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Michelle Higgins' piece is more recent than novelist Margaret Attwood's piece of 1986, but they both represent St. Vincent and the Grenadines as seen by the visitor. In fact I resisted St. Vincent for several years because I thought it would only be interesting to the "yachting crowd"; in other words I thought it was a place where the spaces between the islands were more interesting than the islands themselves. As a permanent resident I think more like Margaret Atwood: that St. Vincent is the standard against which tropical islands should be judged.
For Sailors: St. Vincent and the Grenadines
By MICHELLE HIGGINS
Published: January 28, 2007
St. Vincent and the Grenadines is an archipelago of 32 islands and cays at the southern end of the Caribbean. With relatively calm waters, a steady breeze and short distances between anchorages, the islands have long been a draw for the sailing and yachting crowds. But it's become more popular in the last year or so, thanks to increased marketing efforts and expansions by charter companies. Barefoot Yacht Charters, www.barefootyachts.com, one of the longest running operators in the islands, organized about 400 sailing trips last year, up 45 percent from 2005. Prices for staffed yachts vary widely depending on the size and amenities. A 47-foot, air-conditioned catamaran with a two-person crew and accommodating six guests costs about $9,660 for seven nights. A week-long charter of a 126-foot sailboat that can accommodate 12 guests will run about $64,000. Footloose Sailing Charters, www.footloosecharters.com, a 12-year-old company based in Florida, opened a new base on the island of St. Vincent in October and is offering 10 percent off five-day May charters booked by Feb. 5.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines Travel Guide
Airlines that fly to St. Vincent and the Grenadines include Caribbean Star and LIAT.
A typical seven-day itinerary setting sail from St. Vincent might include Bequia, an island with a strong seafaring history and where model boats are ubiquitous; Mustique, a private island famous for its celebrity beachcombers; and the numerous islets, coves and coral reefs of the Tobago Cays.
WHERE TO STAY If you need a night on land, the Frangipani on Bequia is a favorite hangout for the yachting crowd and overlooks the island's harbor. Doubles start at $60 a night in season (784-458-3255, www.frangipanibequia.com). On Mustique, the high-end Cotton House offers cottages starting at $700 a night in season (784-456-4777, www.cottonhouse.net). Petit St. Vincent is the only resort on the island by the same name. Rates start at $940 a night for a couple in season (800-654-9326, www.psvresort.com).
Introduction to St. Vincent and the Grenadines
By FROMMER'S
One of the major British Windward Islands, sleepy St. Vincent is just beginning to awaken to tourism. Sailors and the yachting set have long known of St. Vincent and The Grenadines, and until recently it was a well-kept vacation secret. Even if you've not been here, you may have seen its scenery in Pirates of the Caribbean, starring Johnny Depp.
You visit St. Vincent for its lush beauty, and The Grenadines for the best sailing waters in the Caribbean. Don't come for nightlife, grand cuisine, or spectacular beaches. There are some white-sand beaches near Kingstown on St. Vincent, but most of the other beaches ringing the island are black sand. The yachting crowd seems to view St. Vincent merely as a launching pad for the 64km (40-mile) string of The Grenadines, but the island still has a few attractions that make it worth exploring on its own.
Introduction to St. Vincent
By FROMMER'S
One of the major British Windward Islands, sleepy St. Vincent is just beginning to awaken to tourism. Sailors and the yachting set have long known of St. Vincent and The Grenadines, and until recently it was a well-kept vacation secret. Even if you've not been here, you may have seen its scenery in Pirates of the Caribbean, starring Johnny Depp.
You visit St. Vincent for its lush beauty, and The Grenadines for the best sailing waters in the Caribbean. Don't come for nightlife, grand cuisine, or spectacular beaches. There are some white-sand beaches near Kingstown on St. Vincent, but most of the other beaches ringing the island are black sand. The yachting crowd seems to view St. Vincent merely as a launching pad for the 64km (40-mile) string of The Grenadines, but the island still has a few attractions that make it worth exploring on its own.
HARD TO REACH, HARD TO LEAVE
By MARGARET ATWOOD; MARGARET ATWOOD'S MOST RECENT NOVEL, ''THE HANDMAID'S TALE,'' IS BEING PUBLISHED THIS MONTH BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN.
Published: January 5, 1986
I first went to St. Vincent and the Grenadines in 1973. I had never before been south of North Carolina; these were my archetypal Caribbean islands, the ones I imprinted on, and so they became the standard against which I have measured all subsequent experiences of tropical islands. I have not yet found any more wonderful.
