Windjammer Cruise

(Note: Clicking on any image in this travelogue will bring up an enlarged version of the image.)

Saturday, March 15
Sint Maarten

Wasn't much of import we did on Saturday. We returned to the dock in Phillipsburg, Sint Maarten. The disembarkation was sort of anticlimactic. After all that exotic stuff we did all week, it was a bit of a letdown to hang around the concrete dock until a golf cart came to take us and our luggage to the taxi stand to be ferried back to Mary's Boon in Simpson's Bay. I will offer here a couple of more pictures of the Sagitta.

We got settled in our room, and walked out to town in search of dinner. Neither of us was particularly hungry. I suggested we stop off at the local Subway for a sandwich. But when we walked into the place, Jenny felt there was something fundamentally wrong with patronizing a place so prosaically American in so exotic a location. I felt no such compunction, so I bought a sandwich to go, and we wandered around until Jenny found a (blessedly) quiet Middle Eastern place where she was able to get some fresh-made tabbouleh without reggae..

Side note: We both appreciate a quiet place to eat. At home we routinely ask restaurateurs if they would kindly turn background music down or off, with varying degrees of success. In the islands it tends to be particularly annoying, because I'm particularly not fond of the music they tend to play, and they tend to play it particularly loudly. It was after coming home from dinner that I wrote and posted the Blog Entry entitled "Public Music" that follows this travelogue in my blog. End of Side Note.

We each ate our preferred dinner in happy accord, after which we had desert at the Carousel. The Carousel is probably the best ice cream joint I've ever been in. Many flavors, both familiar and otherwise, of precisely the correct temperature and consistency. It's real Italian gelato (= frozen) with all ingredients except the fruit imported from Italy. There's a big crystal chandelier. And the entire place is decorated with photographs of famous people, from Jimmy Carter to Ghandi to Shirley Temple, eating ice cream. And behind the ice cream store is an old carousel imported from Venice, and lovingly restored to gleaming rococo perfection. Its only flaw was that the music that played while it operated was a recording of a calliope instead of a real one. And the recording was flawed and would inexplicably lapse into silence for a couple of seconds every so often. Alas, I did not have my camera with me any time we went there. The photos below were nicked from their website. (Sorry, no hi-res blowups available.).

Sunday, March 16
Sint Maarten / Saint Martin

Our plan was to hang out on the island Sunday and Monday, and then fly our separate ways home on Tuesday. "SXM", as the island is known, has an odd geopolitical structure. It is a single nation divided into two regions, each with its own name, language and currency. The Dutch half, which includes the cruise ship port at Phillipsburg and the airport in Simpson's Bay is called "Sint Maarten", speaks primarily English, and uses American dollars. The French half is called Saint Martin, speaks primarily French, and uses dollars or euros. I was glad that one of the two regions was not British, else we would have had to switch to the opposite side of the road when we crossed the border, inviting all sorts of chaos.

We arose Sunday at an hour suitable for vacation, and walked into town for breakfast. (Being a half mile from town, the restaurant at Mary's Boon felt reasonably confident in being overpriced.) We went to a place called "Zee Best" that had been recommended, and sat down at an outdoor table. There was a fellow at the table next to me who looked awfully familiar, but I couldn't place him until he espied me and greeted me by name. It was Kevin Redden, a fellow I knew from the Folk Project, whom I should have recognized, but failed to out of my usual context. Small world. He had been on a boat for the past month and a half escaping the Polar Vortex.

We rented a little Kia at a place called "Paradise Rentals" not too far from Mary's Boon, and set out to explore. We figured to make a clockwise circuit around the island, stopping when we saw anything worth exploring, but making sure to include Pic Paradis. We drove past the airport and crossed into the French section. The pavement suddenly got better. Except for the speed bumps (which I prefer to call "launching ramps".) Jenny wanted to have a peek at Baie Rouge (Red Bay), which we thought we had remembered from our 1998 trip. We overshot the turnoff, and pulled into an entrance road to another resort under construction. As I cranked the steering wheel left in preparation for a U-turn, I heard, "Psssssssssss!" Flat tire? I got out. Sure enough. Left front. I was not moving while turning the wheel. How could I have punctured the tire standing still? I bent down to examine the tire and saw that there was a big circular crack in the sidewall that had split open. The tire was faulty.

Grumbling, I went to the trunk and found the spare and tools all there. But examining the spare, I saw that it too had a crack running all the way around the sidewall. Paradise rentals dropped several notches in my estimation. But the spare held air, so I maneuvered the jack into place and prepared to lift the car. A couple of the workmen involved in the construction offered a hand, but I, being a man, declined and said I could do it myself. I was so concerned with impressing those fellows with my competence that I neglected to tighten the nuts on the spare, and almost drove off with a loose wheel until one of them reminded me. I drove very gingerly back to Paradise Rentals, taking special care over the launching ramps. Paradise replaced the car with an identical twin without complaint, but without apology either. I took great care to inspect all four tires and the spare on the replacement.

We drove back to the construction site to thank the workmen once again and to assure them we were OK, and then went back to the turnoff to Baie Rouge. Parked in the lot and then went down to the beach and found it pretty, but with very big surf and some large rocks upon which it pounded. We didn't want to trust ourselves in that rough water, and neither, apparently, did most others. Only a few brave souls ventured in. And we eventually went back to the car to search for better swimming conditions.

.A little further up the coast we decided to investigate a place called Friar's Bay Beach. This turned out to be a beach for the locals with a fascinating mix of multi-cultural multi-lingual multi-racial inhabitants. Families with kids barbecuing lunch, and a Muslim family with the wife wearing what was apparently an Islamic approved bathing, costume and a casually topless grandmother all coexisted nonchalantly, as did we, the only tourists I could identify as such. Prosaic features such as a car-alarm repeatedly going off in the parking lot made clear the fact that this was the place where the workers who operated, serviced, and vacuumed Paradise went to relax. The barbecue made me realize I was hungry. And feeling in need of some comfort food after a week of fine dining, I ordered what turned out to be an excellent cheeseburger, fries and a Coke from the local beach bar. Yum! The water was warm, calm, and shallow, and refreshing in the 90 degree weather.

After a few hours, we journeyed on, towards Pic Paradis (Paradise Peak), the highest point on the island, a 1500 foot summit. After missing the inconspicuously marked turnoff once or twice, we headed up a road that narrowed, went back and forth through a couple of switchbacks, and then reared up into a seriously first-gear stretch to the top. Towards the very summit there were one or two private estates barred by steel gates, whose houses were not visible from the road. There were few places to park or turn around at the top. But we found a "wide" place in the road where we could leave the car and embark on a seriously first-gear footpath to the summit. This was a very strenuous walk / climb of about 1/2 mile to an observation point where we could view just about the whole eastern half of the island. It was much cooler up here, and very peaceful. Except for the faint but distinct strains of reggae music blaring from some kind of joint in Orleans some 5 miles distant. Grrrrrr! The path made a little circle around the very peak whereupon were erected cell towers that might have serviced the whole island. Building them was undoubtedly one challenging construction project.

We made our way back to Mary's Boon, and then walked out to a fine Italian restaurant where we split an order of some very tasty lasagna served by a grumpy waitress. Even splitting a single portion, it was by far our most expensive meal of the trip. And after dinner we stopped back at the Carousel for ice cream. I had found a flavor that I liked last time with vanilla ice cream and M&Ms, of which I wanted another portion. But Jenny absolutely forbade me to repeat with so many others to choose from. I bowed to her greater wisdom. (I still liked the first flavor better :-) Shhhh! Don't tell her.)