Le Marin, Martinique

Today I decided to check out Le Marin, which is a city about 8km away from here in the anchorage at Ste. Anne. I thought about riding my bike or even renting one but I figured that it was better to see a place at a slower speed and without a bike to haul around.

First I had to find the bus stop. Google translate gave me "arret de bus" but I soon found out that they call it "gare routiere" or bus station here. Nothing is simple. What the bus looked like or how much it cost was another problem that could wait. While I waited I wandered over to a crepe place that sounded interesting.

Nope. Too much in the way of fried food for me. In fact I have decided that there is too much fried food, bread and sweet drinks here for my liking. It seems like on every street corner, there are bakeries that they call partisserie boulangerie that sell these yummy cakes, buns and baguettes.

Hey, get me out of here! OK so back at the bus station, after half an hour we got this....

Turned out to be going to a different place but at least I knew what the buses looked like.......Or so I thought. This showed up soon afterwards.

Talk about luxury. Even air conditioning! Price was $EUR2,10 which you couldn't complain about. When we arrived in Le Marin, Friday shopping was in full swing. City was next to the waterfront FULL of boats.

In the center of the town was Eglise Saint-Etienne Church.

It feels like I am living on a another planet here. It seems that everything is different. Not only are the shops different, but the merchandise is as well and the cars too. There are a lot of small cars like hatchbacks and Kia is quite popular. You hardly ever see Citroen cars that are now owned by Peugeot. I came across this thing on the side of the road that you see everywhere that could be some kind of transformer.

So the bus back to Sainte Anne wasn't leaving for another hour so I decided to hoof it. Boy was that ever a mistake and I am so glad I didn't bike because the roads here have foot high grass growing in the verge at the side of the road.

Martinique has that wonderful characteristic that the French describe as having that "Je ne sais quoi."