Part of this wonderfulness consists in what they are not. They are not overdeveloped -no serried glass-and-concrete ranks of Miami Beach or Surfer's Paradise high-rises. They are not overcrowded - you won't find hordes of tourists laid out flank to flank, turning hot-dog color on the beach. These are not - for the most part - islands for people who want to stay in walled-off tourist ghettos. They are also not sleek or slick or chic or twee. They haven't been particularly reconstructed for the tourist trade, partly because the tourist trade is not dominant. Most of the people you will see on the streets roads or paths really live there.
One reason for this is that you have to work a little to get there. This is not a country served by packaged tours or direct flights: you can't just roll off the jumbo jet, roast yourself by the sea, drink a lot of pina coladas and roll back onto the jumbo jet for sluggish re-entry. More is expected of you, which is why you will rarely see a truly overweight tourist in these regions, and why the people you bump into in beach bars will tend to be a shade more fit, or more adventurous, or even more eccentric, than most. There were two Frenchmen going by double windsurfer from Trinidad, up the islands, to Florida, who stopped overnight in Bequia to eat, rest and consult their map, which was plastic-sealed on the underside of their windsurfer; there was the man who built a single-hand sailing boat in Bequia, sailed around the world in it, and ended up in Bequia two years later . . . and, incidentally, if some youngish man with a yacht tells you he's in real estate in Miami, he probably isn't. Half the fun at social gatherings in these islands is trying to figure out what the other outlanders are really doing there.
The usual route to St. Vincent and the Grenadines from the north goes through Barbados, where you may find you have to overnight, due to cunningly arranged air schedules. From there you take the LIAT flight to St. Vincent. LIAT stands for Leeward Islands Air Transport, but local wit has it as Luggage in Another Terminal. Certainly things can be a little casual; we once waited on the tarmac while they removed part of the engine of our plane and did something to it that looked suspiciously like winding it up. But the pilots are all aces, the flight attendants - who, the last time we looked, were wearing hot-pink satin outfits and Rasta beads - are charming and imperturbable, the flight, it's a daytime one, is spectacular, and the steep landing on St. Vincent is not as foolhardy as it feels the first time you do it.
If you want to spend some time on St. Vincent before going on to the remoter islands, you have various choices. You could stay right in Kingstown, the principal (and capital) town; if you want an old-time but not luxurious hotel experience, try the Heron. Or you could stay a little farther from the center, at the Mariners' Inn, which offers seashore, or farther out still at one of several pricier but still modestly sized resort hotels. You could have a look at the Parliament buildings (St. Vincent is a former British colony, and retains the parliamentary system, with 13 seats). There is still a largely oral culture, and the spoken word is very important. Political speeches are, among other things, a form of popular entertainment, and people will turn on their radios or hasten to the scene if a noted speaker is doing his stuff. A politician is judged partly by how long he can speak - three hours is pretty good - and how many jokes he can make at the expense of the opposition, and a good Vincentian harangue is a work of art, replete with wit, allusion and flowers of rhetoric.
Or you can go to the market, on Bay Street; or you can visit the extensive and beautiful Botanic Gardens, started in 1765 and among the oldest ones in the New World, with breadfruit trees introduced by Captain Bligh. Right in the Botanic Gardens is the tiny but fascinating National Museum, which houses pre-Columbian artifacts. The museum is the brainchild of Dr. Earle Kirby, who is also its curator, and visitors lucky enough to find him there can find out just about anything there is to know about the history of St. Vincent. On the other hand, he may be off digging artifacts out of a bog, or watching the elusive and endangered St. Vincent parrot (he is also a naturalist) and if you are a bird watcher he might be able to give you some pointers. Or, if you're in good shape, you can rent a jeep, pack a picnic lunch and go to the Soufriere, the volcano that blew up in 1979, something it does at about 80-year intervals. We climbed it before the eruption, but after it had begun to smolder, and had sore hamstrings for a week, but the experience was well worth it.
When it's time to move on to the Grenadines, there are again several choices. To get to Bequia, the largest and most northerly island in the chain, you can make the classic trip on the Friendship Rose, a large, chunky motorized sailboat that does a cargo-and-passenger trip every day except Sunday. Or -some days - you can take a thing called the roll-off roll-on, so called because it can take cars, although you won't see many of those. Or you can charter a boat. A friend of mine used to go back and forth in a twin-engine motorboat, but this is not recommended, as she found out when both of her motors conked out in the middle of the channel, noted for its choppy tidal currents.
