3 hrs, 7.7 kms
Day Totals: 16 hrs, 15 .1

Down in the town of Soufriere nestled between the bay and jungle mountains on all side, I quickly set to looking for some lodging. Online I'd only found one overpriced hotel, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that the cheap places don't advertise online. I spot a tourism office and figure it wouldn't hurt to ask.

"Where can I find the cheapest guesthouse?" I ask. The lady points to a cluster of building at the far end of town, pressed against the mountainside.

Sure enough--it is cheap! (relatively speaking). Soufriere is definitely going to be my home for a while.

The day is still young, so I figure I'll go ahead a check out the waterfall that's just a mile or two away. I head inland, up a jungle path until I find the entrance. I'm a bit disgruntled at the 7 dollar entrance fee--especially after I paid 1 dollar for the waterfall in Grenada, but I finally decide to cough up the cash .

Inside is a beautiful garden with a sign that this estate used to belong to the family of the wife of Napoleon. It is still owned and run by a French family as a relic of another era.

The waterfall itself is a sudden reminder of the dark side of this beautiful location: although it doesn't look like it, hidden in the jungle is an active volcano... a volcano that could wipe out this town someday. In fact, this stream is constantly spewing out minerals from this volcano and changes color depending on which mineral is dominant. Today it's sort of grey.

Back in town, I head down to a small park area along the bay, and gaze up at the beautiful Pitons, a stones throw away. I'm told that you can climb them... and I think I definitely need to give it a try.

A lady with a small child sits next to me. At first I find it a bit odd that she strikes up a conversation with me--but it does seems she just wants to chat and nothing more . I'm more used to the Middle East/North Africa where a woman approaching a male stranger for a conversation is all but unthinkable.

She works at the local grocery store and lives with her boyfriend and son. She dreams of visiting London someday... I wonder if that will ever happen with what she's earning...

I ask her why there isn't much farming here in St Lucia. "My family has a farm up in the mountains. But the floods destroyed most of our trees... in fact, my grandfather died in the floods a couple of years ago. It seems like every couple of years there's a hurricane or flood and it destroys our crops. It's a very hard life..."

I suddenly feel a lot more sympathetic for Caribbean folks who give up the farming life for life in the city.

As we people watch folks going past, she points out "The owner of the shop there is Indian"

"She's from the country of India?" I ask

"No ... no... here we call anyone with straight hair 'Indian'--it's not about where they're from. I don't know why I don't have straight hair--my mother did..."

Then she asks me a question that catches me off guard. "Why is everyone in St Lucia black?" she asks.

Seems like an odd question to ask a guy who just arrived on you island, but she seems sincere in her curiousity. I don't know if I should give her a brief history lesson on her country or not...

A couple days later, another local lady asks me the same question. This makes me wonder... what do they teach kids in school about the history of their country? Do they even know that their ancestors were brought from Africa as slaves? That African, native Caribs and South Asian indentured laborers intermarried creating the ethnic mix they are today (explaining why in one family some kids might have straight hair and the others curly)

It's such a vivid contrast to much of Africa, where tribal identities run back thousands of years, and people are categorized and pigeon-holed based on their tribal identity . Where you're taught growing up that you should care about people of your tribe... and distrust everyone else... this making it very difficult to build a unified, functional society that works for the common good of all.

Maybe people here are better off, NOT having any clear tribal identity... NOT being overly aware of their history.

I do love visiting places where tradition and culturaly identity stretches on for milenniums... but that does seems to be a recipe for unresolved conflict--as there's always a reason to hate the neighboring tribe for whatever they did to your tribe at sometime in history.... So this is actually quite refreshing, seeing a culture where those differences have been forgotten.

I head up to the church plaza and ponder on this a bit more. Slavery was a terrible thing--but it did have this intriguing side effect: it eliminated tribalism.