Hello there,

This is the first of a couple of posts on my observations of our recent trip to SXM. Please keep in mind that these are my observations and that your experiences may vary.

I now present for your entertainment (and possibly even for your information)...

The Island - Part 1

With apologies and due reverence to George Lucas…

A long time ago, near an island paradise far away…

A tragic scene unfolds before us. A massive, hangar-like ship’s bridge has only a few occupants. The cavern is dark, with giant pipes running to and fro. Some are hissing steam. (Why, whenever you see the evil alien ship in a futuristic space adventure movie, is there steam coming from pipes on the bridge? Don’t you think they’d have gone beyond steam power by that stage?) Through the windows we see a tall volcanic island in the distance, almost serene compared to the malevolence we feel in the room before us. It is an incongruent view. An old man with a chalk white and weathered face, hooded in a dark black cloak, sits in a throne-like chair looking down at a hapless young Saban held by two mean looking guards wearing white uniforms. A tall guy in a shiny black suit who seems to have a breathing impediment stands nearby… ready to strike. The old man speaks in a slow, deep and guttural voice… “You will tell me where the rest of the crew members are.” He leans forward towards the young islander in order to make his point clearly. “Tell me now.” “It is your last chance…” This last is uttered slowly in an even lower and more menacing tone. The Saban writhes in the grip of the two ship’s officers. The tall guy with the emphysema moves a little forward, towards the prisoner. In a desperate act of defiance, the Saban cries out “You’ll never make me talk!” “I won’t tell you anything!” “Not even how they tasted!” Perhaps that last bit wasn’t the best response, but he’s nothing if not brave. The Emperor leans back and looks down his long aged nose at the pitiful little being. He gazes at him for a few seconds, tilting his head to one side as though observing a bug he is about to squish. He then delivers the Saban’s sentence. “Very well then… Before you die, you will be the first to witness the power of this FULLY… OPERATIONAL… CRUISE SHIP! Buwhahhahhahhah…” The maniacal laughter echoes through the cavernous bridge of the evil ship. The captain steps forward. “Your course, my Lord?” he inquires. “Set course for Saba, and unleash the first wave of passengers… but captain!” “Yes my Lord?” “Release them slowly… Let our little friend here have time to watch and savor the total destruction of his pathetic little island paradise…” The last we ever hear of the now not hungry Saban was his plaintive cry… “Nooooooo!” as he is led away by the two ship’s officers. In the distance seen through the windows of the bridge, Saba Island looms a little larger as the behemoth draws near… A small aircraft impacts the side of a mountain on the island in the distance… Trouble is brewing.


So we’re driving along on Sunday in the little hockey puck Tieros. Let’s see, there’s Stone, okay, got to eat there, that’s on the list. Check! Okay, we also need to find Zee Best. Where Zee Heck iz it?? Oh look! There’s the Italian place those other TTOL folks recommended. Good. Check! There’s those French places on the Dutch side, those other Dutch places on the French side and then the Mexican and Chinese places everywhere. Oh look, there’s the MacDonald’s. I remember so well the hapless TTOL poster who filed a trip report about their eight days on the island and foolishly reported that they had tried to have three of their twenty four meals in fast food joints. You would have thought from the sudden and flaming responses that the poor group had embedded themselves in a fast food restaurant and had eaten nothing but the stuff. We won’t even think of eating at any of those places. I’d never survive telling the TTOL crowd about it. Sometimes you need to be hardy indeed to do this forum posting stuff. Oh look… Peg Leg Pub. Now I’ve got a fix on that one as well. So, let’s see… There’s six nights to have meals and at least a few breakfasts. Don’t really do lunches but maybe we can fit some of these places in at lunch time so we can try some more of them. Now. Tabba Khady. I think I remember someone saying that place is hard to find but it’s definitely worth it. That Phillipe character is always posting thoughtful answers and information on the forum and it would be worth it just to send some business his way for his efforts. Still driving. Now… oh look, there’s Taco Macho. Someone said that was good, too! It looks like an over-grown LoLo. Laguna Ristorante – damn, that’s another one. Oh TTOL people! Why so cruel??! We’ll never be able to get to all of these places!

