Day 8, Devil’s Island

DEVILS ISLAND

We first spotted “Devils Island”, which actually consists of the 3 islands known as the Salvation Islands, around 10 AM.  The three islands are Ile Royale, the largest and where we will land, Ile Saint Joseph and Devil’s Island itself, which is off limits to visitors.  The Salvation Islands were part of the French penal system and were in use from 1852 until 1953.  This is the location featured in the book and movie, Papillon. 

TALES OF TENDERING

This will be the first tender port of the 2020 World Cruise and tendering is always a source of frustration amongst the passengers.  Since over 70% of the passengers are 4 or 5 star Mariners, who are all entitled to priority tendering, this perk has not been honored on previous cruises World Cruises as it would be almost meaningless with so many people entitled.  As they say, when everyone has priority, then no one has priority. 

Holland America is always trying to improve and they are going to try the following tender priority system for this cruise.  We’ll see how it goes. 

A – HAL Excursion participants have priority over all other passengers at the time required to make their scheduled tour. 

B – Neptune Suite and Presidents Club passengers – about 150 people.  These folks don’t need tender tickets, but simply show their room key instead of a tender ticket.  It is considered bad form for Neptune Suite or PC members to try and cut a tender line that is already moving down the stairs to the platform.  Their room key is a Universal Tender Ticket, not a “head of any line pass”. 

C – For Devils Island, they have set up 2 Tender Ticket distribution lines, one for 4/5 stars and one for 3 stars and below.  This will restore the priority tender perk to the 4/5 star mariners.  It remains to be seen if they will continue this at future tender ports.

The line for 4/5 stars to get tender tickets started near the aft entrance to the Ocean Bar – see the graphic below – and snaked forward between the elevators and then back aft into the Ocean Bar itself.  (red line)

The 3 star and below line started outside the liquor shop and snaked aft into the sports bar.  (blue line)

The first person in the priority line arrived 2 hours early while the first person in the non priority line arrived 1 hour early.  

The colored lines in the graphic show the approximate line length when they started passing out tickets at Noon.  Once the lines started moving, they moved quickly and even joining the line at noon, would only be about a 10 minute wait to get to the front of the.  I joined the end of the priority line at Noon and received tender ticket ORANGE 9.  The 3 star line was passing out GRAY colored tender tickets. 

A few minutes later, the first tender tickets were called – Orange 1,2 & 3 and Gray 1.  I didn’t pay attention to see if this ratio was maintained for the next 2 hours until they called for open tendering, but this system seemed to work OK from my perspective. 

Devils Island was a good test port for this tender ticket distribution as there were no tours and no real stress for passengers to get ashore.  We’ll see how this works out at the future high stress tender ports for Falklands and Easter Island – where EVERYONE will try to get on the first tender to meet prearranged private tours. 

To avoid this stress, I decided to book only HAL tours for tender ports.  While the HAL tours have premium pricing, it was worth it to me to be able to avoid getting up at 5 AM and stand in a tender ticket distribution line for 2 hours or more. 

I’ll keep you posted on how the tendering plays out over the cruise. 

We were in no hurry to go ashore so we waited until they called for “open tendering” which means that tender tickets were no longer required.  We caught the next tender which only had about 15 passengers, and most of these were crew members. 

We noticed that the tenders still have that “new car smell” and they are shiny and new.  We were told that they were less than 1 year old. 

The ride ashore took about 15 minutes.  Once ashore we headed off to the center of the island. 

HIKING TO THE HOTEL

The island is not very big, and as we were walking toward the center of the island, we started to run into people who had spent 2 hours exploring the island and were heading back to the ship.  Those that walked quickly, could cover the entire island in that time. 

Once ashore, we headed off the left, toward the center of the island.  Some passengers took the path to the right. 

After a couple hundred yards as we moved along the coast, we were faced with a choice of 3 paths to get to the center of the island and the Hotel/Gift Shop & Bar. 

There is a road to the left, which is the longest but most gradual.  This road is used by the few vehicles on the island.  It follows the coast, rising slowly with good footing, until the Children’s Cemetery where a foot path hooks to the right up into the center of the island and follows a gradual climb to the hotel.  This is the easiest way to the top. 

The center road is steeper, but not as steep as the 138 stairs to the right.  This center road, is very uneven and hard to walk across.  Many people we talked to said they preferred the steeper stairs because this path was so uneven. 

We chose to use the stairs which were not too bad if we went slow.  We would take the longer, but more gradual coast road on the way back a couple hours later.  However, at the time we didn’t know that the coast road was more gradual, albeit longer.  If we had to do it again, we would have probably used the coast road to go to and from the center of the island. 

We were warned to use insect repellent, which we did, but we didn’t observe any flying insects or biting during our visit, but as always, conditions may be different during other times of the year. 

Upon arrival on the top of the island, there are various old rooms and buildings to tour that were part of the prison system when it was still in use.  We quickly walked thru a few buildings before moving on to the hotel.  

The hotel/bar and gift shop was inside the main building and shared one end of a large room with the bar on the other end.  We browsed the gift shop for a few minutes, but the T-shirts were not very interesting and we didn’t find anything else that we wanted and we left empty handed. 

We bought a Heineken Beer and an Orangina  soft drink for UD$8 and went outside to enjoy them on the covered patio with a nice view of Devil’s Island. 

LIGHTHOUSE AND MONKEYS

After we finished, we continued toward the modern lighthouse and Children’s Cemetery before we headed back to the tender pier along the longer, but more gradual coast road.  There is an active radar tracking station here, and a few vehicles from that station came whizzing by on our way back. 

Monkeys, peacocks and other wildlife were everywhere, and we couldn’t miss seeing plenty of them as we walked around the island. 

We arrived back at the tender pier at 4:50 PM and caught the next tender leaving around 5 PM.  The last tender was scheduled for 5:30PM. 

While it was warm on the island, it wasn’t blistering hot and the humidity wasn’t too bad.  We kept moving slowly and I suspect if we were more energetic we might have worked up more of a sweat. 

TIM KAMINSKI

Tonight’s show was an encore performance by comedian Tim Kaminski.  Tonight he did a straight standup routine and didn’t pull up anyone from the audience.  His show was very good, presenting a great mix of old jokes along with contemporary observations. 

This entry was posted in 2020 Grand World Voyage, Devils Island (Ile Royale), French Guiana, South America

• Tim Kaminski