By the waterfront in Kingstown, there are two squares where minibuses start their journeys for villages around the island.
It's very simple- one is for villages on the leeward side and the other (named the Tokyo bus stop) for the windward coast. Note that the northwest coast has no roads, so it's not possible to circle the island. To reach the northern point of St Vincent at the village of Fancy, there are minibuses as far as Sandy Bay on the windward side, and then from there it's lifts, a private vehicle or walking.
I caught a minibus for Wallilabou (half way up the leeward west coast). Out of town, we passed the 1806 Fort Charlotte, high on a promontory above Kingstown, then wooden roadside bungalows with their plots of sweet potato, mango and citrus trees. St Vincent is a hilly island and the bus followed curves in the road all the way, sometimes high above the sea, at other times dropping down to villages in sheltered bays. After Layou, with its Amerinidian stone carvings, we dropped off schoolchildren in Barrouallie. Back in the 19th century, the main activity here was whaling. Today, the small rowboat-like whaling boats are still built, and used mainly for line-fishing just off shore as well as for catching a limited number of melon-headed whales (a large dolphin species, known locally as blackfish). To this day, St Vincent and the Grenadines remains as the only Caribbean island where hunting of dolphins and whales, by quota, is permitted.
The bus dropped me off on a hill above Wallilabou bay, where there is a pier and old cannons facing out to sea.
The sea was crystal clear and as I talked to a fisherman, a young lad and his father began rowing out to the reef in their whaler.
In this same bay, Caribs used to live before Europeans arrived. A remnant of one of their clay pots was resting on a table in an old warehouse behind the dock.
There were also two-hundred year-old Port bottles, brought over on ships from England, and found by divers in the bay. I have this image in my mind of drunk sailors throwing empty bottles overboard.
Bizarrely, the warehouse also had an old telephone exchange, a sewing machine and shelves packed with dusty black telephones.
Nowadays, Wallilabou is best known as the setting for the fictional Port Royal settlement in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man's Chest.
Although abandoned for now, it still attracts visitors, such as this group from Poland.
At the Anchorage bar, the barman sold me a lime juice and lent me a mask and snorkel. With such clear waters, I couldn't miss a swim.
I ended up being amazed with the variety or reef fish and corals in the shallows below the cliffs. Further out, I free dived down to thirty feet, where there was a coral reef sloping out to sea, packed with life and colour.
As I emerged at the surface, the lad and his father were in their whaler fifty feet away, peacefully line-fishing above the reef.
