Trip Report - December 11-18

(I would have posted my trip report sooner but wanted to make it as detailed as possible)

Intro:
This was our first trip to St.Maarten/St.Martin. I have been to Aruba many times over the years because my uncle owns some timeshares down there but although I love Aruba I wanted to go see something different, somewhere new in the Caribbean. So after a lot of reading and research some how I decided on SXM and booked a week in December.

Flight:
Air Transat, left mid-afternoon which kind of sucked because you get into SXM late when its already dark but overall it was an uneventful problem free flight.

Car Rental:
Since I am only 22 finding a car rental was a bit difficult at first, most places do not want to rent to you unless you are at least 25. However after talking with Michael from Unity Car Rental he was very understanding and gave me a great rate. It was a Nissan Sentra which seemed pretty decent for what we needed. Picture: http://www.zerokarma.com/modules/Photo_Album/albums/St_Martin1/PC130007.JPG

Resort:
We stayed at the Sonesta Maho Beach Resort mainly for the all-inclusive. Now I know most of you on here look down on all-inclusive packages and I am aware there is tons of amazing restaurants but in our case the all-inclusive saved us a lot of money. When I stay in Aruba at my uncles timeshare I pay out of my own pocket for all the food so I know how much it can quickly eat up your cash flow. I think we got more then our monies worth of food and alcohol (which they make their drinks strong as hell). The actual resort was pretty nice, nice grounds, nice pool. However are room wasn't the greatest and the beach was basically non-existent there however these were not major problems for us because we barely spent any time in the room anyways other than sleeping and we were mostly at either Mullet beach or Orient beach.

Dining Out:
We did go out once for a fancy dinner for my fiancés birthday, we went to La Samanna in the evening. Quite an interesting place to get into, had to go through 2 gates then you drive into this neat compound. The view at the restaurant is simply amazing there, my fiancé enjoyed it immensely. I had the red snapper and she had the beef dish which were both excellent. http://www.lasamanna.com/web/omar/omar_c3b1_restaurant.jsp

Sight Seeing:
- Fort Louis: Pretty neat fort, took lots of good pictures
- Marigot: Beautiful little town, the market was neat, had many interesting things for sale.
- Happy Bay: Was actually fairly crowded with people the day we hiked over, some people were having a birthday beach party or something.
- Fort Amsterdam: Very dumpy and run down, lots of garbage around. Couldn't even find it at first, didn't realize you have to walk through the Divi Beach resort to even get to it.
- Pinel Island: Was a very neat island to visit, did some snorkelling around there for a little bit then did a hike around the island. The north side had tons of shells washed up on the beach that we took a look at and we also saw a few hermit crabs crawling around. Food and drinks there were unreasonablely expensive in my opinion so we didn’t bother eating or drinking anything there and elected to head back over to our area and go to the Sunset beach bar instead.
- Sunset Beach Bar: I guess watching the planes counts as sight seeing. Had a lot of fun there, very relaxed and chilling atmosphere. I took a ton of awesome sunset pictures which are in the photo album: http://www.zerokarma.com/modules.php?name=Photo_Album&file=thumbnails&album=9

Activities:
- 12 Metre Challenge: This was one of the highlights of the trip for me. I love sailing so it was awesome to be on such an amazing boat, being on a Canadian boat was an extra bonus and winning the race was an even better extra bonus! I got horribly burned that day though forgot to put sun screen on, doh! - http://www.12metre.com/
- Horseback Riding: My fiancé is really into horseback riding so we for a 2 hour ride at Lucky Stables. They took us on a tour of undeveloped area near Cay Bay I believe it was and we went “swimming with the horses” I assumed it was just a stroll in the water with the horses but they take you actually deep in the water! It was pretty cool though, I am glad I didn’t bring my camera this time though otherwise it would have gotten soaked. - http://www.luckystable.com/

