St Martin

St Martin

I have not long returned from a fortnight in St Martin. A friend from my days at Bristol university, Kay, found me via the internet and invited me for a holiday at her house there. It was good to meet her again, after almost 50 years, and also to have a break from the winter in Mollans. It's not that often that I get the chance to swim in a warm sea and acquire a tan in February.

I found St Martin to be a beautiful island but strange in many ways. Not least of its many quirks is that despite being very small it is split into two distinct territories. About two thirds of the island is still officially part of France; the other third is an autonomous region within the Netherlands. Moreover, the official currency for the Dutch area is still the guilder, which exists only as a virtual currency. Dutch functionaries apparently have their salaries denominated in guilders but actually receive American dollars at a fixed exchange rate between the guilder and the dollar. So the physical currency is the American dollar.

The island has little history and what there is is recent, dating from European occupation. Arawak indians from South America landed on the island from time to time but it appears to have been uninhabited when Europeans arrived to fight over it. Ownership switched between the usual suspects, the English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and French before ending up in the hands of the last two. What they fought for, apart from their natural inclination in past centuries to fight one another anyway, was salt. St Martin had, and still has, large expanses of salt lagoons.

But possibly the most defining characteristic of St Martin is that it has no natural fresh water supply. Clean water is provided nowadays by means of desalination plant and the houses mostly have roofs designed to enable rain water to be collected and used as a secondary supply. This probably explains why the island was rarely inhabited until European colonisation and also explains something else I found strange: the striking lack of cultivation. I saw no fields of crops or garden vegetable plots and most plants in gardens seemed to be trees or bushes. Irrigation by desalinated water is clearly uneconomic resulting, although there was some grazing by goats and cattle, in almost all food apart from fish being imported.

Despite this handicap, St Martin is a genuinely beautiful island. It's highest point is only 455 metres but it is far from flat, unlike it's near neighbour Anguilla; hills abound. Its most appealing features are the many spacious beaches, most fringed by restaurants and cafés serving quality meals. The fish in particular is excellent. There are also many restaurants offering creole dishes, which is what passes for “native” cuisine. Whether this is accurate or a delusion is a matter for debate as most of the indigenous population would seem to have its origins in the slave trade under colonisation. However beaches and food are what attracts the tourists, primarily from North America, who underpin its economy. The fact that the island is duty free no doubt helps too. And St Martin is famous also for Juliana Airport, the runway of which is no more than 50 metres from a beach on which sunbathers seem to risk getting a haircut from the wheels of landing jets.

Apart from the beaches and restaurants there is not a great deal to occupy tourists. There is a small but interesting museum in Philipsburg, a butterfly farm by the Le Galion beach and abundant bird life. The pelican is the islands national icon; I saw egrets, many varieties of sea birds and others I could not name but what particularly caught my eye were the humming birds, which seemed completely unafraid by my presence.

My friend Kay's beautifully designed house overlooks the Grand Case bay with what must be one of the best views on the island. It was a real pleasure to have a morning coffee and evening G&T (Kay makes a superb one) whilst admiring the view below. So I returned having renewed acquaintance with a good friend, eaten some very good meals, bathed on some spectacular beaches and with a tan. Moreover, I returned in time to witness the early days of spring here in Mollans. To compensate for a very noticeable drop in temperature I can start on my gardening.