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 (more...)
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.
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.
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 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.
If you’d like her phone number, please leave a comment and I’ll dig it up.