Why are we driving around on this Sunday? Several reasons really (we can be really thrifty sometimes). We’re getting our bearings so to speak. We’re also seeing if we can begin to get a sense of the pulse of the island, looking for what makes it tick. We’re checking out TTOL landmarks and, we’re trying to buy some simple tools so we can use them to disable to high-beam focused laser lighting system at the villa which would allow me to get some sleep. On this fine Sunday in paradise we sure got a sense of the pulse of the place all right. The patient had died sometime early that morning. Try buying a screwdriver in Simpson Bay on a Sunday (when you’re unfamiliar with the place and don’t remember that there is a huge hardware store with an unpronounceable Dutch name just up the road from the Grand Marche). Every place we tried in Simpson Bay and Maho was in a complete state of “gone fishin”. If the climate was a little drier, I would have expected tumbleweeds to be blowing down the road and an old mule to stroll by slowly in front of us as we stood on the block waiting for our showdown with “the Kid”… There was very little open. No shops. It was deathly quiet. Hmmm… Any “soul” around here had vacated the place a while before.

One of the other reasons we were out and about on this Sunday was to get the dive tanks refilled after my shore diving in Burgeaux Bay. There must be a law against running compressors on Sundays on SXM since none of the dive shops we tried were open. This makes it difficult to get a dive tank refilled. Blowing into it won’t work. If you could physically hang on to the tank, you could take the valve out and hold it up behind a departing Airbus (to overfill it) or a 757 (for a standard fill) but the air might not be as pure as you’d like it. This was the first place I’d ever been that advertised scuba diving as one of its attractions but didn’t have an open dive shop where you could get tanks refilled on any given day. I’m sure there might have been shops open, perhaps on the “French” side but we hadn’t, as yet, made it there. So we confined ourselves to the quest for basic tools and answers to our questions on the “pulse” of the place. We had to find an area that didn’t look like a scene from the movie “3:10 to Yuma”. Where would we find the “action” that one associates with this paradise?

I know! We’ll drive to the big city of Philipsburg. Everything will be open there. It’s the main city of the island (much to the disgust of the French). Let’s go… We head off through the sleepy little Simpson Bay driving using the TTOL-provided navigation instructions “You can’t get lost. There’s only one road.” One road? If this is one road it sure wasn’t built very well. There are bits of it heading off in all directions. At times it’s hard to know whether you’re travelling on what would be considered the “one” road, or if you’ve ventured onto a tributary feeding a small backwater community. At least there are detailed road signs everywhere. Sint Maarten doesn’t use many of the internationally recognized road symbols and signage though. They have a unique way of providing instant recognition for directions. On-island, they simply announce your location by pointing the way to jewelry stores. I’m not kidding. We observed hundreds of what appeared to be road signs that are made up of tall groups of advertisements pointing the way to various jewelry stores “Acme Diamonds – this way”, “BuyALot Gems – that way”. We’d never seen anything like it. And it wasn’t as though there were signs for all kinds of shops, either. It was mostly jewelry. And you can actually navigate using these just like you would with “normal” directions. Instead of “Schenectedy – 17 Miles”, you have “Om Jewelers”. You follow the signs to “Om”, hang a left at “Gemsland” and continue on to “Zhavieri”. It’s easy. When you’re next on the island, toss your regular map into the back seat and actually try driving to a favorite restaurant or beach attraction using only the jewelry signage. You’ll be amazed at the results. You’ll all be able to laugh about it later.

People will, of course, try to convince you that road signs are useless on SXM since there is only one principal road and they will assure you that it is almost impossible to get lost. This is a farce since we managed to get lost twice and I’ve navigated small boats across large seas (always managing to reach my intended destination) and I have a pretty good sense of direction. We ended up driving down a back road one day when I foolishly followed a road sign that said “Simpson Bay – Airport”. It was on the road from Cole Bay to Simpson Bay a little past the Grand Marche supermarket. I should have followed the sign that said “BrightStone Jewels” since that seems to be Papiementu for “Simpson Bay – Airport”. On another day we came across a road sign that said “Orient Bay Beach Club”, with an arrow pointing to the right. We took it, like the idiots we were, thinking that this road would take us to Orient Bay Beach Club and we discovered a residential area that provided no access to the beach. We only got out of there by following a vehicle with a sign on it that said “Come to Jesus” since we figured we might as well get to know Him if we were destined to die on sint Maarten simply because we don’t buy jewelry. We should, of course, have turned at the “Crystal-Lustre Gems and Watches – This way” sign but again, we didn’t have our English to SXM dictionary with us and didn’t realize that this is the sign that actually says “Orient Bay Beach Club”. Perhaps if we’d been driving naked we would have gravitated to it. Maybe there’s some kind of strange and ancient navigation method that the earliest travelers used simply by following the course indicated by their extended genitals. After all, some would say that most men follow directions this way. Perhaps those ancient Polynesians actually managed to navigate the Pacific simply by charting the course of their erections. That would be awfully hard to write up in a history book, though, and I guess that’s why school children are told that these mariners “followed wave patterns and used the sky”. In our case, we weren’t driving naked and if I had needed to undo my shorts and expose my genitals in order to get directions I might have killed us both. It would have made for a pretty interesting scene for the ambulance folks though. Anyway, we chose to follow the few road signs that weren’t jewelry ads. Our mistake.