Miscellaneous Observations:
- lots of stray cats and dogs: I have seen lots of stray dogs before on Aruba and Turks & Caicos but I have never seen so many stray cats before
- lots of abandoned buildings: I am not just talking about the decaying Mullet Beach Resort, I noticed many places that look abandoned and looted. One place in particular I remember while walking from Friars Bay to Happy Bay, along the trail there are some houses near by which look fairly new and looked like they were probably pretty fancy at one time but where trashed and abandoned. There was several other similar cases like this I noticed in other areas.
- traffic is absolutely horrible especially the Philipsburg-Airport corridor. I think the situation could be vastly improved by simply installing more traffic lights in certain intersections. We went exploring the island on Sunday which worked out good because that turned out to be the least busy day in terms of traffic.
- motorcycles only drive in the middle of the road, many of them were idiots narrowly missing cars by inches, I was tempted to open my door on some of them…
- people take such poor care of their cars in SXM, almost every car is banged up or scratched in some way, also people do not seem to know what Tire Pressure is. I observed tons of cars driving around with near flats, I even saw many supped up cars with very expensive low profile tires driving around with near flat tires. Seems kind of stupid to wreck your tires like that, I can’t imagine them being that cheap over there.

Philipsburg + Jewellery Shopping:
The renovation of Front street looks pretty good, they did a good job, of course I can’t really compared it to the old way since this was my first trip (just going by old pictures). Our main mission in Philipsburg was to find some place to make us sort of a custom ring. My fiancé had a neat idea of getting a ring with both of our birth stones in it. This turned out to be quite a difficult task because firstly there isn’t too many two gem rings available, too many 3 gem rings or single gem rings. Even when finding a two gem ring the next step is to find identical sizes of the gems to interchange. The final step would be to actually get them to make this modification. Most jewellery stores seemed reluctant to make this custom ring we wanted, some refused, others said it couldn’t be done and a couple others would do it but wanted us to buy two rings. Finally after going through at least 8 or 9 stores we found a place Uj Ulimate Jewelers who actually took time to help us and make it work. We found a nice two piece 14k white gold ring we liked and they were able to find the proper size gems we needed to interchange it and they gave us a good deal on top of all that, they were quite helpful and my fiancé was very happy with the ring. Website - http://www.ultimatejewels.com/
As side from the Jewellery shopping I was not overly impressed with Philipsburg. I did not feel very relaxed while walking around mostly because people are constantly harassing and sometimes being overly aggressive trying to sell you things. In the center of Philipsburg by the court house all these rental guys, scooter rentals and other rentals kept trying to sell me drugs. First they try to sell you the scooter rental or whatever rental it is but if you say no thanks they then ask you if you want any weed or coke or E, etc… Of course I just tell them no thanks and they were cool with it and left me alone but the fact 4-5 different guys in that area kept asking me was a bit uncomfortable. Although I must admit they are more discreet about it, I know in Aruba the drug dealers are a lot more blunt about it.

Beaches:
Orient Beach – Our favourite beach, the Americans bussed in from cruise ships were sort of annoying though, many of them seemed shocked that people were walking around topless or nude. Do the cruise ships not inform them that Orient beach is clothing optional? I observed this same ignorant behaviour at Pinel Island as well.
Mullet Beach – Second Favourite, the waves were quite large the last two days we were there which was quite fun. There was several people surfing on the east side.
Friars Bay / Happy Bay – I liked both of these beaches because they are more laid back then others. The hike over to Happy Bay was kind of neat too. Both beaches seemed fairly busy the day we went though but it still wasn’t too bad. The parking lot in Friars Bay was funny, some woman kept backing into cars while trying to get out, we just stood there shaking our head asking ourselves what the hell she was doing.

Pictures:
There is over 300+ pictures here in this album I created. We had two different cameras so some of the pictures are out of order. http://www.zerokarma.com/modules.php?name=Photo_Album&file=thumbnails&album=9
(if possible I would appreciate if you could click on one of the ads while viewing the pictures to help me pay for the bandwidth costs, if you could it would be appreciated)

Overall Conclusion:
We had an excellent, extremely fun, problem free vacation. SXM is a very interesting and unique island. Although it was only a week we got to see a lot of new things and did a lot of stuff. There was still more things we wanted to do but there was only so much time. We definitely will visit SXM again in the future however we will probably check out a few other islands first before we return. The main goal was to go and visit somewhere new and have a good time and we accomplished that. I’d like to thank everyone here, all the information I found out on this board helped out immensely.