Its a never ending island hop... today we hopped of the boat at Kingstown, on the island St. Vincents and Grenadine. Once through the usual port duty free - cheap booze and diamonds to go milarkey we were straight into the town... crazy noisy smelly chaos... refreshingly no tat shops for tourists, just local markets and street traders all vying for local sales. 
Music blasting from everywhere, cars (very battered and often very pimped) all over the roads - parked in the middle of the street, loading, unloading, chatting seemingly oblivious to the total traffic jam caused behind them...
We walked through this mayhem - the temperatures were rising probably about 30 degrees - tourists evident by trying to walk on the shady side of the street - even when we turned off the main drag and there were less people it was still like carnival time with music blasting everywhere. Its very atmospheric and mostly promotes a good vibe although I have heard '3 little birds' everywhich way about a dozen times a day🤣🤣🤣
We were heading to the botanical gardens. Eventually we set of up a wee hill and came to an amazing building - part stone - part brick. We had been told that before the islands became independant you could tell who built what the French always built with stone and the British with brick.
This astonishing building was of french origin ... two pointers, first it was mainly stone - incredibly ornate - using brick for some decoration and secondly it was a Roman Catholic school. It was so out of character to all the buildings around it. There was a notice inviting visitors to sit in the courtyard garden - which we did - suddenly a shady lush verdant spot of tranquility...
But eventually we braved the sunshine and carried on up the hill. Another school on the corner - nothing ornate about this one - just this amazing loud trumpeting noise coming from the building - seriously loud and sustained as if the whole trumpet part of several orchestras were just letting off steam with one long blast.. it was tuneless and deafening - we hurried past to find the Botanical garden just a few more metres round the corner.
Again glorious serene space full of hibiscus, palm trees, enormous avocado trees, bread fruit (from original seed donated by Captian Bligh) and all the fauna and foliage you might expect in the Caribbean. There was also a parrot sanctuary.. rescueing parrots and helping to keep endangered species going.
It was a nice spot, less shade than we had expected and no cafe so we headed back down towards town. When we got to the noisy school- It was still incredibly noisy. As we rounded the corner, intending to walk down that street as an alternative way back, we were met by hundreds of school girls all dressed in uniform With banners marching up and down the road... And those that weren't marching had these plastic horns that they were blowing.. making this tremendous trumpeting noise🤣🤣 It must have been some kind of school celebration the banners seemed to represent different 'houses' within the school. They were all having a very good time, but we decided not to walk down that street and carried on back into the bustle of the main throughfare where aftrr that cacaphony, for a short while it felt quiet🤣
Back in town we thought we'd have a beer... but there just wasnt anywhere obvious - we stopped to have a snoop round a local supermarket - it was so expensive and they didn't have any banana ketchup - it was hot and we were wilting - so we ended up back very near the ship where we had a couple of local beers before returning to the over airconditioned ship...
The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to building our boat... tougher that it looks but its going well. The ship had a bbq that evening - meaning no outside tables to sit at and its too cold to sit in the observatory bar so we sat on the promenade deck to watch the moon come up and the boat sail away.