Commodore
March 25, 2022

Lush Botanical Gardens of Deshaies

It was a windy day, the Trades were roaring over the mountains. A good day to be off the boat. We headed into town to find a way back to Deshaies to visit the Botanical Gardens there. We went into the dinghy dock which was not as crowded as yesterday and found the Information office. We were very grateful to find the lady behind the desk could speak good English and help us with a number of things. Firstly a taxi was going to take hours to come and cost €120, so she found some local guy to drive us there and back, and do our chores for €60 – bargain!. She organised for us to replace our gas cylinder (for the cooker) and a place to get a PCR test for Los Roques. It did mean we had to skedaddle back to the boat to get our empty gas cylinder. Our taxi man turned up promptly, thank goodness the info lady had sorted him out, as he didn’t speak a word of English and didn’t seem to master google translate. It was a lovely drive along the coast back to Deshaies, 24kms by road, by boat it was 8kms! The driver stopped off to replace our gas tank as some little local shack, which was a bargain. He then took us to a pharmacy for our PCR test, but they only did antigen tests, but they gave us the number of 3 nurses who could do a PCR test for us, which was very helpful. We finally got to the Botanical gardens, which were very impressive, an extremely slick and well maintained operation. We enjoyed ambling around the very well manicured gardens along a very convoluted path that wound its way around the thick vegetation, making the place feel much bigger than it really was. It was a great way to spend the two hours, that the taxi man had given us.

The water was so green it seemed artificial

Heliconias

Vibrant parakeets in a huge walk in aviary

Stunning orchids

Exotic trees

We haven’t seen a leaf cutter ant in years

Wax rose with little green lizard

Very pretty Caribbean flamingoes

This is not ancient script, just wood worm artistry

An enormous South African Sausage tree. Only two enormous sausages on the tree and plenty of flowers, they most probably manually fertilised the flowers to get the sausage seed pods, as It is only a specific bat that pollinates the flowers.