Gros Piton

Hello folks!

Hows things? Hope you all are as busy as I am at the moment, in a good way obviously... Lots of things happening here there and everywhere, including piton climbing on Saturday! Actually, I managed to tick two things off last Saturday, one off the St. Lucia list, which was to climb gros piton, and another one off the “have to do once in lifetime”-list, which was awesome!!

So, to do the adventure justice I have to start at the beginning… of course we didn’t have the landrover (although we did, just noone knew, how weird is that!), so the three of us got up bright and early on Saturday and left the house surprisingly with only half an hour delay to catch a bus into town and then down south towards Vieux Fort, so that we could get off at the junction leading towards gros piton and then hopefully hitch a ride for the rest of journey… a few more delays later and we got off the bus and started walking down a beautiful and tranquil road towards the piton looming in the distance. Tranquil I say because there was literally noone there. We walked and walked, but no car ever passed us, except for one, which went the wrong way. What was wrong here, noone climbing the piton today? Mountain closed? Hmm, mysterious… but alas, after about 40 minutes worth of walking we almost stumbled into the explanation for the absence of cars:

There was no other way to cross the river by car, and even the footbridge:

Had clearly seen better days. So we jumped the river and kept on walking, and after about an hour, at the other end of the road we finally came across a sign that looked like this:

Much laughter and 5 minutes later we were at the BOTTOM of the piton! So leteth the climbing commence! Our plan to start early so we wouldn’t have to climb it in the heat of the day obviously had gone out the window by then, and a hot day it was indeed, but that was not going to deter us, we had come too far.

The climb starts rather gently, a bit of scrambling across big rocks, but rather flat, because one goes in a semi-circle around the piton and up a little shoulder before actually starting the climb, a nice way to ease yourself into the walk. The area around the piton is largely untouched, so it was glorious walking through the forest on the way up, and I particularly enjoyed walking for the sake of walking, without having to record any data or wrestle down iguanas… J

2.5 hours and many short breaks later finally saw us at the top of gros piton, where it was a bit hazy, so the view unfortunately wasn’t what it could have been, but it was still awesome, one could see as far as Mt. Gimie, the highest point of the island, and we were happy.

The way down was much quicker, and we now faced the problem of how to get back to the highway, and then into town in time, so we could pick up our stuff and go home before the last bus leaves town…

So we were sitting at this busstop, hoping against better knowledge, when with much huffing and puffing and honking and shouting a large lorry with about 20 guys in the back comes around the corner. Our lucky day!! We flagged him down and practically begged him to drop us off at the highway, at first he thought I was kidding, and almost didn’t stop, I suppose not too many white girls want a ride in the back of his vehicle… but in the end I managed to convince him and so the Saturday afternoon saw me standing in the back of the lorry with the largest grin on my face and a breeze around my ears! It was awesome, and turquoise! The lorry, not me J

So much excitement last weekend, on Sunday we went wormsnake hunting, rather successfully in the end, they are the coolest of snakes, really tiny, but a proper snake! That means I have now seen 3 out of the 4 snakes on the island, although some argue that there might be a fifth one around, which noone has seen around in a while, that doesn’t really count, does it?

So yes, much awesomeness going on, we’ll see what mischief I get up to this weekend!

Hope you’re well, friends near and far, don’t forget to do something exciting!

Cheers,

Carol