One of the stops on our tour of the island was Orient Beach, a popular beach along the “French Riviera” of St Martin. This was our version of beach hell, stuffed to the brim with parasailers, hawkers, and sunbathers.

Philipsburg is bordered by a beautiful beach with shallow, calm waters.  There are lots of restaurants, change facilities, and shops in the immediate area around.  This isn’t your idyllic tropical beach, but for those who fancy lunch at their choice of restaurants and then a quick walk to a beach, this is the place to be.  It is also close to the cruise ship port, so they get a lot of traffic from the boats.

The next day we checked out and left our bags at the hotel, and walked to the taxi stand close to the port, next to the market. There we arranged a 3 hour tour of the island with a taxi driver. She gave us a reasonable price of $40, after some pretty easy haggling. She gave us some very candid commentary and good insight into the culture and struggle of the local population versus the Europeans – it was not a very pretty picture.  She was a very good driver, and left us lots of time at the stops to sightsee.

TAXI MARIA
Airport Road, grand-case
home phone 0590-87-74-72
cell 0690-27-63-53

We walked 5 minutes to the Marina Royale district, which is a very nice development of high-end restaurants and shops overlooking the yachts of the marina. It’s very pleasant – it was a different world to the area around our hotel. We had a very nice meal at La Main a la Pate – not exactly cheap, although the fresh lobster was about the same price as what we would pay in California at a restaurant. All the restaurants have tables spilling out right onto the boardwalk that rings the L shaped marina, and street performers entertained us while we ate. The waiter and Maitre d’ were very friendly (the Maitre d’ even had a side-business arranging tours).

After dinner, we went for a pleasant stroll along the marina, and did a little bit of late night souvenir shopping.

We stayed at the Fantastic Guest House. It lived up to it’s name – it was relatively cheap, the location couldn’t be beat (right next to the Marina), the room was spotless, air conditioning was powerful, and from a corner of the shower stall in the bathroom, we even had free wi-fi from one of the neighbours (or we could pay $10 from the hotel!).

The hotel has a small plunge pool, and a very nice patio overlooking the harbour. The only downside was that the area immediately around the hotel wasn’t very clean and didn’t look that safe – I doubt if women would feel safe there alone at night. The hotel is right above a Fantastic Mechanics Shop.

This came as a very big surprise to us – it turns out that as of 2008, US dollars and Euros are taken at par in St. Martin/Sint Maarten. Of course, this made for a 30% discount for everything with US Dollars. We’re not sure if we would have been able to take US Dollars out of bank machines (everybody seemed to have them in the cash registers) – but we blew through our US cash very quickly.  Our taxi ride tour of the island was at an instant discount, as was our hotel, and cab fare from the airport.

Arriving in Sint Maarten, the Juliana airport is very clean and modern, and we were surprised to see our luggage again. (unlike the line-up of 50 or so people waiting in the lost luggage line-up, from another LIAT flight). We shared a taxi (which they arranged) to our backpacker hotel in St Martin for about $20.

After coming from Dominica, St Martin/St Maarten is a different world. There is development everywhere – casinos, restaurants, shops, fancy hotels…  It didn’t take long for us to be extremely glad we were only staying one night. Crossing from the Dutch Sint Maarten part of the islands to the St. Martin French side, there is no evidence at all that this is a different coutrny – except for the small sign we sped by as we crossed.

Although the islands are not that far, flying between them requires patience, strength, and more patience. The only option for us to get from Dominica to St Martin was to fly on Liat Air, the worst airline we’ve ever flown on (ok – 2nd worse. Vietnam Air crashed the Airbus we were supposed to be on. Their bad). The flight was 4 hours late leaving (no excuse given), and Melville Hall was not a great place to get stuck- the only redeeming feature of the airport was the free Wi-Fi. We had to connect through Antigua (Liat’s hub) and had already missed our flight by the time we arrived. We then had to wait an hour in a line-up waiting for them to re-route the 30ish passengers who just got off the plane.. Since this is such a common occurence on LIAT, we were expecting them to process this sort of thing better Apparently, we were lucky it was only that bad – another lady we talked to who lives in Dominica once had her flight take off in the dark even though Melville Hall has no lights and isn’t rated for night flights. Another couple we talked to got transferred to a plane whose door wouldn’t seal shut – but they still took off. . Anyways LIAT finally routed us through another island and we got to St Martin in the early evening, as opposed to our planned noon arrival.  We were just happy to make it, and happy that it was our last flight on LIAT.

Driving from Portsmouth to Melville Hall aiport took about 1 hour, and was a fairly easy drive, even in the rain. We only almost got lost once, but a friendly local directed us before we could even take out our map. Our car rental company let us drop off the car at the aiport without incurring any extra fees.  The airport itself is very small and cramped, but had free wifi and a small cafe.

We arranged for a guide to take us up the Indian River. The Indian River is a river that empties into the ocean at the heart of Portsmouth, and rowboats and guides will take you up the river to a “Jungle Bar” where some delicious rum punch is served. Our guide was excellent (despite being severely hung over) and picked us up at our hotel in Portsmouth in his motorboat. The jungle scenery was pretty, but as with the aerial tram, we didn’t see any interesting animals.

There was some nice flowers, some fish in the water, and trees with roots extending into the water.  Our guide told us one of the scenes of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 that was filmed on this river.