To “Stand off” is, I am led to believe, a nautical expression (you know how I love those) that applies when a vessel keeps a safe and prudent distance from another object, like its destination, an obstruction or another vessel, while it awaits further information about that object. It’s related to “Standing-to” in which a vessel approaches an object (usually another vessel) and keeps a safe distance while being ready to lend assistance if required or while waiting for some procedure to be completed before the vessel that is “standing to” attaches itself to the object. I would guess that the expression “someone is being standoffish” is derived from this term. We were reminded of it frequently on Sint Maarten. It would manifest itself whenever we met a local person who had to provide us with some form of service. As we first approached, they would appear to be wary of what we might ask them to do and how we might react if they didn’t perform this task in a way that pleased us sufficiently. At first I wasn’t sure why this was happening. I’m a pretty friendly guy and, as far as I’m concerned, we’re all equals. I really don’t care what anyone does for a living. If it’s what you do, then that’s okay with me. So I try to talk openly and in a friendly way with anyone I interact with. It doesn’t cost a dime and has often led to some really interesting exchanges. I’m attuned to people being standoffish when I go to a restaurant or approach an airline ticket counter and that attitude is normally really easy to overcome. I found it a little harder to do this on Sint Maarten and Sonia and I were becoming concerned about whether or not it was something we were doing that was causing the problem.

Actually, as I write this about our trip to the island now that I am back at home, something occurred to me. I’m walking down the street in Washington DC one morning recently and I have three separate encounters with business people going about their daily activities. As each one approaches, and we make eye contact, I smile, nod and say “morning!” Not one of them gives a response (except one who seemed to quicken his pace – perhaps “morning” is an Urdu or Pashtun code word for “I am about to kill you with extreme prejudice – have a nice day”). They just avert their eyes and hustle by on their way to whatever occupies the day for them. The problem is, I’ve been using this greeting for years and since I still haven’t been sent off to Guantamino Bay, it must not be an evil-doer code word. Maybe I’m saying it wrong. Or perhaps they think I’m going to approach them and ask them to work in the White House. Right now, that’s an unpopular business address and it isn’t seen as a good career move. Maybe that’s it.

I guess none of the average folks on the street that I encountered during my week on Sint Maarten spoke Urdu (or had read any Homeland Security directives directing them to be wary of, and then report, the suspicious activity of someone behaving in a friendly manner) since the same “Morning!” interaction was most often greeted with wide smiles, a seemingly heartfelt “Hello!” and, occasionally, a firm handshake. I even got a wave from a couple of local kids who were about to sacrifice themselves for the amusement of tire spinning tourists at Maho Bay Beach by hanging on to a fence directly behind the business end of a General Electric “Human Underwear Removal Technology” (HURT) device attached to the wing of an Air France Airbus A340 that was about to depart. Even The fellows working on the Caravanserai hotel and in the strange Turkish Mosque next door to the villa were routinely pleasant when I greeted them as they walked to and from their work and we couldn’t have been further apart in so many respects. It’s curious. I can’t get a nod from my fellow citizens but I practically get adopted by the Sint Maarten locals. There’s any number of lessons to be learned from this.

The folks who gave us the “wary-local” attitude, though, were most often those in jobs that required them to provide some form of service to visitors. It took me a while, including a view of myself in the mirror, to begin to understand their reaction to us. I don’t look like I spend a lot of time in the tropics. No matter how much time I play in the sun, I still look like I’d fit in walking around Fargo, North Dakota in January. And, if you couple the fair skin with the fact that I’m pretty large and that I tend to just march on in to a place I’m visiting, it can be viewed by these folks in the service businesses as though I fit a particular profile. I don’t, and I hope never to be seen by people who actually end up communicating with me as one of “those” people. We’ll come back and discuss this species later on, since it completely answered the reaction of the people in restaurants and shops and relates directly to the not too fictitious evil Emperor I introduced you to at the beginning of the post.


