Monday 26 February Antigua 2007

We breakfasted at the Gauguin restaurant today, and then went to book a taxi for 11am to go and explore St. Johns, the largest town on the island. St. Johns is pretty much like St. Lucia's Soufriere area. It has a lot of poor areas mixed with some nice shopping streets, a market and a very pretty harbour area. We bought a new pair of black sandals for me and a bottle of red Wolf Blass to make a change from the Chilean merlot. We lunched at Bananas in St John's some excellent calamari, blackened mahi mahi fish with salad for me and a pizza for Andrew, we tried the local Wadadli beer, which was really nice too. We wandered around the harbour and looked in all the duty free jewellery shops, but found nothing that we liked enough to buy. Jojo our taxi driver picked us up about 3pm, we drove back to Galley Bay. The speciality fruit on the island is blackened pineapple, but we haven't seen any so far. We relaxed for a while, went for a walk along the beach, the red flag is flying as seems usual now, apparently this area was very calm up until the 1998 hurricane, but the sea became quite wild then and has not been tranquil very often since. We went for dinner at the Sea Grape, then had cocktails and watched the sunset. They have amazing cocktails here, and always a speciality cocktail of the day. Our favourite so far is the Fantasy, a frozen blend of vodka, coconut rum, coconut cream, pineapple juice and red grenadine - very yummy. Dinner was ok, they do excellent starters, soups, salads and desserts, but sometimes, as this evening, the main courses are not so good. We strolled over to the Teepee bar again after dining to listen to the Rawdon Edwards band playing Calypso music and have a nightcap.