Another family run part 3: Guadeloupe

We reserved a spot at Marina de Rivière Sens (SW of Basse Terre, Guadeloupe), which was a perfect place to rent a car and visit the most beautiful part of the island. It’s not the most beautiful marina nor town, but a great “base camp”.

Car-Day 1: La Soufrière

We went up for a hike (# 25 on the tourist map) around the active volcano: La Soufrière (Sulfur in French).
First you pass a beautiful tropical forest full of great birds and epiphytes. If you’re lucky you’ll see a few species of humming-birds.

 

As you go higher, vegetation gets thinner and clouds thicker! You have to be lucky when you go up to have a clear view of the volcano and many people try this hike more than 5 times. However, maybe you’ll be surprised but we do have a tight time schedule so we only go up once and that’s just fine! 

As it gets smelly and very windy, we decide to take a trail back down towards la Grande chute de Gallion.

 

It's a very slippery and quite difficult trail, especially as it wouldn’t stop raining, but soooo beautiful!  

 

To finish the 4 hour walk, we went for a swim in the hot baths “Les Bains Jaunes” just at the car park. A delight for the muscles after an intense and muddy walk!

 

Car-Day 2: Les Chutes du Carbet

This is a very easy walk and you have to be lucky not to have buses full of tourists just arriving as you are, but still you should do this walk. It’s a beautiful guided path through the tropical forest. From the base you can see the first two and if your lucky the three waterfalls.

 

You can only walk up to the first waterfall at this moment since the other pathways are closed due to mudslides. We found the end a bit disappointing as you cannot get close nor get a good picture of the actual waterfall, but overall we still think it’s worth a visit!

  

There’s a very nice restaurant as you drive back down, owned by two woman who will serve you a great traditional Creole menu. Good beer also, honestly everywhere we go you have quite good beer!

As the physical exercise of this day was a bit limited and we had to walk off this plentiful meal, we decided to add "la trace du Bassin Bleu". Also, the girls still had too much energy!

This walk is quite easy, not popular at all, no nicely paved pathway, but a lush forest, banana trees and after a little rock climbing a great plunge at the base of a small waterfall.

I guess in sunny weather its supposed to be blue, but as tradition calls for, we do it all in the rain! Yes yes, I also went in there ;-)

Car-Day 3: La Trace de la Rivière Quiock

Starting from the “Maison de la Forêt”, we went for a hike that crosses 18 times the same river. The most difficult hike until now, especially with heavy legs after the two previous days.

After the first half hour my mum returned to try an easier hike around the forest house. We decided to go on until two o’clock, but off course it took us a bit longer (6 hours) and at 4 pm we found a mum in a catatonic state because she was sure something had happened. Oeps sorry no cellphone reception… She alarmed the woodsman that picked us up at the end of the footpath, quite at ease because he knew the hike would take us around 5 hours …
It’s true that they forgot to indicate that the trail was closed, but they were so sure we would turn back in the first half hour that they didn’t come after us to get us back…

Honestly the most intense, approving walk going over tree roots and through the mud every centimetre of the hike, washing up each time we crossed (sometimes we needed to swim) the river. But the most beautiful walk ever!

Day 4: Sail to Pigeon island

My mum left LouiseAnna and stayed a week at Sainte-Rose (the North of Basse Terre). With a clean boat we sailed towards "les îlets à Goyaves" or Pigeon island. While we happily say bye bye to the rain we're very sad to leave these beautiful mountains. The girls find back their playground and dress as if we live in Belgium ;-)

 

Sunset over Pigeon island

Unlike comments all over the cruising community, the bay across Pigeon island is quite nice and a very good place to take your dinghy out to the Cousteau Reserve.

Day 5: Chilling’ and teaching

Teaching aboard of LouiseAnna goes well, but it’s not easy. The girls are often distracted by a flying fish, a turtle, a dolphin, another boat that arrives with new friends … and sometimes mum just doesn’t feel like it and wants to read a book 😳 The distraction shown below was a moment of dolphins swimming in very shallow water between the boats at anchor. Actually it was a group of dolphins mating and really they mate like “pigs”! But we didn’t explain that to the girls as we didn’t have “the talk yet” 😯🙅.

 Quick jump on dads back to check out the dolphins.

Day 6: Swimming at the Cousteau Reserve

Snorkeling is amazing here! There’s even a statuette of Cousteau around 10 m depth you can check out (we forgot the GoPro for that swim, grrrr). You don’t have to be able to dive to enjoy the marine scenery.

Day 7: Deshaies

This bay is quite loved by many cruisers, however we’re not so fond of it. It’s not even that pretty, restaurants cheat on saying they’re Gault Millau, but they’re fake panels and the food is not so great and expensive.

 Nice mini fruit market though...

An the Botanical Garden (expensive) is truly beautiful.

 

 

 

Wonderful playground overlooking the Bay of Deshaies.

Day 8: Sainte-Rose


Very quiet, not so easy to get there and very poor holding. But a nice place to start and have a tour in the Mangroves. We didn’t do this anymore as we wanted to take advantage of the good weather to go to Antigua, but it looks very nice. 
 The girls went swimming at the hotel of grandma, because the ocean is great, but a swimming pool is better off course!

We said our goodbyes to grandma and Guadeloupe. We’ll definitely come back here in a few years ;-)