Exploring Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas
November 10: Our port visit today was the city of Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. We had planned to take a catamaran to the island of St. John for another beach and snorkeling day, but Mother Nature changed those plans.
This was my first view of St. Thomas, at 06:47. The rain was coming down in buckets, the winds were high and the lightning and thunder were quite impressive! It wasn’t looking like the day we had planned. We docked at Crown Point, a few miles west of Charlotte Amalie.
An ambulance was standing at the gangway. We learned later that a couple of the ship’s officers had donated blood during the night to keep one of our passengers alive, and the captain had raced to St. Thomas at top speed to get him to hospital. Captain Scott told us later than the extra speed used $20,000 worth of fuel more than normal!
When we went down to the gangway, we were told that due to the weather, all but one excursion had been cancelled. I was glad for the cancellation of ours – I wasn’t looking forward to going on a sailboat in that weather 🙁
At 07:15 the Eurodam arrived, and docked beside us. She is quite similar to the Noordam, but carries about 200 more passengers.
I always enjoy watching the docking procedures. The temperature was 74° – although it looks rather like a rainy day in an Alaska port, it didn’t feel the same!
We’d read that St. Thomas has an extremely efficient transportation system for ship passengers, and it turned out to be true. The covered-wagon-style pickup trucks seen in this photo are the main component of that system – the one-way fare to downtown Charlotte Amalie is $4 per person.
Dronningen’s Gade, the main street of Charlotte Amalie. We were in no big hurry to get into town, which is famous for its shopping. This photo was shot a couple of minutes before 11:00. The rain had let up, and the streets were busy. After the rain stoppped about half an hour later, it was crazy-busy. There must be 100 jewelery stores on this street and they all had lots of people in them.
Because we hadn’t planned on coming here, we had done no research, so just got a map and wandered looking for old stuff. This is the Legislative Building. St. Thomas was under Danish rule for most of the period between 1666 and 1917.
Fort Christian, across the street from the Legislative Building, was built in 1671 according to the date below the 19th-century belltower, but Fodor’s says that it was built between 1672 and 1690. Fodor’s also says that a multi-million-dollar renovation was completed in the spring of 2009, but it’s surrounded by construction fencing and doesn’t look like anyone has worked on it in a long time.
St. Thomas is one of the world’s busiest cruise ports, and there were 4 more ships in Charlotte Amalie’s harbour, a Carnival ship that I didn’t catch the name of, the Freedom of the Seas, the Disney Magic, and what surely is the ugliest cruise ship ever built, the Norwegian Epic.
Frederick Lutheran Church, built in 1793.
I don’t know yet what this building is, but liked the scene.
“99 Steps” (there are actually 102) was built from ships’ ballast in the 1700s to access a new residential area above the harbour.
A fountain along the path to “Blackbeard’s Castle”.
The landmark tower at Blackbeard’s Castle was built in 1679. The property was locked up behind a solid-board fence so we didn’t get a close look.
We went back into the shopping area to see if we could find anything interesting, with no luck – crowds just make both Cathy and I nuts. There is some cool architecture, though.
We caught a van back to Crown Point. Our van was a rather ratty old thing (the driver was quite a character), but some of the trucks are very nice.
The rocks around the dock are loaded with large iguanas!
Back on the ship, we discovered that the grill by the Lido pool serves up the best cheeseburgers we’ve had on a ship.
The Crown Point Marina and container port, seen from Deck 10 at 4:45 pm…
… as the Eurodam sailed away. Our departure was delayed by another ambulance. Captain Scott said in a presentation that we had 5 people taken off the ship sick in St. Thomas! No, we don’t have a virus going around the ship.
That night we went to a special dinner with the Executive Chef. What an experience that was! Here, Troy explains how he created the shrimp that we’d just enjoyed. Each part of the meal was prepared in front of us in the ship’s million-dollar presentation kitchen/theatre, and each was paired with wine or liquer.
The finale, an amzing tiramisu 🙂
We were scheduled to be at sea all day, but as you’ll see in my next post, it didn’t turn out that way.
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