Day Six - St Martin, Guernsey - 8 April

We woke to a very gloomy and cold day but by lunch time the sun was out and it was a lovely and warmer afternoon. Mid morning we caught the local bus into St Peter Port and went to the Visitor Information Centre on the esplanade to gather all the tourist information.

We decided to catch one of the local buses which goes anti-clockwise around the entire island coastline and takes about an hour an a half. Before boarding the bus we fortified ourselves with a coffee and a French pastry. All bus fares are one pound whether you are going one stop or right around the island and are therefore very good value. It was busy on the bus being Easter Sunday with many tourists having the same idea as us of spending a pound and going on a grand tour of the island. The coastal scenery was beautiful with the tide going out from the rocky shoreline and the little boats becoming marooned on the sand.

The island is bigger than we expected but our guidebook says that no point on Guernsey is more than three kilometres from the sea. It is far more built-up than rural Isle of Wight. When the bus took us to the northern and western sides of the island the old World War II fortifications and bunkers which are left over from the German occupation can seen dotted along the coastline. We got off the bus at about three quarters of the way around the island at the far south west corner at Torteval to see the Pleinmont Observation Tower. This is a five storey German naval tower built by Hitler‘s forces in 1942.

It is only open on Sunday afternoons and it would have been our only opportunity to see inside it. We walked around the entire headland on a coastal path before reaching the tower rather than taking the direct route by road. The view from the cliffs over the coastline was very pretty. After climbing the tower and taking in its history we returned to the bus stop via the winding road down from the cliff. We continued going anti-clockwise in the bus until we got back to our hotel where we arrived back at four o’clock. Guernsey has its own currency which is intermingled with the English currency. Guernsey currency is not legal tender in the UK so we must remember to spend or exchange our notes before heading over to Jersey. Photos: Henk beside the yellow phone boxes at the bus terminus at St Peter Port; Boats along the northern coastline; Pleinmont Observation Tower.