Monday means it’s St Maarten. We arrived on the dot at 08.00 and were all tied up and ready to get ashore by 08.30. However, not before a meeting of the Full English Club in the main restaurant. As always, breakfast did not disappoint.
We have never been to St Maarten before, despite having laid a cable from here to Curacao back in the mid 70’s. For today’s geography class The island is about 150 miles East of Puerto Rico in the Lesser Antilles and covers some 37 square miles. There will be questions asked when we return, so it’s advisable to keep up and if you can’t keep up – take notes. There is sufficient trivia about the ship to run the Sunday Quiz for the next 5 years, so brush up your maritime memories.
Upon disembarking – that’s nautical for getting off- we took a taxi tour with eight others and went round some of the high spots on the Island. It looks like a great place to holiday or live, reasonably clean and tidy, the properties did not look as ramshackled as some of the places we have been to.
What is very peculiar is that the island is divided in two. One part belongs to the Netherlands and the other part is French. They therefore have two different police forces, two lots of different laws and two currencies. But ignoring that, it was definitely the best place that we have visited so far on this cruise. As always in the Caribbean, everyone is friendly and they certainly know to respect tourists as it’s their prime source of income these days.
One of the points of call on the tour is the airport at St Maarten. The runway here pretty much backs onto the beach, so the planes literally go just a few feet above your head. I have photos to prove it!!. When a big jet takes off, people hang onto the fence and the jetwash lifts them off their feet and they ‘float’ holding on to the fence with their hands. A mall executive jet took off whilst we were there and it almost blew us off our feet, so heaven knows what a big jet would do if you weren’t holding on. Funny what qualifies as a tourist hotspot in the 21st century.
From there we went to Marigot in the French half and spent some time wandering around having multiple Kodak moments. I also bought a super Caribbean shirt, which will get an airing at the Christmas quiz. Note that as we are in the French half, it is now St Martin. Eventually, we returned to Philipsburg (St Maarten) and browsed the shops. This is definitely the cheapest place for duty free and is apparently renowned for jewellery and camera equipment. Pity Maureen bought me a new camera and I bought her jewellery for our anniversary, before we left. If only we had known!!
We returned to the ship for lunch, but as we were late, it had to be a quick snack in the poolside grill. We then ventured out again into Philipsburg to get a better look around town. As it was pushing 30 degrees, we eventually retired to the ship and snatched a last hour or so of sunshine before it set at 5.40pm.
We were just a few minutes late in departing from St Maarten, but there has always been something special about leaving a port, watching the land disappear. Time to open the bottle of Champagne, that has been cooling in the fridge since we arrived. We managed to do some serious damage to it whilst getting changed for dinner. The menu for dinner so far has not been duplicated and continues to offer a fantastic choice. As if that wasn’t enough, there are always three other items including a steak, a light option and something else that sounds vaguely healthy, that I can’t remember. Tonight we dined on Duck for starters, mixed grill for me and posh prawn curry for Maureen.
After dinner we continued with some on board retail therapy, hitting the dress shop. Well, actually, just Maureen, I was only in tow to say that nothing looked big in the dress! From there we adjourned to the Havana Room to watch a George Michael tribute act, who looked more like him than sounded like him!! That was followed by a vaguely entertaining version of ‘Give us a clue’ with teams that included the Captain and cruise director. Just a little too contrived and predictable to be good entertainment.
By this time it was way past our bedtime, so we retired to the cabin to polish off the bedtime chocolate on the pillow and sleep. No time to complete this blog posting as we were so tired. The weather has been windy all afternoon and it was gusting to 40mph during the night. Not that I knew anything about it.
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