BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – St. Kitts and Nevis is getting exposure in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri.
Tom Uhlenbrock, headlined his article: “St. Kitts and Nevis: Little known jewels, lots of sparkle” paid a six-day visit to both islands.
“St. Kitts is growing as a tourist destination and proud of it, while Nevis, which has no casinos, no cruise ships, no fast food and no buildings taller than a coconut palm wants the island to stay that way,” he said.
The article follows:
A walk up a curving blacktop road led to a mountain pass where you could see the white-capped Atlantic pounding an empty beach on one side of St. Kitts’ south peninsula, and the Caribbean lapping languidly on the other. In the distance, clouds shrouded the top of the dormant volcano at the center of the nearby island of Nevis.
I arrived in time to catch the sunset and had the road’s scenic turnout to myself. The woman who was there with her two pet monkeys earlier in the day had packed up her souvenir stand for the night.
The clouds were turning pink when a Toyota van, the vehicle of choice for taxis, pulled up and the driver pointed out his window. “There’s Nevis,” he said. The back window rolled down and two passengers reached out, clutching cameras and snapped away. The windows rolled up, the taxi took off, and I was alone again with the fiery sky.
Drive-by tourism. The lovely, little-known sister islands of St. Kitts and Nevis deserve a much closer look.
Situated about 200 miles southeast of Puerto Rico, in the Leeward Islands of the West Indies, St. Kitts and the smaller Nevis are separated by two miles and a 45-minute ferry ride. Christopher Columbus explored the islands in 1493, and the English and French fought over them for more than 100 years.
The two islands came under British control after a decisive battle in 1782 but gained their independence in 1983 and became the smallest nation in the Americas. Now called the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis, with the capital city of Basseterre situated on St. Kitts, they retain much of their colonial charm. English is the official language, and most residents are descendants of African slaves.
Both islands have volcanic mountains covered in lush rain forest running down to beaches. Both have one major city, Basseterre in St. Kitts and Charlestown in Nevis. Both have villages scattered along the main roads that circle each island. St. Kitts is oval, with 69 square miles and about 35,880 residents. Nevis is half that size and circular, with 11,000 islanders.
But while they have much in common, the two are distinctly, and stubbornly, different. So much so that Nevis tried in 1998 to break away, with the vote to secede barely failing to reach the two-thirds majority.
Hardly identical
St. Kitts is growing as a tourist destination and proud of it. As many as three cruise ships dock on any given day, and tourists crowd the shops of Basseterre or take a ride on the scenic train across the island.
Nevis, pronounced “knee-vis” by its residents, has no casinos, no cruise ships, no fast food and no buildings taller than a coconut palm. And it wants to stay that way.
The differing philosophies were evident in the two places where I stayed in a six-day visit.
The St. Kitts Marriott Resort & the Royal Beach Casino has five floors, 513 rooms, 10 restaurants and bars, a championship golf course with holes on both the Atlantic and Caribbean and the Emerald Mist Spa. The balcony of my room looked out on a palm-studded plaza, a meandering pool with bridge and swim-up bar and dozens of cabanas in neat rows on a broad golden beach.
Nisbet Plantation Beach Club, a cluster of 36 yellow cottages and a restored circa 1778 greathouse, is on 30 acres of lawn, gardens and palm trees on one of Nevis’ old sugar plantations. The plantation is the ancestral home of Fanny Nisbet, who married Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson, Britain’s famous naval hero.
Nevis has turned several plantations into elegant inns; the Montpelier Plantation Inn higher up the mountainside is where stars such as Meryl Streep hang out. Nisbet is the only plantation on the beach and maintains the reserved ambience of a well-maintained country club. TripAdvisor voted Nisbet Plantation the top luxury hotel in Latin America and the Caribbean in its 2008 Travelers Choice awards, and Conde Nast Traveler named it tops for service in the Caribbean on its 2009 Gold List.
St. Kitts close up
Driving the skinny, two-lane roads that circle St. Kitts and Nevis can be a challenge for a visitor, and not just because you’re on the left side. Dogs, donkeys, cattle, chickens, goats, sheep and the occasional monkey share the roads and can appear around the next curve. (A footnote: Island sheep have no woolly coats and look just like the goats. The difference, I learned, is goats hold their tails upward, sheep point them downward.)
