St. Kitts has Monkeys!

Day 9 – 16 December 2025 – Basseterre, St. Kitts

 

When we were living on St. Thomas, we spent a week or so on St. Kitts, and even made it out to Nevis.  On this trip, I really wanted to re-visit the unique fortress, but it was crazy expensive for taxi as well as the new entrance fee.  Really, between a round-trip tour bus and the entry, it would run about $50 US.  A taxi would be more expensive.  And while I like to contribute to the local economy, I wasn’t carrying that kind of cash with me.

 

But for anyone who has never been to the fortress on St. Kitts, it is definitely worth a visit.  If you’ve seen the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, that’s the fortress – built in a pentagon shape, with five guard “towers” (more like points) that are almost arrow shaped, projecting out from each corner of the pentagon.  Fascinating shape, so different from the usual basic square!

 

So, instead walked around town a bit, just wandering.  I visited an arts and crafts market, but there wasn’t anything I couldn’t live without.   One of the big things seems to be local people who walk around with one or two baby monkeys, and tourists pay some money to hold the monkey and take a photo.  Not something I'd want to do, and I really would rather the monkeys weren't monkey-napped from the forest and could stay with their group in the wild.  (The monkeys aren't native to St. Kitts, they were brought here by the British or French from West Africa.  Yes, along with slaves, sadly.  These are green monkeys, also known as vervet monkeys.  Cute, but I do prefer to see them in the forest.  We saw some family groups on our first trip to St. Kitts years ago.)

 

I talked to some people, and made my way to the chocolate store – yes, cacao pods are now grown on St. Kitts, and there’s a place that makes delightful chocolate bars so they can sell 100% Kittesian chocolate. 

 

I bought a bar of the milk chocolate for Richard – the young saleswoman kindly found some ribbon, chocolate brown ribbon, and tied a lovely bow on the milk chocolate bar because tomorrow will be Richard’s birthday.  She also gave me a little card so I could write a message on it.  So nice of her to go out of her way to help me, but that’s Caribbean hospitality – ask politely, and people will go out of their way to be helpful!

 

Eventually I headed back to the ship.  I thought about finding a spot to sketch, but the only seating I could find was the tour meeting spot by the docks, and the only view was the cruise ships.  Nah, not something I wanted to sketch.  So I just went back, found Richard, and we had a chance to have lunch together on the ship.