Oh, the Places We'll Go!: Allure Day 5 - Rum Punch and The Sea Urchin Man

I forgot to include our planned schedule for Day 5 from my pre-cruise calendar.

9am-2:30pm – Bernard’s Tour

3pm – 6pm – Flowrider

9:30pm – Ice Games (show)

11:45pm – Quest

After the iguana farm, we boarded the bus and continued our tour with Sexy. I didn’t mention earlier that Sexy had loaded two coolers onto our bus at the start of the tour. One had water and soft drinks. The other had beer and rum punch. Our bartender from the Trellis Bar in Central Park had told us to make sure to try the “Guavaberry Punch” in St. Martin. He said it is the local rum drink. So we were pretty sure the rum punch Sexy had was the Guava Punch our bartender had mentioned, so we were looking forward to trying it.

Every time we stopped the bus, drinks were offered. The iguana farm was still pretty early, so we had not tried any rum punch yet.

Also, to be consistent with the theme of “The Most Disorganized Review. Ever.”, I forgot to mention that when we had loaded the bus at the pier in St. Martin, we watched as a small group walked by, coming from the direction of the ship (and our ship was the only one in port that day), rolling all of their luggage. We had to wonder why they were leaving the Allure. They didn’t look unhappy, so I doubt they were being kicked off for being naughty. And nobody looked hurt (or sad), so I don’t think they or a family member were injured. I wonder if maybe it was just a planned departure? Maybe they were guests of a crew member who was ending his/her contract in St. Martin? I hope it was nothing bad. I sure wouldn’t want to be leaving Allure when we still had two Sea Days left…

Back to the review:

Off we go, across the border, to the French side of the island.

We made a short stop at a nice overlook of Oyster Pond, where there were two main resorts on the other side of a bay where several sailboats were anchored. The Westin Dawn Beach Resort and the Oyster Bay Beach Resort. Sexy told us that the Westin was on the French side, and the water in the bay and Oyster Bay Beach Resort were on the Dutch side.

That’s the Oyster Bay Beach Resort with the glass on top.

One day, I will vacation here for more than a day.

Looking back down the road we had just come down

More of the bay

Out to the ocean

Back on the bus, our next stop was Rotary Lookout Point, where there was a tower constructed to climb and get a nice view of the ocean and surrounding islands. Near the bottom of the tower, we found “The Sea Urchin Man”. He had a name, but I don’t remember it, and he asked us to call him “The Sea Urchin Man”, so we did.

The Sea Urchin Man had a table set up close to the shoreline. On the table, he had a variety of shells. He went into the ocean and pulled out some live creatures and showed them to us. Then he showed us what the dead version looked like.

Here I am holding a sand dollar.

It was squirmy. It would move its tentacles (or soft spikes, or… whatever), trying to move around my hand. It moved slowly, not abruptly, so it didn’t startle me, but it felt funny.

And here is a live conch, coming out of his shell.

(You can see the “dead” sand dollar on the table below the conch, and you can tell the difference – at least in color – from the live one.)

A better photo of the conch

He also had sea urchins and some other stuff I don’t remember, but holding the sand dollar was enough fun for me for the day.

From the tower

There’s The Sea Urchin Man in grey, pointing out some of the local wildlife to others. Just a note: if you take this tour, or otherwise visit TSUM (for short), he works for tips. We put a couple of dollars in his jar. He takes U.S. Dollars or Euro (or I imagine you could get creative, but we stuck with dollars).

You can see in the photo above, that there was a guide on the railings of the tower. It explained some of the islands and local wildlife (birds, I think) that you could see from the tower.