November 16 Devil’s Island and Ile Royale, French Guiana

 

Did you see the movie, or read the book, Papillion?  Well it was based on a true escape from Devil’s Island that happened in 1941.  We were able to see the island and land on the adjacent island call Ile Royale.  They had the hospital and cemetery for the children of the guards there.  The guards had families her on Royale.  The children were buried here, the guards were buried on a nearby island and the prisoners were dumped into the sea.

 

                                                                                          This is Devil’s Island

 

 

                       here we are

 

                                   a black cat, of course                                   monkeys everywhere (the best part)

 

                                                                             some of the buildings that are left.  Hospital.

                                                                                   the island itself is beautiful.

 

The weather was what you would expect.  Hot and muggy.  It started to rain, no problem.  It started to really rain, so we took shelter under a overhang.  Then we thought, you can only get so wet.  So we went on our way and got wet.  Well, it turned out that as wet as we got from the rain, did not compare to how wet we got from sweating.  We did a lot of walking and half of it was uphill, very uphill.  When we got back to the ship, we had lunch and came to the room and took off our wet clothes and fell dead asleep, for 2 hours.  This lower altitude is getting to us.

 

We have a sea day tomorrow, so we will sleep in. 

November 14 Bridgetown, Barbados

Barbados is a lovely island.  Very green, as you can see.

 

          

 

We took a little van with 9 other people  They were about to leave when we were shown to their van and off we went.  It became more interesting when we discovered that the driver/guide and the two of us were the only ones who spoke English.  All the others spoke Spanish.  We toured the island for a couple of hours.  Yes, it was hot and from now on it will only get hotter.  And more humid, if more is over 96%.

 

We saw a very old church

 

                               notice the strange pipes

 

 

                    Rihanna is from here and we saw were she grew up (they named the street after her) and the multimillion dollar mansion she uses now.

                                             This is the Parliament building

 

A day at sea tomorrow, then to Devil’s Island in French Guiana.