Each day while we were on the island, we could see from our Villa, Coral Breeze, one of the apron areas of the airport given over to parking executive jets. It is on the Southern periphery of the new terminal area and has about two acres of parking space. Also, whenever we drove to Simpson Bay, we would pass by the second executive jet parking area at the Northern apron, just near the WINAIR Otter park (lest you think this is some kind of new wildlife attraction, let me warn you that the Twin Otter is the kind of aircraft that WINAR flies and I really wouldn’t recommend trying to get close to or to try and feed one of these, especially when it is “alive”. And remember from the earlier posts, always approach an aircraft from the front, where it can see you and won’t be startled, even if it is an Otter…). At the executive jet parking areas at the airport there were always jets. There were frequently different jets on any given day. They would just appear. There must have been some amazing advances in engine noise technology with these aircraft since I’m a really light sleeper and never heard them come or go during the night. If I had been counting, there would have been at least twenty separate executive aircraft that came and went during our low-season week long stay.

Business jets are definitely the way to travel. They have a real cachet to them and an ambience that’s just a touch difficult to find on a packed US Airways 757 or Spirit Airlines A319. And the convenience! Check-in is reasonably straightforward “Hello Charles, take us to Monte…”, baggage claim tends to be a little smoother “Your bags are waiting for you in the Limo, Sir…” and you don’t need to scour Seatguru.Com to try and figure out which is a good seat (Hint – every seat is a good one and would show up in green on Seatguru.com). The only real drawback is the astronomical cost. I haven’t been able to justify it. I priced it for the trip to Sint Maarten and felt that $30,000 to $50,000 was pushing it for the two of us. It would eat into the money we had set aside for diving. I don’t do a lot of my travel in business jets. I know who does, though. Rich people.

Rich people travel in business jets. They fly in them all the time just like you and I fly in packed United 737’s. If one of them needs to do something important, like, look at a painting they might consider buying, then they’ll rush on out to the airport, pass through “security”, and hop on to their waiting Astra or Gulfstream from Marquis-Jet or Flex-Jet and hop off to their intended destination. Unlike booking a flight on the Internet weeks in advance, and then monitoring a website named after a small plastic boat to see if the price will come down and they can get a refund, Rich People will have one of their minions “arrange” a trip with just a few hours notice. They will be whisked to the airport in the comfort of modes of travel we have never seen in order to prepare for the arduous process of walking from the limo to the aircraft itself. Yes. Rich People travel in business jets. They also travel in mega yachts. If they don’t own a yacht themselves, they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend a week on a 200 foot plus mega yacht that they probably won’t see much of during their booked time with it. Or, if they own one, they may pay tropical island municipalities millions of dollars to demolish old bridges and build bigger bridges so they can bring their mega yachts into lagoons. They probably pay municipalities to create lagoons so they can pay municipalities to rebuild bridges and dredge canals so they can bring in their mega yachts. Rich people don’t get stuck in traffic in a place like Sint Maarten. They manage to never get stuck in traffic unless it’s important that people see them doing this, like in Manhattan or Monaco. They also don’t like to see “unpleasant and dirty” things. Grime isn’t something to which they like to be exposed. Crowds, grime and small, inexpensive automobiles that almost anyone can afford to at least rent are unpleasant reminders that other, lesser people have a life too. When they come to an island paradise, they can afford not to be exposed to the things we all take for granted and eventually simply don’t see. They found a way to avoid this easily. They paid for the construction of the Hyper-Train. It’s the only logical conclusion.

Known by the acronym CASH (the Controlled Access System Hypertube), this transportation system was built using Magnetic Levitation technology and the clever use of large pneumatic tubes during the period of construction of the new Princess Juliana Airport. For those of you that were wondering why the construction delays were plaguing the new airport, and the island journalists concerns weren’t being addressed by the authorities, this is the only plausible answer. It all makes sense when you put the pieces together. Indeed, check closely for the real story on that $5 additional “improvement fee” levied recently. I think you’ll soon discover what is being “improved”. Magnetic Levitation technology is quite expensive and it’s only fitting that you and I should pay for the Rich People to travel in style. In this at least, Sint Maarten isn’t that different from home after all, is it? I guess the Rich People decided that the trip to a nice villa overlooking Orient Bay Beach, a fancy restaurant in Marigot or even the mega yacht marina in the Simpson Bay lagoon was just too ugly or would take too much time. They’d be forced to see the wreck of the Atlantis Semi-submersible which fetched up in a boatyard by the side of the airport road some time ago and now awaits its fate as a perma-submersible dive reef as soon as some dive shop can buy it and remove the corpses of the long dead tourists, who were foolish enough to pay for a ride, and sink it somewhere out to sea.