St. Kitts: Looking over to St. Eustatius (Statia)
To gawk at the beaches and mountains of St. Kitts, I hired William Tyson, owner of one of those Toyota taxis, who has given so many tours that he recites the roadside historical markers by heart.
At age 70, and the father of 22 children, soft-spoken Tyson is an island feature of his own. “I played in a steel band, you know,” he said. “I was definitely lucky with the women.”
“Columbus named the island St. Christopher after his patron saint; somebody shortened it to St. Kitts,” Tyson said. “There’s now a plan to develop the eastern side with a hotel and marina. They’re putting a golf course in there, as well.”
Our first stop was “The Strip,” a string of open bars along Timothy Beach that is the place to be on Friday and Saturday nights. St. Kitts is home to a veterinary college, and some students were engaged in a vigorous volleyball game on the sand. The strip also has Mr. X’s Shiggidy Shack, which some claim serves the best fresh-from-the-sea lobster. Tyson, however, voted for Spratnet in the village of Old Road.
We passed fields of sugar cane, but Tyson explained that sugar no longer is a viable industry because of a crash in prices. Tourism is the No. 1 revenue source on the two islands.
‘The people who use the fields the most now are the Rastas,” he said. “They go in the middle, carve out a little plot and grow their marijuana. If you get caught, they charge you money, heavy sums. If you can’t pay, you go to prison.”
A cruise ship was in town, and Basseterre was a bit busy. We saw the clock tower at the town’s center and Independence Square. “Back in the late 1750s, it was used as a slave market,” Tyson said. “These buildings have underground basements. That’s where they kept the slaves to be sold. They named it Independence Square in 1983.”
The ferry ride on the Caribbean to Nevis costs $10 and was a scenic delight from the top deck, although the wind claimed my favorite hat. Mount Nevis, as usual, was crowned with clouds and stood majestically above the string of gingerbread buildings of Charlestown.
Nevis close up
During the three days at Nisbet Plantation, we strolled its deserted beaches, dined at its AAA Four-Diamond restaurant and hiked up high into the rain forest, meeting two troops of green vervet monkeys. The large males serving as “sentinels” gave us threatening looks.
I missed out on an excursion with Scuba Safari that one of my traveling companions, a veteran diver, put in his top five. He spotted an eel, a sea turtle, two octopuses, several sting rays and five large nurse sharks hunkered under a coral ledge. Harmless to humans, nurse sharks use their puckered mouths to dine on fish and shrimp.
Again, I hired a driver to show me around. T.C. had clipped hair dyed the vibrant red of an island poinsettia, and was a grandmother who drove a double-decker bus in Leeds, England, before discovering Nevis 16 years ago.
“Came to paradise, fell in love, end of story,” she said. After initially telling me T.C. stood for “Tough Cookie,” she later admitted to Thelma Claxton.
We drove by the site of the island’s major luxury hotel, the Four Seasons, which once hosted Britney and Beyoncé. Battered by Hurricane Omar in 2008, the resort is closed with its reopening date expected by late this year.
“The French-Canadian company that built it put the beachfront rooms and lobby below sea level so the customers could walk right out onto the sand,” T.C. said. “When the sea comes in, you can’t drain out the ocean.”
We saw the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers, and heard the story of the MV Christina, an overloaded ferry that sank in 1970 off Nevis, taking 233 islanders with it.
“As the boat started to sink, the metal seats shifted forward and blocked the entrance, everyone was trapped,” T.C. said.
She also described her specialty tour of the island’s “rum shops” on Sunday afternoons.
“You have to drink a beer in each bar, the most bars we’ve ever done was 16,” she said. “They know we’re coming and cook fish, Johnny cakes, jerked pork and a dish of pig’s snouts and trotters. It’s cooked up into a gelatin, lines your stomach.”
Before heading home, we only had time for a Sunday brunch of Bloody Marys and lobster eggs Benedict at Gallipot, a seaside restaurant.
We had to pass on the snouts and trotters.
