Orient Bay looked much better from farther away Orient Bay, St Martin 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, an

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 ve

Night time view of the Marina Royale in Marigot 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

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

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

Juliana Airport in Sint Maarten 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 a

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