ATV Riding on St. Kitts

For our final day trip activity, we chose a dusty ATV ride over on St. Kitts.  It turned out to be a full day kind of thing.  After meeting at the dock in the early morning, we took a speed boat over to St. Kitts where we met up with Carol, our guide. I can't recall the name of our taxi driver, but he was very nice and wore a headset mic so he could provide us with some narrative about St. Kitts as we drove the 30 minutes to our ATV attraction.

Along the way we observed masses of dead seaweed washed along the shoreline. Carol told us they do not know why the seaweed has been washing up, but it is a fairly recent phenomenon. There's a lot of development going on over on St. Kitts including two universities, and while the sugar cane manufacturing is basically over as an industry here, many of the plantation owners have been selling off their land to property developers.  We could see the new Hyatt Resort being build and several other condominium properties. Not sure how we feel about it. On the one hand, one would hope an Island like this should have something other than tourism driving its economy, but on the other the sugar business was apparently very costly, so that is why there is no notable sugar exports coming out of St. Kitts or Nevis nowadays.

When we got to the ATV attraction, our instructor ran us through some procedures in operating the ATV. Neither I or Stephani had ever been on one before, but it was very easy to ride, and we got up to some pretty fast speeds.  One of the fellows we were riding with was a bit of a hot dogger. He would slow down, losing sight of the instructor and then ride like hell, flipping the ATV over at one point. We came upon an interesting property, which was once a sugar refinery.  On the front part of the property was the old refinery and in the back a home was being built.  Apparently construction on the home was started 10 years ago by a Canadian. He is building an old plantation house to look very much like the rest of the property. To us it looked like an old ruin though. It was hard to imagine this house being finished any time soon.

View looking up at the home under construction from old refinery

The old refinery part of the property

We then went to Caribelle Batik, located in historic  Romney Manor. Once owned by Sam Jefferson II, the great great great grandfather of Thomas Jefferson (3rd President of U.S.A.) the great house was renamed Romney Manor following its acquisition in the early 17th century by the Earl of Romney.

Using the ancient Indonesian methods of resisting dye with wax, Caribelle creates the many designs for which they have become associated. During a visit to Caribelle, you will see artists demonstrating the techniques as well as receive a full explanation on how its done. The colors were incredible on all of the pieces.  I picked up a rather nice Batik fan for Stephani.

An example of a Batik made at Caribelle.

The Saman Tree 

Here is a video taken mostly using my GoPro camera.

The ATV excursion we took the boat back to Nevis and then went for a nice shower, getting cleaned up for our last dinner on the Island over at Mango's.