Fort Charlotte

Raquel came to pick us up with his car, to take us on a trip to Fort Charlotte. We went off, but the wheel of the car was loose. So firstly, we had to drive uphill with a loose wheel for quite some minutes. It felt pretty unsafe, and I had some doubt whether or not this trip would ever happen. But after some funky driving, we arrived at a house where he could fix the wheel.
Then we took a bypass by car and passed along the harbor. Here a huge German Cruise-ship was docked. We took a look at it from a distance, and got so amazed by how big it was! There were so many people chilling, two swimming pools, a lounge on the side of the cruise(probably to watch dolphins and whales while sailing) and bars.
The city was very quiet because it was a Sunday. There were some people at the graveyard, weird as it is, rather celebrating then grieving.
We drove on very steep hills, both, uphill and downhill, but finally we managed to arrive at Fort Charlotte. When we arrived, a car full of tourists from the cruise had also just arrived. Elderly Europeans with shorts and shades, caps and bags, camera's and sunburned arms filled up our sights and pictures. One, at the moment when he was arriving the fort, was immediately asking where the ice cream was. Then the guide told him : 'No ice cream, we have pumpkin here.', and she pointed at a plant in the grass growing there by coincidence. Pretty.
Another guide there turned out to be a friend of Raquel and decided to give us a tour. The 200 years old fort,with its amazingly thick walls is build very high, about 200 meters above sea-level. When we looked down, in the direction of the sea, we could see a kind of natural square bath. In times the fort was used, it was functioning as a bath for the people with Leprosy. When we looked west, we could see the local radio- and television station, the local beer brewery for 'Hairoun beer', a tiny harbor where the 'black pearl' of Pirates of the Caribbean was build.
The weirdest thing though, was that there was a woman’s jail attached to this fort, one which is in use nowadays. Once a woman was trialed for killing her children. She turned out to be innocent, but this was after she got hung. Since that day, they promised never to sentence a woman to death again and instead put them into this very prison. In the afternoon, when it gets a little cooler and the fort is almost closed for visitors, the women go to the open space in the fort for doing some sports.
We als saw paintings about the history of the people. A slave boat from Africa sank in between the two islands Saint Vincent and Bequia and the slaves swum towards both islands. So nowadays the locals descent both from the native West-Indian people and the African people. To brighten up the place they brought two barrels to the fort which were used in the movie. (Maybe , after all the Pirates of The Caribbean stuff, I should mention some parts of the movie were filmed at Saint Vincent). It's funny, quite some locals worked on helping with the movie (often because they got a lot of free food for it), and they always say : 'I saw Johnny Depp, I have a picture with I and him, but I've never seen the movies. Have you seen them movies?'.
The fort is also a kind of lighthouse for the boats. Boats call to this house when they are coming on, or for example, when they are in trouble. The dude in it was done for the day, so we had to tell him he could come down, so he did and drank some beer. But no one was replacing him really. Then the phone was ringing for several times, while no one was really answering. A quite nice indication of how things can be.
The sight from the fort was very amazing. On one side you can see the wild Atlantic, on the other side there's the calmer Caribbean Sea. On the sea you could see shadows of the clouds, effects of the winds and depths and underwater streams. .
After a Guinness, fruit cocktail(very nice sparkling fruit juice) and half a liter of Coca cola for the amount enormous amount of €3,30 we went for another drive uphill. Tiny roads alongside tiny, fragile looking houses. Some of them half-finished, probably because building the next level of the house turned out to be too much effort after all. We passed along houses where Anthony's family used to live. And then we ended up in a village build by the government. It looked quite nice. But we heard people didn't really like to live here, at 'Green Hill', cause they found it too cold (25 degrees Celsius instead of 30).
Anthony's cousin lives here, so we knocked on the door. Then it turned out to be the birthday of her boyfriend and so he invited us over for a brandy, or if someone wouldn't drink that strong stuff, some nice red wine from Canada. We took a look in the house, saw that the ceiling was covered with Sticky Wicky's (plakhandjes), let the child explain why that was ( He and his sister like to throw them up there, and that sometimes they fall off and sometimes his sister pulls them off and then they have to throw them back again.), had some chats, the boyfriend asked us 'what you're waiting for, why aren't you married yet, then he told us he likes to be happy, and then we went off again.
We went downhill into the city and spotted some lost tourists from the cruise-ship. They didn't look altogether happy. Probably because their cruise-ship had docked on a Sunday, and while waltzing trough the city center, they must have discovered that everything's closed on Sundays here. And realizing they kind of wasted their day by not just staying on their cruise and have a swim in one of the huge swimming pools.
What they could have done, though, was buying a very nice ice cream from the ice cream shop which opens at 4 o'clock in the afternoon for people like us, who went for a trip and ending their day with an ice cream. We had Guinness, coconut, and butterscotch ice cream. And then Raquel brought us home.
At home, Baxter was waiting for us. He ran towards us with his tongue out of his mouth, jumped on us for about 15 minutes. Then he played with us for another 15 minutes, rolling over the floor, drooling and biting us in the hands, arms and ankles very tenderly, running away from us and running towards us again.
Then we had dinner while watching 'Boer zoekt vrouw' and Anne baked a very nice apple cinnamon cake, which we had for dessert.
The later it got, the more we got surrounded by weird bugs. So we got annoyed and decided to go to bed; far away and safe from the bugs. But when I shone with the torch for the lat check-up, there was somewhat a dragon in the corner of the net, accompanied by a five legged shrimped colored freak spider which we had to get out of the net (if we wanted to sleep kind of comfortable). So we had a little fight which ended with 6 legs attached to Anthony's Flip Flop, and a lizard underneath the bed and 9 clothing pins extra holding the net closed very tightly. Then we slept.

As a special, some English lessons from Boer zoekt vrouw:

waiter: 'Would you like some sparkling?'
vrouw: 'Ja, ze vroegen dus net of we sparkling wouwen, dus ik heb ja gezeg, want da's volgens mij bubbelwijn.

Waiter: 'We have soup, salad, salmon..'
vrouw: 'Wat ga jij nemen?'
Boer: 'Oja, ehh, wat hadden ze nou te eten? Salmon? Wat is dat, salamander of zo?'.

So, I just wanted to say, my mistakes in English, it must be dialect.