Profligate's
Progress
February 6 - St. Barth, FWI
We spent most of Wednesday at St. Kitts,
which is a lot like Catalina - except that it has a tall volcano
and a big rainforest; they have monkeys instead of buffalo; the
climate is tropical instead of temperate; the biggest crop is
sugarcane; most of the population are descendants of slaves;
it's home to a huge fort; and it was the site of many battles
between Caribs, the French, and the Brits. We suppose what we're
trying to say is that St. Kitts and Catalina are about the same
size.
St. Kitts isn't the easiest place to clear
into. There's really no place to tie your dinghy at the commercial
port. We ended up tying to a big barge that could have left at
any moment. And the clearing procedure was the all too common
fill out a bunch of papers nonsense that seems to us to be a
waste of time. In fact, lots of folks simply never check in at
the various islands down here. There aren't many patrol boats,
so not many seem to get caught.
In many of the official offices in the
Caribbean, the radio is tuned to some music, and lots of the
officials seem to groove with the beat. At St. Kitts, we got
a kick out of the fact that the radio was playing, and the port
official was rocking to the beat of Sweet Aloha.
At least the man and the woman in the office
were friendly. We wanted to tour the island, and they got us
a great taxi guide - even though the Queen Mary 2, the
largest cruise ship in the world, on her very first cruise, was
in town, and her passengers were gobbling up most of the taxis.
Leroy, our very friendly taxi guide, charged us $60 for a four-hour
tour - or about the same price as a light lunch in St. Barth.
The tour turned out to be an excellent deal.
We like the funny stuff you find out about
places. For example, we asked if locals still harvest the sugar
cane on St. Kitts. "Oh no," said Leroy, "none
of our people would do that. We bring workers in from Guiana."
We also got a kick out of the fact they were building some 'low
income' housing on a little bluff about 150 feet above the Caribbean
Sea, with a great view. We told our driver they'd be million
dollar lots in California. He just laughed and said, "Everybody
on St. Kitts has an ocean view."
The highlights of the tour were Basseterre,
the capital of St. Kitts & Nevis, which is one island; the
rainforest; Romney Manor, an old plantation that's now a botanical
garden; Brimstone Hill, the 'Gibraltar of the Caribbean; the
prime minister's house; and an overview of the southern third
of the island. Here are some photos:
David Ray's Newport, Rhode Island-based Nirvana, built
by Hinckley in about 1950 and meticulously maintained, enjoys
a close reach with St. Kitts in the background.
After the Brits and French joined together to massacre the Carib
Indians, with the help of a traitorous Carib woman, they split
the island. The French got the two ends while the Brits got the
middle. Yeah, as if that was going to work out. So the Brits
built Brimstone Hill, the biggest fort in the Caribbean, with
a commanding overview of the sea. They had scores of cannons
with a range of three miles. Had one of them been operational,
it would have been easy enough to lob a cannonball on the unsuspecting
Sunsail chartercat motoring below in the photo. In fact, we suggested
that the tourist attraction could dramatically increase attendance
if they'd only have live demonstrations of the cannons. Alas,
we think this great idea will go nowhere. In any event, the Brits
aimed all their guns toward the sea, overlooking the fact that
the clever French might attack from the rear. Which is what they
did, of course. After a month or so, the 8,000 French starved
out the 1,000 Brits.
Another shot of Brimstone Hill, showing Saba on the left, and
Statia in the distance. The cannon is pointed toward Le Select
Bar on St. Barth, about 40 miles away.
St. Kitts basically has one road that follows the coast around
the island. That leaves the entire upper elevations to the rainforest,
and inhabitants such as this little monkey. We were alternately
told that the monkeys came over as pets of the Europeans or escaped
a ship that wrecked on the shore. In any event, there are now
more than 100,000 of them - about three times the number of humans
on the island - and they drive the farmers crazy.
This is one tiny fraction of a single massive tree at Romney
Manor. Before Hurricane George hit, it was said to cover over
one acre! Even now, it has about 250 other plants growing on
it. A better journalist would have remembered the name of the
tree.
Doña de Mallorca always wanted to know what she'd look
like in dreads. Here she tries on some red ones.
The main circus in Basseterre, capital of St. Kitts, was modeled
after Piccadilly Circus in London. You can tell this isn't the
one in London because there aren't any double-decker buses. Oh
yeah, and because of the chickens strolling around.
The folks of St. Kitts have, to our mind, come up with a good
plan. If non-islanders want to buy land, they can only do it
on the undeveloped south end of the island. This keeps rich foreigners
from driving the price of housing on the rest of the island out
of reach of the locals. Ironically, the south side of the island
is one of the most beautiful, and is almost totally undeveloped.
Until recently, that is. A Canadian plastics mogul apparently
put up $400 million to build a gigantic Marriott Hotel, at what
we feel wasn't a very good site. Hilton, on the other hand, is
apparently going to build at the site seen in the photo, where
the rough Atlantic and the smooth Caribbean are separated by
only a couple of hundred yards. If you're looking for isolated
anchorages in the St. Kitts/Nevis area, the south side of the
island is the place. There's nobody around.
Scotland? It only looks like it. It's actually one of the numerous
remote anchorages at the south end of St. Kitts. And it only
looks cold. The water and air are very, very warm, thank you.
Actually, this is more than St. Kitts, as the cloud shrouded
volcanic peak in the background is Nevis, which is separated
from St. Kitts by less than two miles.
You see a lot of great boats and ships in the Caribbean, such
as this five-master. Germans apparently go crazy for these kinds
of cruises, for this is almost new and was built specifically
for the purpose. Count the number of sails!
Photos Latitude/Richard
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