P&O Caribbean Cruise (February 2023): Tuesday 14 February

Today was Martinique. This was a port we'd looked forward to as we hadn't been here before.

We'd booked a tour Discovering Martinique. As we walked to the meeting point we could already sense this was a different island from others we had visited. It's a French island, fully incorporated into both the French Republic and the EU and there are links to France everywhere.

The roads were much smoother than we'd seen elsewhere. However, in spite of the better road surfaces, the roads were very twisty and hilly. Our first stop was at St James Rum Distillery where we were told how rum is made and then had a tasting. Boy, was the rum strong! We resisted the temptation to buy.

There are lots of different types of sugar cane. With this one you can take cuttings which will readily grow into new plants. Whilst there is still a good deal of sugar and associated products being produced in the West Indies, most of the industry here was killed off by the discovery that sugar beet provided a good alternative source which could be grown where sugar cane could not.

Sugar cane needs to be crushed to extract the juice from the cane. This is a water-powered crusher. Ideally cane should be crushed as soon as possible after being cut down as delay means a loss of sugar content. Perhaps this was the reason why narrow gauge railways sprang up all across the islands so that sugar cane could be taken quickly from the field to the sugar mills. You can often see old windmills dotted here and there on these islands where cane could be crushed soon after being cut.

Martinique has 'road trams'. They look like trams but there are no rails. Instead they run along designated routes reserved primarily for them and the road layouts are reminiscent of such as the Sheffield Supertram network. Emergency vehicles can also use these reserved lanes.

Sugar cane

Another old press

We then continued on our island tour stopping briefly at a banana plantation before our lunch stop. Lunch was fishcakes as a starter followed by jerk chicken and ice cream washed down with rum punch and red wine.

Sugar cane awaiting crushing

Distilling equipment

Interesting name on the engine!

Fairly inexpensive factory shop!

In the afternoon we stopped in St Pierre, the former capital, whose population of 30,000 was wiped out in a volcanic eruption of Mount Pelee in 1902. There were only two survivors of the ash and sulphurous gases and it was to become the worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century.

Overall we thought that Martinique was a tidy, lush and pretty island - apart from the apartment blocks in the larger communities - but we were glad to get back to the ship after what was a lot of time in a coach on a hot day.