Thursday, November 16, 2000

St. Croix

My hand-written notes ended here, more or less, so no more exact times are written in the headings. The last island on our tour is St. Croix. We dock at a long pier, so no tender is required this time. You simply walk off the boat, down the pier, and into the melee of taxi drivers and junk-sellers that is Frederiksted.

We have an excursion this afternoon, Toby and I - a 12-mile bike tour on the island.

A small square of flea-market-style booths await at the shore end of the pier.

Along the waterfront, the usual jewelry and booze shops. I wander through, and buy a couple of nice Hawaiian-style shirts for Terrie.

There's a sculpture on the waterfront, a memorial for the island war veterans.

The shore here is mostly coralstone, a ragged kind of rock on which you wouldn't necessarily go barefoot. Little crabs and fishes scurry around in the pools made in the rock. Again, relatively clear water and white sea bottom. Where the boat is docked (it drafts 25 feet), the water is at least 25 feet deep, but you can see the bottom.

Again, I walk a couple of blocks back from the main street, into the residential stuff. Many apparent ruins of buildings, overgrown with bougainvillea and other plant life. An old cemetery, and a church, where I see the morning bike tour parked.

An old guy, either drunk or otherwise mentally impaired, asks me for a cigarette, and I give him one. He attempts to give me a high five, his hand landing about halfway up my arm...

Back to the boat for a swim, a bit more frying in the sun (though this time with sunblock), and to meet up with Toby. We have lunch at the "nice" Carmen dining room; a shrimp appetizer and chicken Caesar for me, banana soup and salad for Toby.

Some confusion about where the bike tour meets up. Our tickets say "Pier - shore end," but the women at the door on the Empress maintains that they will meet us out here. Just when we're about to head into shore, a guy appears with a Bike Tour sign.

We are outfitted with bikes and helmets, and take a quick loop through the town, past the earlier-mentioned cemetery (where our guide, Mike, points out tamarind and other trees) and the church (where the team picks flowers for us to view and smell - bougainvillea, frangipani, hibiscus, etc.).

Mike (senior) is a very knowledgeable guide. With political science and history degrees, he of course has a lot to say about island politics, but also knows the plant and animal life. On this island, there are deer, mongoose(geese?), feral pigs. I see two red-tail hawks and a couple of egrets during the tour. Mainly, I want a bike ride, though, and we get one. Heading north out of town along a road that is not heavily-traveled, we make one more stop at a sugar factory, ogling a baobab tree, before continuing some miles to a nice little beach. Again, the coralstone, but I think you could get in the water here if you really wanted to. Toby and I are the fastest cyclists on this tour, and Mike obligingly splits up the tour so we can ride back with Jamie, the St. Croix Cycling Champion, who has no problem going at our pace, indeed stops off at one point for a few minutes and easily catches up with us. If you go to St. Croix, consider taking this tour.

St. Croix Bikes and Tours: http://www.stcroixbike.com/

We have a meeting at 4:00, and we arrive just a little late to find various managers introducing the members of their teams one by laborious one. Each person must get up from their seat, walk up or down to the stage, and walk back to their seat. I order a Bahama Mama, and try to stay behind Deanna who's drinking the same thing.

We are treated to more PowerPoint presentations.

My suggested slogan for the company: "OinkiCorp - Perfecting the Image" (that text displays at the bottom of the screen with the screen-projector software OinkiCorp uses).

Often, the people who do great stuff in an organization are not the people who should present information about what they do. I've seen way too many presentations where the presenter basically reads his/her slides to the audience. There is no excitement here, though we must applaud at the end of practically every spoken sentence. It's not they're not doing exciting stuff, but that they are not generally experienced public speakers.

After about two hours, the meeting ends with a whimper not a bang, and we are free to go.

There's another meeting at 7 after dinner; I cannot bring myself to attend. So fire me.

While most people go to dinner, I head for the deck 10 bar. At 6, there's only one other guy there; he's on the cruise with his wife's company, and they've given everyone charge-plus cards with unlimited free drinks. Much as I'd like to spend the $150 that was in my account from OinkiCorp, I've only managed to spend about $40 so far. Now I can't even seem to buy a drink.

We have a nice conversation, and the bar and the deck fill up around us as others are released from their meetings and start drinking. The conversation turns to football and then politics, and I start feeling the urge to escape.

I do escape successfully, finding a group of OinkiCorp folk, which I join for a while. At one point, Toby wants a dress from the Centrum for his daughter, and I go with him and buy the $35 dress. Somehow, the evening passes, and I find myself around 1:00a smoking pot on the top deck with some people I met, finishing off what must be my ninth or tenth Kamikaze, and staggering down to bed. The last entry in my little notebook is barely legible.