Basseterre, St. Kitts

Having been released from quarantine at 8:47 a.m., at 10:15, we left the ship for a train ride around the island.

The train was made in Romania. One could wonder how a Romanian train wound up on a Caribbean island, but I decided to leave that as an unnecessary imponderable. Looking at the collection of derelicts behind the station, a more interesting question would be how many Romanian trains it takes to assemble one that works.

Most interesting to me was that the train traveled on a narrow-gauge track. The rails were only 30 inches apart. The train cars were about 6 ft wide. We soon discovered this meant that when the rails were slightly uneven, the car's swaying was significant, all the more so because we were on the upper deck. Most of the track was in that condition, but some was worse.  This explained why the train traveled at 9 miles per hour.

Going under the first couple of bridges was a bit of a knuckle-biter since we were in the front seats of the first car. I had observed that the tin roofing over our head was not damaged, but thinking back to the junkyard, it could have been a new cover. Fortunately, even with the swaying, there was (barely) enough clearance.

Originally, the train had been used to bring sugar cane from the plantations to the processing locations. When sugar cane was abandoned as a crop in 2005, the railway was turned into a tourist attraction.

As we rolled along, there were opportunities to look south to see Nevis. Later on, we could look north to see Saba.

The railway no longer runs around the entire island. Property on the Caribbean side was too valuable for homes, hotels, etc. Whatever the reason, we had to forward buses for the last 40 minutes of our circumnavigation.

Looking at the map, there were no roads that transected the island. This was not a surprise given the size of the dormant volcano that juts up in the middle of the island.