped off the bus, and as it roared away down the road, it became very apparent that I should have asked for more specific directions toward the North Point, not just a north point.  I continued down the gravel road, which led to an abandoned hotel complex, clearly not having been occupied in many years.  It was creepy, there’s no denying that, but I was so engrossed in my adventure mindset that I kept walking further toward the cliffs on the coast and into the complex.  A couple of times, I got the feeling that someone was watching me, but I attributed that to an over-active imagination as I continued to snap some pictures of the collapsing hotel buildings.  I came through a group of trees, and then I immediately saw the small fire burning.  Before I could decide the next course of action, the man tending the fire jumped to his feet and waved at me.  “Great,” I thought. “I just wandered at least half a mile into an abandoned hotel complex, and now I’m alone with an arguably homeless gentleman in the northernmost part of the country.”

As he walked toward me, the only thing I could think of to say was “Oh, sorry man, should I leave?”  He came closer, and I could tell that my first assumption was definitely right; this guy was living out here.  “Where your tour guide?  It’s okay.  I be your tour guide.  Your people go to the Animal Flower Cave, over der.  But here you can take dem steps down to da beach and swim, very refreshing!”

I looked incredulously down at the waves pounding the rocky cliffs — there was no way anyone could swim down there.  We introduced ourselves, and he told me he was the “Keeper of the Flame of the North”, which would explain his little fire.  It was a strange sensation, talking to the Keeper of the Flame of the North, because I was simultaneously excited to be talking to someone so eccentric, but also very nervous he was going to finish the conversation by taking all my money.  After discussing our respective birthdays and how his mother’s birthday is ten days away from mine, he did eventually ask for some money. “Man, I go into town and my friends make fun o’ me ’cause I got nothin’!  They say, ‘What you doin’ up there?’  They don’ know I’m keepin’ the flame goin’.”

I stolidly told him I could give him a $2 bill, but that was all.  The Keeper of the Flame, and, briefly, my new tour guide, was not thrilled but accepted it and thanked me with a fist pound.  Then, as casually as I possibly could, I said my goodbyes and booked it out of there.

The rest of the adventure was breathtaking.  I skirted the coast for a half-mile in the other direction upon leaving the hotel complex, and was mesmerized by the raw power of the Atlantic Ocean just hammering away at the forty foot cliffs standing in its path.  I got close enough to get hit with ocean spray as droplets of water exploded over the edge of the cliff.  The Animal Flower Cave, where I was told “my people go”, as it turns out, is a bit of a tourist trap, as it cost $20 Bajan to have a tour guide walk you down a flight of stairs and then tell you you’re in a small cave.  Don’t get me wrong — it was cool to be standing in a cave where you could see the water rushing into the pools on the cave floor, only to be sucked out moments later, but as soon as monetary value gets placed on something, one’s expectations inevitably go up as well.

Out of water, with not much left to explore, I walked back to the nearest bus stop. This is where pre-adventure planning really is important, because, with no prior knowledge of bus schedules and/or specific routes, I ended up waiting nearly two hours in the baking heat for any form of transportation to come.  I watched school children getting home from school, people biking home from work, and the sun nearly set behind the sugar cane fields before a bus driver told me to get on his bus, despite the fact that it was going in the wrong direction.  I agreed, just happy to not be sitting out on a sidewalk anymore.  The bus would, in fact, make it back to a stop near campus, but not before driving down countless back roads all over the countryside in order to make its necessary stops.  For a mere $2 Bajan, I got to see more of Barbados than I had in my previous three weeks combined.

This is where the “Keeper of the Flame” advised me to go swimming.

The view of North Point from the Animal Flower Cave.