Today is St Maarten and we docked in Phillipsburg on the Dutch side just as it was getting light.
We’ve been here once before, on our very first cruise, a 7-nighter out of Puerto Rico. In those very early days we didn’t think much about excursions so, being newbies, we didn’t book anything in advance then. As a result we had never ventured outside the port area and we had regretted that since.
This time we felt we had to have some sort of tour. This one wasn’t “The Best of St Maarten” but its nearest equivalent – “A Glimpse of St Maarten” and I did wonder if this might mean it was a whistle-stop tour.
It was billed as lasting only 2.5 hours but did have an 8am start so we knew we had to get organised. We duly watched other ships arriving after us over breakfast and then got ourselves on to the dockside in good time.
The quayside looked familiar and yet in some ways it didn’t and we were to find out why later. We were shepherded along to a very smart part of the terminal area and then towards a fleet of buses. Then came a surprise. So far we had been on only small buses (typical capacity of around 15) but these were full-size buses, so we wondered how many others might be on board.
Our first surprise from P&O in terms of social distancing was when the first time we went down to dinner and discovered that they seem to assume that, at dinner, people will usually be happy to share a table. That is the last thing we expected. And as for tour buses, we thought that they would run at half capacity so that people could spread out, but no. Instead of social distancing, the substitute arrangement was that a clipboard was passed round for us to give our cabin numbers inside the box representing our seats for the purposes of contact tracing – charming.
Now, back to St Maarten. St Maarten is jointly owned by the French and the Dutch with a low-profile border across the island. Whereas yesterday we were in a former British colony where they drive on the left, in St Maarten they drive on the right.
The French part has the Euro and is on 220 volts whereas the Dutch part is on 110 volts and uses the Netherlands Antillean Guilder alongside the US dollar. Trouble is, like most such places, if you pay them in US dollars, you’ll get guilder as change and where are you going to spend those?!
Like St Kitts yesterday, St Maarten has its fair share of untidiness
littered around and while I know that per capita incomes can be low in the
Caribbean (although they are as high as $35k in Sint Maarten) there seems to be
a definite lack of pride in the outsides of people’s properties with old cars
rusting away and all sorts of weird and wonderful-looking things slowly
deteriorating in front of everyone’s very eyes and scattered all over. Many
properties look a bit scruffy and unloved and either half-finished or
half-derelict properties are everywhere to be seen.
Having been told to be ready to go at 8am sharp, it was 8.25am before the coach wheels started to turn and the driver/guide introduced himself as Dennis and added that he wasn’t a menace. As it turned out, that was a matter of opinion! He talked incessantly from start to finish with mostly sexist and corny jokes, many of which we had heard yesterday!
We set off on the coast road. St Maarten isn’t a large island (16 square miles) and it’s a fairly straightforward run to go round the main part of the island. As we travelled, our driver told us of the two hurricanes in recent years that had caused so much havoc on the island.
First of all came Hurricane Luis which was a long-lived
and powerful Category 4 hurricane which caused extensive damage to St Maarten
in 1995 and lasted for 36 hours.
Worse than that for St Maarten was Hurricane Irma which hit the island on 6 September 2017. Although it took only 6 hours to pass through, it caused extensive damage. Four deaths were ultimately reported and the main international airport was extensively damaged.
70% of the infrastructure on the Dutch part was destroyed
and the Dutch Red Cross estimated that nearly a third of the buildings in Sint
Maarten had been destroyed and that over 90 per cent of structures on the
island had been damaged. There was much
restoration work required, but in little over a year after Hurricane Irma, St
Maarten's cruise industry had recovered to the extent that, in 2018, more than
1 million cruise passengers visited the island.
We soon crossed the border into the French part. The
architecture looked a little more French, but the untidiness was still apparent
and we headed to the capital of the French part – Marigot. While not an unattractive place in itself, it
is not a particularly memorable place but with great potential to develop its
waterfront.
We were dropped off here for a 50-minute stop. There was a large, attractive market, but we don’t need anything these days so decide to walk along the waterfront. That turned out not to be an option. The bay at Marigot is beautiful, but there is no promenade or walkway along the water’s edge to enjoy. We had envisaged a pleasant walk with the opportunity to sit on a bench or two where we could look out to sea. This was no Matagorda where we had so enjoyed the waterfront last autumn and we slowly made our way back to the bus. A further drive followed during which we were allowed a brief stop to take photos across the bay from where we could clearly see Saba and also make out the vague outlines of others, including Sint Eustitius and St Kitts.
There are lots of vegetarian iguanas on the island. We saw some of them in the trees, but I didn't successfully get a photo of any. The island does have one problem. They used to have snakes on St Maarten so the islanders got mongooses in to cull the population. Trouble is, the killed all of them and they now have the problem of too many mongooses!
I forgot to say. We got our bath robes on Monday as you may have noticed from previous photos!
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