If they were forced to actually drive on those roads, the Rich People would have to wind their way (albeit slowly) past seemingly endless car rental agencies that are renting the kind of vehicles these folks would buy for their cat (the cat they didn’t like – they bought a hummer for the other one) and past, horror of horrors, large quantities of people who aren’t beautiful and probably don’t have a lot of money (Gasp! Such people exist, you know!). No. Rich People take the Hypertube. If they are hip Rich People, then they call it the “HT”. Those recent power failures that have occurred, particularly on the Dutch side, are associated with power overruns which occasionally occur when the train is “energized” and the pneumatic pump engages to give the car a shove. It’s a pity for the rest of us “topside”, but that is just the way of things in a polarized world. Don’t blame the Rich People for this. They didn’t even know the power was out. And don’t look for the entrances to the train stations either.

The entrances are reached through special access doors that only open for an Amex Centurion Card, a Visa Signature Exclusive or any business jet fractional-ownership (now there’s a timeshare for you!) card which still has a positive balance of hours on it. These Hypertube station access doors are coated with RP-CAP (Rich Person’s Cloaking Access Paint) which is why you and I can’t see them. They lead into the Hypertube terminus, a gleaming white, brightly lit station where there is somehow always a train car ready (there’s no waiting) and there is soft, welcoming music playing over the THX certified sound system. The whisking sound as the tube train doors open is reminiscent of Star Trek, which suits these folks just fine. Comfortable chairs and pastel hues greet the Rich People as they prepare (with champagne and caviar) for the short journey ahead. Once the doors close, the Tube car silently and suddenly departs the airport station and, while the occupant’s favorite music plays in the background, the interior walls of the train come alive showing scenes from the Rich Person’s favorite movies. In no time, the car arrives at the intended destination immediately adjacent whatever object the Rich Person intends to occupy next (their current choices are limited to Mega Yacht, Immense Villa, or Exclusive Restaurant but more options are being constructed as of this writing).

It’s the only way to travel on-island and I have sent requests to some of my favorite Rich People to see if they’ll take me along (perhaps as a baggage carrier) on one of their brief but comfy trips so I can give you folks more detail. Since they haven’t called me back yet, I can tell that they’re busy over in the Mediterranean or preparing to make another Billion dollars this year managing a hedge fund (That’s one of those financial “vehicles” – why do we call it a vehicle? – where the manager makes money off of buying and aggregating large pools of debt and selling the debt to other managers who aggregate those pools with other pools so those managers can do something similar. I always thought debt was debt and that it was something you couldn’t and shouldn’t make money off of and this is why I’m not an economist and won’t make a Billion dollars this year – even though it would probably qualify me for access to the Hypertube). These are busy people and they live a life that’s so foreign to mine they may as well be another species entirely.

Every day while we stayed at Coral Breeze, a large number of workers would arrive at the house next door which looked a little like a mosque (I’m thinking Turkish), complete with minaret-type architecture along the roofline. These men (they were invariably men) would park at the house next door to the mosque on the other side from our villa. This place looks suspiciously like a rural railway station. There were far too many workers to simply be renovating the house and, in fact, once they entered the structure we could barely hear a sound from it all day. The only solution to the puzzle is that the Turkish mosque next door to Coral Breeze conceals the entrance to the construction area for CASH-Tube 3, the link to Saint Barth’s (the primary reason for the $5 “improvement” fee that we’re all paying at the airport now).

Currently, Rich People love to brag about the fact that their business jet is so big, it exceeds the “minimums” at the airport on St. Barth’s (they would say this in full expectation that we wouldn’t understand what the word “minimums” meant in this context), so they land at SXM, and then they take a helicopter to their little piece of paradise. I saw a helicopter frequently working its way between Princess Juliana and the land of excessive and conspicuous consumption a mere thirty odd miles away to the East. This chopper was no rattling little Bell Jetranger either, we’re talking pure Augusta AW139 here, the rotary winged aircraft most preferred by rich people. Mostly because it has retractable landing gear so it looks all grown up like their business jets. It is also, I believe, one of the few commercially available helicopters with an auto-pilot (no mean feat in a helicopter). This can be handy when the passengers discover that the pilot isn’t sufficiently “au fait” with Rich People and they throw him out to be consumed by Sabans. When the new CASH-tube is complete, the Rich People can swipe their way into the gleaming new station complex, step on to the waiting car, and be whisked to St Bart’s while the Bollinger chills. And just remember, every time you fly out of SXM, you’re helping to make this possible. Thank you.

This post has reached its maximum length so the story will have to end here. There is more to learn, though. There are encounters with wild-eyed and armed French policemen, a bone shaking tour of the suburbs, an introduction to “The Kid” and a drink that can best be called “Droop”.

It’s all still to come in the remaining posts on my observations on the island you all know and love.

Thanks for reading this far and I hope you manage to get through with me to the end.

Until then…

James