Our next stop included two countries within one small island. St. Maarten (Sint Maarten is the Dutch version of the name of the Island) is half Dutch, half French. The usual story of change of possession between the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish. But a twist on the usual ending in that the Dutch and French briefly came to their senses and decided that it made more sense to divvy it up than continue wasting time, money, and resources on fighting over it. The nice thing is that they have a 350 year old treaty that allows residents and anyone else to move freely back and forth between the two sides. So to this day the island is divided in half, with all services, such as power plants, schools, and utilities duplicated on each half. The Dutch side, with its capitol in Phillipsburg, uses the Netherlands Antilles Guilder for currency. Yeah, no one else has ever heard of it, either. What they really use is the US dollar. All prices have the US dollar price conspicuously posted.
Nuff said
But then there’s those French. The French part of the island is considered a full part of France (most other countries treat the islands as territories, if they have not become fully independent nations – only France seems to treat them as full citizens). They would not use the US dollar of course, so the currency du jour is the Euro. They will take US dollars, but still charge the exchange rate, which is perfectly fair.
We started our day by taking the short walk into town from the cruise terminal, which was about a one mile walk along a busy highway. Not exciting, but seemed like less hassle than the water taxi that charged money and had a big line. The walk seemed quite short and a good opportunity to wear off some of yesterday’s indulgences. When we hit town, it was fun to see that the water side of town overlooked a beautiful sandy beach lined with chairs and umbrellas. Yes, there were hawkers out there selling time in their chairs for a few bucks, but it was a gorgeous scene and refreshing after some of the more industrial town fronts we had seen. It was also lined with restaurants, bars, and cafes. Again, a change from what we had seen previously. There were also a lot of shops with the usual multitudes of jewelry, actually no, bazillions of big jewelry stores, cheap souvenirs, the same T-shirts we had seen everywhere, and guys with taxis just waiting for us.
Sitting really wasn’t what we wanted to do
Line em up and move em out
Now this is what a beach front cafe should look like in the Caribbean!
Main street
An appropriate Xmas tree
Dutch like their orange
That’s a courthouse I would enjoy working in
We did find some better quality shops off the main drag, also as usual, including a nice art gallery. Soon, though, we had to head back to catch the tour we had signed up for. Our original plan was to rent bicycles at a shop we had identified, but after a few days in the islands we realized that a) it was WAY too humid and hot to spend a day cycling and b) the roads and traffic looked far too frightening. Our walk along the highway into town only reinforced that notion as it was already quite steamy at 10 am, and there was no shoulder on the busy roads and plentiful crazy drivers.
So we joined our afternoon tour, which consisted of a ride by boat across the lagoon (open bar and live music) followed by time in the main town on the French side of the island, then a bus through the countryside back to our origin. You never know how these tours are going to work out, especially as we joined the very long line of ticket holders, but it turned out quite delightful.
Getting into the spirit
St. Maarten turns out to be the winter home of the rich, famous, and obscenely rich. We went by many overly large yachts, including Steve Jobs’ former boat. Don’t know who owns it now, but it sure looked like an Apple computer on the water. Hearing about how the uber rich don’t even travel on their mega yachts was more than disgusting, but it does keep the local economy going.
Formerly belonged to Steve Jobs – looks kinda Apple
When we reached Marigot, the French capitol, we immediately spied a café selling croissants. Tami had her usual chocolat, Mike had plain. Yum. Honestly, almost as good as Café Besalu. There were a lot of high end fashion shops that we peered in but skipped. Tami just doesn’t quite go for those sequiny form fitting dresses. Or any dresses, for that matter.
Marigot
How far did they have to go to get that?
Cemetary
We enjoyed the French feel of Marigot so much that we indulged in a second round of croissants before the tour back to Phillipsburg. We did need to help support the local economy. Back in town, we decided that we really needed to go back to the art gallery where we had seen some artwork that could not be passed up. So we got a lot of miles in and were some of the last ones back on the ship, but it was a fine, fine day.
We enjoyed the lobster dinner tonight and worked our way back to our cabin down the 9th deck hallway. We can always find our cabin by the post-it notes on the doors of our neighbors. There are three couples who are traveling together and they all put different colored post-its on their doors saying whose cabin it is. So we just go past the three post-its and there we are. One day someone had put one of the post-its on our door. We righted the situation, of course.
Pulling out of town