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Aug 27, 2011

Where to go for one day in Caribbean?

St. Maarten / St. Martin

The half-Dutch, half-French island of St. Maarten/St. Martin, with its many restaurants and hotels, makes a great base for an island-hopping adventure.
Graced by the nickname Unspoiled Queen, tiny little Saba is not the kind of Caribbean island one stumbles upon by accident.

Viewed from St. Maarten, 28 miles across the sea, it appears like a huge, uninhabitable rock jutting out of the sea. Up close, approached by boat, that rock still seems forbidding, surrounded by steep cliffs lashed by waves. But cast one's eyes higher up the rocky slopes and tiny white cottages dapple green hillsides. Suddenly a small plane swoops in for a landing on a plateau just above the surf, and it starts to look like a strange fantasy, both alluring and daunting.

This five-square-mile island has special charms, but I can understand why someone might not want to risk their entire Caribbean vacation on an idiosyncratic little curiosity like Saba.

My thought: Why choose one island for a vacation when you can try four?

Half-Dutch, half-French, St. Maarten/St. Martin is a long-established vacation haunt popular with Americans, especially those favoring time-share vacations. But it has another asset: Located amid a handful of smaller islands that aren't as easy to get to, St. Martin functions as a sort of transportation hub, with ferries and commuter flights that take visitors on easy day trips.

Not that one suffers from diversions on St. Martin. The French side has the best beaches, the lion's share of gourmet restaurants and a more sophisticated lifestyle. The Dutch side boasts a dozen casinos, ample nightlife and is one of the Caribbean's top duty-free shopping ports (multiple cruise ships at dock are pretty much a daily presence, at least in winter). The island is also well connected to major airports in the eastern United States.

But all that commerce -- and the resulting daily traffic jams -- can be wearying. So, my ideal visit to St. Martin is one that takes advantage of the island's bounty of lodging, dining and entertainment, but allows for escapes to nearby neighbors for subtler diversions.

On a recent trip with my sister Sarah, we split our time between the two sides, spending the first few nights on the Dutch side, and the last on the French. But her favorite memories were the offshore excursions.

 

Saba

Strict rules are laid out on the ferry to Saba. There are immigration rules, safety rules, and then there are rules of etiquette that start with tidy paper bags.

"The white bins are not for trash," announced the captain of the Edge II, a 60-passenger motorized catamaran. "No one wants to see what you had for breakfast, so if you need to get rid of it, put it in those [bags]."

Cans of ginger ale were offered, some travelers popped dramamine, and most of us on the half-full ferry made the 75-minute crossing with relatively settled stomachs.

Customs and immigration were handled within minutes of docking (like St. Maarten, Saba is part of the Netherlands Antilles) and cabdriver Donna Cain was waiting nearby to escort those who wanted an island tour. The 90-minute excursion started with a winding ascent from the port up through a narrow gorge, and Donna explained how the road was conceived.

"When you tell a Saban 'you can't do' something, they'll do it," Donna said. In 1938, access to Saba's main village -- called the Bottom, elevation 800 feet above sea level -- was via a staircase. "Josephus Lambert Hassell took a correspondence course and learned how to build a road," Donna explained, lauding Mr. Hassell with the kind of approbation some places accord to elder statesmen. The road took 20 years to build, completed in 1958, and today it winds from the port on one side of the island to Saba's breathtakingly small airport, flanked on three sides by sea cliffs (it's called the world's shortest international runway).

Just 1,400 or so permanent residents live between the two points in four villages. The Bottom is the capital of the island, but Windwardside claims the catbird seat on an airy ridge. Home to most of the hotels (fewer than 100 rooms total) and restaurants, Windwardside is the bustling tourism hub of the island.

"Bustling" in Saba would probably be defined by a traffic jam involving two vehicles and three stray goats.

"It's so clean, so charming," Sarah enthused. "It reminds me of Switzerland."

Our original plan was to tackle the hike to Mount Scenery, Saba's volcanic apex. The mountain vaults a half-mile above sea level, though the trail starts from halfway up. But when Donna pulled up to the trailhead, a light rain had begun to fall.

Sarah and I decided a day in pretty Windwardside might be the better plan. We had lunch at the Tropics Café and visited artisans who make Saba Lace, a craft introduced to the island in the 1870s. Today, only a few older women still practice the "drawn threadwork," integrating religious themes and the Saba name into the delicate pieces.

