It was our first alarm-less day of the trip, though some men doing construction at the villas down the beach from us woke us up around 7am anyway. Perhaps they don’t work on weekends and we will not have to deal with that for the next couple days. Though my phone was telling me that it was presently storming and wouldn’t clear until 4pm, this couldn’t have been further from the truth.
We fixed ourselves some breakfast of premade Belgian waffles with sugar that we had purchased at the market yesterday. While we were eating breakfast, the American Eagle flight appeared to have finally landed in Tortola. In a way, it’s best that we didn’t make it on our first day either because we would have been here with the storm coming down all day yesterday. It’s best that it was a travel day. But with the sun shining down brightly, our first stop was The Baths National Park. This is the most famous site on Virgin Gorda — home to the unique large boulders that line the coastline.
It was a little confusing at first because there are numerous trails that lead to The Baths. It seems most people do the simplest and most direct path that goes straight to the beach, but the park workers sold us on the idea of seeing something called the Caves first. We didn’t know anything about it, but it sounded interesting enough. It required lots of crouching as we made ourselves small to fit through the narrow gaps and low hanging rocks around us. It was indeed scenic and we were soon at The Baths themselves.
On other parts of the islands, there is an inundation of sargassum, not to be confused with my peppered use of sarcasm in this blog. Sargassum is brown seaweed that reeks of rotten eggs, farts, and dead fish. It is a potent mixture that made us want to vomit while driving around the island. HOWEVER, The Baths thankfully do not have a sargassum issue as the bulk of it seems to have washed ashore on different parts of the island. Thus, we were able to take our time enjoying the site — initially all to ourselves.
Eventually more people showed up, but were also quick to leave. It appeared they were on some kind of day trip that gave them all of fifteen minutes at The Baths before heading back out. Though Nicole has seen images of copious amounts of visitors at The Baths, that was not our experience at all. Hurricane season for the win! Yet, even those images appear to be related to a Disney cruise ship that occasionally docks (averaging once every other week) on Tortola and offers a Virgin Gorda excursion. I’m convinced we are currently the only people staying at our hotel and we really don’t see other tourists — much fewer even than Bonaire which itself was not that crowded.
There was, however, a decent amount of marine life in the water just offshore from The Baths and I spotted these Caribbean reef squid. There were about six of them in formation just slowly hovering around the reef. I was waiting for them to catch a fish, but no such luck. Nevertheless, really cool to see such interesting creatures in person. After spending about two hours or so at The Baths, we headed back to the car park.
It is very reminiscent of the Seychellles — particularly Anse Source D’argent on La Digue island. Search for that using my fancy new search bar in the blog to compare and contrast! While our personal experience would seem to indicate that Virgin Gorda’s Baths are less visited, the opposite appears to actually be the truth. I think it is a matter of timing and the season that allowed us to have such a tranquil visit. We returned to our beachfront abode to fix ourselves some lunch and unwind for a spell. We read our books and relaxed to the sounds of the ocean which eventually became the sounds of nearby construction.
We took that as cue to head elsewhere for a spell. The return of clouds made a stand up paddle board session seem appealing. It was a nice temperature shielded from the sun as we leisurely paddled along the coast for a while. I then made us a dinner reservation, which was probably not required this time of year, but it is also for the most popular restaurant on the island — The CocoMaya.
It is supposed to be a good spot to watch the sunset as well, but a rain shower passed through as this would have happened. We were surrounded on both sides by tables of loud people drinking lots of alcohol. Bricole, everyone’s favorite (and responsible) celebrity couple, thought it best to depart before any one of them got behind the wheel. But as they asked for the wine menu, we decided we had time to indulge ourselves on some sticky toffee pudding. I suppose that is one thing that you won’t find on the U.S. Virgin Islands — a wee bit of Britishness on a plate.
Being the savvy and economical people that we are, we returned to the Mango Bay Resort and tapped into our bottle of wine as we sat outside amidst strung lights while we listened to the waves crashing against the shore. The clouds did eventually clear a bit to reveal some stars and a bit of the milky way. Tomorrow we don’t have any grand plans beyond going to another rocky beach and maybe tracking down some souvenirs to add to our collection. Ta ta for now.
passports & pepto bismol 