We usually spend a few weeks and then again a few weeks in The Caribbean each winter. Our haunts are La Samanna in St. Martin, St. Barths, and Anguilla. After the hurricane, which hit in September, we checked on the people we knew. No one was hurt. Everyone had major damage though. As the months wore on, the reports were more and more diverse. From “we are getting on our feet” to “it is still a disaster zone” to “the restaurants are opening and the hotels will be open for Festive Season” (Christmas). Then NY friends went down to Anguilla for a little vacation and their reports on Anguilla were good. They also said the St. Martin airport was a tent. We decided to invest five nights and go see for ourselves. Strictly research. It was in June. It was very off season. The weather was fair with some rain every day. We flew to Anguilla via San Juan. We had forgotten that San Juan was one of the devastated places. And it was, although we only saw the airport and the land while flying in. We arrived in Anguilla on a Monday morning. It is, and always has been, an ugly island. Now it is even uglier because the foliage is brown or nonexistent, but it still has magnificent powder sand beaches. The people began putting the island back together immediately instead of waiting for government money from England, which still has not arrived. There were a few open restaurants. We stayed at the “new” Four Seasons, which was previously called the Viceroy. It looked the same as it had prior to the storm, which to me looked like a concrete prison. The foliage was lacking. The beach was as beautiful as it was before. The hotel was basically empty but that was due to off-season. Some of the island restaurants were open. Many were closed due to the hurricane or the time of year. Visited many of the hotels that we knew from before..... like Cap Juluca. We needed an appointment with the GM to be shown the property. They have a long way to go.
The GM there stated that he will have at least 60 rooms available by Christmas 2018. That will be half of the property. That means the other half of the property will still remain a construction site. Who wants to pay $1000 or $1500 a night and stay in the middle of a construction site. And the foliage there now is dark brown or nonexistent. Prediction: There is no way that that property will be finished for Christmas. Belmond has a lot of money and they are talking about making it their gem in the Caribbean, but you are still talking about producing with Caribbean workmen. It will be beautiful in the end, but we just don’t know when the end will be. The plans, which he shared with us, look magnificent. The other thought is you have to pray that the hurricane season that is on its way will be a mild one. The few restaurants we did dine at were very good....like the Reef and Vaya. Both worth repeating.
From Anguilla we were able to book a flight to Saint Barths. We stayed at a hotel we have never been to, which is called Manapany. It did get hit in the hurricane but they were able to redo the hotel and have it open. We happened to have seen two rooms. The first room that they put us in had major construction going on behind it. And one of the questions I asked when I booked the room was, “Is the hotel under any construction?“. The answer I got was “No, there is no construction going on”. So after 30 minutes in the room listening to banging (surprising that we lasted that long), we made them move us to the room furthest away from the construction and that room happen to be directly on the beach and it was a suite. But it was a silly suite because you had to actually leave the bedroom and walked down a little path to get to the living room. In my estimation it was useless. I told the hotel that they would be better off making that into a ”petite chambre” on the beach. It had an outside shower and it had a bathroom. All they had to do was put in a bed and they would be able to get another €700 a night. Stepping right out onto the sand. The hotel itself was in a very peculiar location on the island. There was a lot of twisting and turning and little streets......a bit on the difficult side to get to, but once we arrived it was so pretty that we really didn’t want to leave. The second night we had dinner plans in the town of Gustavia, and we canceled them. The hotel had live music that night. The restaurant was on the sand. There were a ton of people there. (A ton in St. Barths was maybe 50!) And we started drinking and talking and after a while my husband asked if I would mind if we had dinner there. And so we did. The food was good. The drinks were good. The company was good. The music was good. The weather was perfect. The night was delightful.
So, our primary purpose in going to Saint Barts was to check out the condition of Eden Rock Hotel and the condition of Hotel Isle de France, and to see which restaurants survived, and the general condition of the island.
The general condition of the island is poor. There is not too much green on the island currently. There were garbage dumps that previously never existed OR they were hidden. I tend to guess they never existed before. A good majority of the restaurants are closed, and I’m hoping some of those will re-open for winter 2018-2019. Many of the boutiques are closed. Eden Rock was a major construction site. All you could see was rebar and that they were in the process of preparing or pouring concrete. We contacted the hotel via email when we returned to Manapany, as we could not believe they would be open for Christmas 2018. They insisted they knew more than we did and they would be a functioning hotel by then. I hope so but I would be very surprised. Isle de France (LVMH) was in an even worse state.
From St. Barths we flew to St. Martin. We were unable to find a hotel that did not seem disgusting. The few higher end hotels on the island were decimated. Because of this, we timed it such that we arrived in St. Martin on the morning of the day we were flying to JFK. We figured we would hire a taxi, check out the things we wanted to see, and he would take us back to the airport in time for our flight to New York. Well, as luck would have it, our plane from St. Barths, which is a 10 minute flight to St. Martin, was delayed almost 90 minutes. When we arrived at the airport in St. Martin, we knew we were going to have to return early because the airport was literally a big tent. This did not leave us very much time to see St. Martin.
We immediately went to La Samanna, but the general manager had just left and there was no way we were going to be allowed on the property. We have had 35 consecutive years there. We had a lot of time invested in this island. Our children grew up there. From La Samanna we headed towards Marigot, which is the main town on a marina. We heard it was wiped out. The road is one lane in each direction. We sat on the road for at least 30 minutes. There had to be some kind of accident and nobody moved so eventually we made a U-turn. The next thing we wanted to see was the town of Grand Casse. Because of the accident, we would have to circumvent the French side of the island and travel through the Dutch side, which would take us well over an hour to get to where we wanted to go. We headed towards the Dutch side and drove for half an hour, but then the time was close to return to the airport. And so we did, without accomplishing anything. So we still don’t know in how destroyed a state the island of Sint Maarten/Saint Martin is. From what we saw on our little tour, there was little left. All the restaurants that we passed which were on the beach were gone. Flattened. Nothing. The stores and the pharmacy we frequented were nonexistent. The locals are suffering due to lack of tourism. And the airport is a tent. A big white tent.
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