Anguilla

The easiest of the neighbors to reach, Anguilla is just a 20-minute ferry ride from Marigot, the capital of the French side of St. Martin -- fast enough to leave no time for queasiness. Arrival on Anguilla was as simple as pulling up to a dock flanked by beaches, the backdrop recumbent and adorned by little more than boxy buildings.

But those beaches! At 35 square miles, Anguilla boasts what I believe is the greatest collection of sandscapes in the Caribbean. Thirty-some in all, they range from a pocket of sand that snuggles into a cove called Little Bay, reached by boat and barely large enough for a picnic for two, to mile-long Shoal Bay, where beach bars pulse with reggae.

No time to visit them all on our brief visit. While picking up a rental car I decided we should head first to the far end of the island, to Savannah Bay, a cove that has eluded me on previous visits. The lack of a sign might be one reason I'd missed it before, and when I located the turnoff we bumped down an untended road, arriving at a ramshackle plywood restaurant called Palm Grove. Just beyond, curling behind a curtain of sea grape trees, Savannah Bay looked like yet another long sweep of silica for Anguilla to brag about, though on closer inspection the banks were littered with nets, plastic bottles and unmated flip-flops that had washed ashore.

A lack of hotels or other developments lining Savannah was probably one reason the beach wasn't raked clean each day. While Sarah headed down the empty beach to find seashells, I ordered a plate of barbecue chicken and ribs, a salad and a pair of Red Stripe beers -- total price, $35. While not inexpensive, it was cheap by Anguilla standards, where highfalutin menus aspire to gourmet heights (and often succeed).

Anguilla's scrubby landscape is dry and undistinguished, perhaps one reason that architects building on the island have crafted stark buildings in a whitewashed, almost Moorish, style (one former hotel was even called Casablanca). I like the look, as they provide a flourish to the Anguilla's topographically challenged interior.

On the ferry ride back to St. Martin, the sun eased below the horizon and a twinkle of lights appeared as we crossed the channel between the islands.

St. Barths

A daily ferry travels to St. Barthélemy, but Sarah and I splurged on the 12-minute flight to the French island. And although Saba may have the shorter runway, the one for St. Barths, as the island is best known, was hardly short on excitement.

The 19-seat plane cruised over the island's western tip and banked to the left for a nearly 180-degree turn as it came in for a landing. Between the pilots' shoulders we could see them aiming for, then passing just above, a traffic roundabout that coalesced at a mountain pass. Here the plane made a final plunge to the asphalt, coming to a halt just before the runway melted into the sand of broad St. Jean Bay.

I negotiated for a rental car, and we sped away to pack in as much of the island as we could during our short visit. Since this was a Sunday, that meant brunch at Le Gaïac, the restaurant adjoining a 15-room celebrity hangout, Hôtel Le Toiny. Set along a gentle, cactus-dotted hillside overlooking the sea, Le Gaïac is a treat I've always wanted to try; it's the place to be seen on a Sunday.

At a poolside table, we sipped champagne cocktails laced with strawberry puree and adopted the most décontracté pose we could, hoping to blend in with the swell crowd. The spread was extravagant: poached salmon, fresh oysters, halved lobster tails, and tuna ceviche on the cold table; eggs in a variety of preparations, grilled grouper and sirloin. Lurking to the side were more than a half-dozen desserts: tartes, mousse, panna cotta, each small enough to invite multiple samplings.

In contrast to Saba, where a single mountain defines the island, eight-square-mile St. Barths has an unpredictable topography, and the spindly roads involve curvaceous undulations that resemble a roller-coaster ride punctuated by salt ponds. New vistas are announced at one bend after another, many of them framed by the multimillion-dollar homes that define the island's character (the roster of celebrities who've bunked down on St. Barths is legion).

On Sundays, the pretty harbor of Gustavia is a ghost town, so I aimed the car toward Anse de Grande Saline, one of the island's choice beaches. A quarter-mile trail leads over a shrub-lined dune down to the sand, which is soft, wide and generous. A few hours later, Sarah was in a state of dreamy bliss. As we headed back to the airport, I could sense the mental gears turning in her head.

"Get me a job here," she commanded with a smile.

On our late afternoon flight back to St. Maarten, we were the only passengers on the plane. Apparently Sarah wasn't the only one who didn't want to leave.

David Swanson is a contributing editor for National Geographic Traveler magazine and writes the "Affordable Caribbean" column for Caribbean Travel & Life magazine.

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