St Lucia East to West through the rain forest

== Skip this section for the actual hike !


Our journey starts in the morning with a mooring in Rodney Bay Marina. First, immigration office, then, cleaning the boat, using some WiFi and head south with the goal of crossing the island from West to East, through the rain forest, in 1 day ½.


We immediately catch a bus headed to Castries, the capital city. There, we learn that direct buses from Castries to La Suffiere don't run on Sundays, fuck. Also, apparently it's dangerous to take an indirect route, as you don't want to find yourself in the night looking for transportation. People keep saying the criminality is going through the roof recently. So basically, we can either pay a taxi (about 100$ EC) to get to La Suffrière or take a bus (9$ EC per person) the next day at 5am.


We decide to not decide and get drunk in a small outside bar, drinking local "Piton" beer, playing Street Fighter, and sympathizing with the owner of the bar and the people there. Joints are passing hands non-stop, and after 3h, one passing dude enlightens us : we should take a bus on an other line (Castries - Vieux Fort), and do the hike from East to West. It's 4:30pm, we still have time to get there before it's dark, let's do it!


Waiting for the bus, we get another chance to talk about this hiking project with a taxi driver. He says people usually do this with a guide (and offers us to do it for us, of course). Everyone has been saying so, and also people have been telling us all kind of stuff about dangerous snakes, and how dangerous the rain forest is. But the people telling us it's dangerous either have never been, or want to sell us their services.


We hop of the bus in Micoud, there's some public WiFi ! We learn that there's just 1 venimous snake in the island it's hardly seen nowadays. Also, we ask the police if we can pitch our tent in their "garden", they say no and insist that the rain forest is dangerous, but can't really explain why, it's just dangerous.


We play football on the city's brand new synthetic-grass field, get humiliated by 15 years olds but feel fantastic after 2h30 of running everywhere.


9pm : time to eat and sleep. Looking for a spot, we meet a lovely lady coming out of church. She wants to help us, makes calls for us, and a few minutes later a friend of hers is showing us a good place to pitch our tent in a safe neighborhood. As a thank you, and to share french culinary culture, we offer a degustation of camembert (which we thoughtfully kept in the freezer all the way accross the Atlantic, for almost 2 months) and homemade corn bread, which we eat in her kitchen. She and her son inform us that the hike is not really dangerous, and that they did it without a guide and were fine.


Shitty night : every hour offers a 20min heavy shower. We manage to move our mattresses under a bandstand. Some people with little to no singing skills are doing a karaoke until 1am (good songs though), and mosquitoes are having the time of their life.


Alarm rings at 5:45am the next day, we didn't sleep more than 1 hour, but we're off !


==


Sorry about this silly story, you're probably here to know about the hike, so here are some usefull information :

- The hike is magnificent. You'll feel like you're in a botanical garden, but real. Everything is disproportionate, nature is lush, birds noisy and smells strong.

- We saw signs that seemed to indicate that you must get explicit permission to do cross the reserve, we didn't but maybe give them a call (I suspect they might require you to get a guide). The Des Cartier Rainforest trail (the protected area, I presume), is not super well maintained, beware of rotten wood bridges and rotten wood steps.

- We started from Micoud's police station, following the itinerary on MAPS.ME. To get a headstart, you can get a taxi and have it drop you at the end of Mahaut Road. You could also try hitchhiking early in the morning (6-7 am) as there are numerous people going with pick-up trucks to work in the banana/yam/coffee plantations. If going the other way W->E, you can take a bus from La Suffrière to Migny.

- Prepare to get wet to the bone. You'll be going through the rain forest and it's name is not undeserved. We had constant and heavy rain after kilometer 3. We also had to cross a river with water to knee level. Having tried both trail shoes and sandals during this hike, I think good hiking sandals are a slightly better choice. An even better choice could be high, waterproof boots !

- - As you can see on the GPS track, at one point we missed a turn and had to turn around. It was fun though, the track got wilder and we met a very nice guy who was on his way to plant Marie Jeanne plants even deeper in the forest. He carefully explained us how to get back on the right track.

- Get a big heavy knife or even better a machete, you'll find an unlimited amount of coconuts laying on the ground in the first half of the hike, full of sweet water and delicious flesh. You can also just open the coconut by repeatedly smashing the end of it on a pointy rock, that's what we did.

- From what we understood, snakes are hardly seen anymore. We didn't see any. As explained in the introduction above, just one species on the island is venimous (lancehead snake, which can get really bad if you're bitten), but local people in Micoud told us that there are actually very few of them. We did see crabs in the rain forest, there were a shit ton of them because of the heavy rain (107 of them, we counted!).

- We stopped hiking when we met the first village : Migny. We were exhausted, soaked and out of food. Happiness filled our hearts when we ate some snacks and finally sat our asses in a bus to La Suffrière.


==


After the bus dropped us in La Suffrière, we had ice cream and took buses back to Castries and Rodney Bay. We left the island the next day in the morning (headed to Dominica) tired but happy and full of memories of those 48h in St Lucia !