Today we are in St. Vincent.
St. Vincent & the Grenadines is unique on our itinerary as the country with the strictest COVID restrictions. So far on this cruise vaccinated travelers have been able to go ashore without restrictions at all, but here you can only go ashore on a ship's excursion. So, with the kiddo at "Adventure Ocean," Diana and I did a "scenic drive" tour.
We boarded a minibus like the one below.
After passing through Kingstown our first stop was Fort Charlotte to the north of the capital and high above the harbour. You can see Grandeur of the Seas far below. You could see some of the Grenadine islands from up here, too, but not in the photo below.
We had maybe half an hour or so to tour the fort.
Some goats were foraging nearby, and I enjoyed watching them.
Our only other stop on the tour was the botanical gardens, which is more than 250 years old. We had a nice walk through the gardens.
For me the most exciting part of the botanical gardens was seeing St. Vincent's indigenous and endemic Amazona guildingii parrot.
I did not take any good pictures, but you can see one of them below, and I really enjoyed watching them because they are very noisy and quite active.
Once we reached the end of the walk through the gardens, a lady was there selling beers, so we bought a couple. I must have failed to take a picture of the bottle, but as in Antigua the local beer is named after the Indigenous name of the island, in this case the Carib word Hairoun, meaning something like "land of the blessed." It actually might be the same beer as Wadadli because it is produced by the same brewery, but either way I find the naming choice interesting.
After the botanical garden we drove south of Kingstown before coming back to the port.
We had a nice view of the sunset as we sailed away.
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