Our second island visit in the Caribbean came last Tuesday.  Martinique is a French territory, hence the name.  The people there speak French, Creole, and a little English.  Even though the city that we pulled into was the Capital of the island, there wasn’t very much to do.  There were a few good restaurants along the waterfront within sight of the ship, but the bay wasn’t as good for snorkeling as Curacao was.  We were also unable to schedule any scuba diving trips, as we did in Curacao.

Tuesday, we pulled into the bay of Fort-de-France fairly early in the morning.  The bay was shallow, but we couldn’t see the bottom very clearly.  The city here was much larger than the city in Curacao that we moored next to, so I suspect that has something to do with it.  In Curacao we snorkeled about 100 feet away from the ship, and we could see 20 feet down into the water.  Tuesday afternoon I got to go into town for a little while.  We walked around the downtown area, which was a really crowded area filled with small shops.  The shops were all closing down at about 4pm for the day, so we never saw much of what was in them.  It surprised us how many pharmacies, shoe stores and sunglasses stores seemed to be on every street corner.  The pharmacies were almost everywhere, and you could almost always spot one from wherever you were.

Most of the restaurants in Fort-de-France opened at 7pm and stay open well into the night.  This made it difficult for us to find any food though between 4pm and 7pm.  We mostly walked around the city observing how many stores were closed before we were able to get any food.  Shortly before 7 we found a restaurant that was willing to open about 10 minutes early, and serve us some drinks before they began serving their main entrees.  The menu was a little cryptic, but the waitress, who had a hard enough time with English, was able to sufficiently describe what we were ordering.  I got a steak, which was probably about the equivalent of a filet mignon, but not quite as good as the steak that I had in Miami.  (The prices were a lot better, too.)  We went back to the ship soon after that, with our bellies satisfied and a little knowledge about the island.

Wednesday was a duty day for me, and I had an easy watch.  I went to bed fairly early to prepare for liberty on Thursday.

Thursday morning we left the ship in a fairly large group.  We had the intention of seeing how easy it would be to get away from Fort-de-France and find some good snorkeling or hiking.  There is a large volcano in the northern part of the island, and some guys had heard about canyoning.  Unfortunately, we never actually went canyoning, because we were told that we wouldn’t be allowed to rent any “motorized vehicles” while in Martinique, so our transportation was extremely limited.  Canyoning is a sport where you rappel or climb through canyons to get to waterfalls or whatever else you may want to see.  It sounded fun, but I think we would have needed to prepare far in advance in order to do it.

We caught a taxi to a city further up the coast called Saint Pierre.  The city was small, but the coolest thing about it was the black sand on the beach.  It wasn’t quite black, but it was definitely a dark grayish color.  We snorkeled for a little while, but the area that we were in wasn’t very good, and we should have found some rocks to snorkel near.  The volcano loomed up in the sky behind the city, and according to the history books, Saint Pierre was called “Little Paris” before the city was covered in lava in 1902.  Now it is a small quiet city with a lot of fishing boats in it’s harbor.  We were concerned about getting back to Fort-de-France in any reasonable amount of time, so after a couple of hours of snorkeling, we crammed our group into a small bus that was the nearest we were going to get to a taxi.  The price was pretty inexpensive, but there were about 15 people on the bus altogether.  The rest of the evening was spent in Fort-de-France enjoying the food of Martinique.

We are underway once again now, and tonight I will have the 2am-7am watch.  Lately, it seems like a lot of the equipment that I own has been breaking, so I’ve spent a lot of time troubleshooting and repairing stuff.  The atmosphere of the ship has relaxed quite a bit from the stressed-out state that it was in a couple of weeks ago.

I have heard much about the strange weather in US recently.  I would appreciate some email about the strange weather that has been happening up there, if you feel so inclined.  J