Day 1 in St. Croix: let's go east, snorkel and night walk at Christiansted

Date: 08.03.2014

After we got all our stuff to the apartment, we decided to head east to see the most eastern part of United States. This suited wel with my earlier travels 05/2013, when I spent an hour lying on my stomach in the westernmost part of the Europe (Bjargtangar, Iceland). This time I didn't lie flat on the ground, just lost my sunglasses there while talking with the locals :)..

 at Bjargtangar fulfilling my lifelong dream of photograph puffins

The statue on the easternmost part of the US 

There was a huge monument on the point Udall as they call it, but you could go even more to the east if you jumped over the fence - and that is what we did, of course!

The easternmost corner of the US

The future image of stnz' gay date ad ;)

The views there were lot better, and there were huge sea birds flying around. I almost forgot the whole easternmost point while I was looking at the birds... The trail to the point was full with thorny plants, so it wasn't easy to get there - it literally took blood, sweat and tears to reach the point.

After admiring the views and the birds for a while, we got back to the car and went to snorkeling in nearby park area. Locals were having some awesome parties there, one of which was a birthday party - I can admit I was a little jealous.

I haven't freedived in years, so I've forgotten all about it, and my times under the water really suck (around 15s). Carlito send me some PDFs considering breathing techniques to further develop my skill as a diver, and I flipped through them quickly earlier and tried a few tricks - in first try I could stay under 28s :). I need to practice this back in Finland, annoying that you cannot use your fins when you're in a pool, if it isn't a specially reserved time for divers and free divers so it has to wait until it gets warm..

After we swam and snorkeled for a while, we returned to Christiansted and went for a walk in the town.
As a photographer I saw a lot of cool buildings and ruins right in the town centre. If it would've been safer, I would've taken my DSLR and tripod with me and do some real night time photography. Now I just had to use my little Lumix on handheld, so the quality of the images isn't really awesome.

As someone from the mainland said earlier "The whole Virgin Islands is for sale", you could really see it here. Everywhere were for sale-signs and the town centre was almost empty. The hotels were pretty full, but you didn't see much of the tourists, because most of them stay and do their things in the resorts, so in many cases we were the only "outsiders" visible..

BTW - The placement of the moon here is completely wrong. You have to look straight up to see the moon - at home, it's somewhere more neck-friendly position over the horizon.

After walking a while and seeing some 1,5m long fishes at the dock we ended up in a bar where was live music playing. Halen drank some really potent gintonic and rumcola, while me and stnz drank our colas like we usually do.

Outside the place there were couple of trees where bats were flying, and I moved myself to watch them hunt. They are such beautiful and fascinating creatures, I would've stayed there watching them for hours if I could.

We walked back to our apartment for a good night sleep (except halen, who didn't want to sleep in a queen sized bed with stnz and slept on a very hard surface on the couch instead of it)..

BTW - they drive on the left side of the road here and the steering wheel still on the left side of the cars. And the lights of the cars aren't aligned right, so every passing car will blind you at night.. Weird. Really weird.