St. Vincent is lush, mountainous and volcanic, Bequia flatter and drier. This is a hiker's paradise: hardly any cars and much variety of terrain, from the palm-fringed shores and truly deserted beaches to the somewhat wild avocado plantations, the rocky but manageable cliffs around Shark Bay and the highland plateaus, which were settled by Scots in the 18th century, some of whose descendants are still there. People are friendly but not intrusive, and they will expect you to be the same. Bequia is an island of seafaring men, who do quite well by island standards and are self-reliant and proud of it. The harbor at Port Elizabeth is one of the safest and best harbors in the Caribbean, and you will usually see sailboats from all parts of the world at anchor there, being repainted or refurbished or just resting up. If you want to meet the sailors, hang out at the small but charming Frangipani Hotel, especially on barbecue night; the Frangi specializes in homemade local-ingredient cuisine, and is one of the best places to eat in these parts, as the boat people know. Don't miss the key lime pie.
If you want to see the other Grenadines, the best way is to charter a boat. In fact for most of them it's the only way, unless you have a boat of your own. You could make a day trip to something nearby - Battowia or Baliceaux, or Isle a Quatre, all of which will raise visions of Treasure Island, so admirably suited do they seem for pirates. Then there's Mustique, hangout of Princess Margaret, which is a different story. I went there once but don't remember much about it, as we made the mistake of going in a motor launch instead of a sailboat, and the big item for me was not the scenery but whether or not I was going to keep my breakfast down. (I did; others didn't.) Should you wish to go all the way down to Union Island or Petit St. Vincent, you should overnight in the Tobago Keys, a cluster of tiny uninhabited wonders that, unlike most things on tourist brochures, really do look that perfect when you actually get there. The next day you can go on to Union Island, where there is a real French restaurant in the Anchorage Hotel, or to Petit St. Vincent, which is - all of it - a private resort, with discreet but well-equipped individual cottages along the shore. If you've been on a boat for a while, you may want to spend a night there in hot-water luxury. There's even breakfast room sevice, which you get by putting a note in your individual mailbox: the ultimate luxury is no telephones.
Across from Petit St. Vincent is Petit Martinique, which is geographically part of the Grenadines but politically part of Grenada. The people there are as individualistic and resourceful as Newfoundlanders and, like the Bequians, are noted sailors. As there is no electricity on the island, they build their boats by hand. If you know someone who knows someone, this is a great island to visit. If not, you may find you attract suspicion. The story goes that when the previous Grenadian Government tried to impose some regulation on the islanders - who are used to managing their own affairs - by sending a couple of soldiers, no one would rent them a room or sell them anything to eat, so they had to stroll about on the beach until picked up.
When you want to go somewhere else, you can either do it by boat, or make use of the airport on Union Island, which will get you somewhere else, from where you can get somewhere else. By that time you'll probably be so relaxed that the actual timetable won't worry you a lot.
But beware of these islands. Fifteen years ago, a friend of mine - she of the twin-engine motorboat - was going around the world for the second time. She stopped over in Bequia, and has been there ever since. On the spot, on the move in an island chain Accommodations The Heron in Kingstown, St. Vincent, close to the anchorage and the market, has 15 rooms, each with private bath. The veranda at the rear, overlooking a tropical garden, is a favorite meeting place. Meals are served family-style. Rates are $54 a day for two, including breakfast and dinner. Outside the capital, on Villa Beach, the Mariners' Inn overlooks a channel and across to Young Island. It has 21 rooms and charges from $70 to $80 for two, with breakfast and dinner. The Grand View Beach on Villa Point is a former estate house with 12 rooms and it has a pool and squash court. The daily rates for two are $94, or $118 with breakfast and dinner.
On Bequia, the Frangipani, on Port Elizabeth Beach, has 12 rooms and charges from $30 to $60 a day for a double room. The hotel, owned by the Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, James (Son) Mitchell, is a favorite gathering place for island politicians and artists, and the Thursday evening barbecues held on the patio and in the garden are a major social event. The barbecues, which include entertainment, cost about $35 a person. Queen Elizabeth II had tea in the Frangipani's garden during her visit to the Caribbean last fall.
The quieter Friendship Bay Hotel on Bequia is a small resort with 27 rooms, a pool and beach bar. It charges $150 a day for two, including breakfast and dinner. The Sunny Caribbee has cottages at $60 for two, or $100 with breakfast and dinner. Rooms in its main building are $30, and $70 with breakfast and dinner. There's a beach, and an anchorage nearby.
Petit St. Vincent, a resort occupying an entire island of the same name, has 22 villas, all with views of the sea. The rate of $420 a day for two includes all meals. Island Hopping Among the interisland boats is the Friendship Rose, which sails from St. Vincent to Bequia every day except Sunday. The trip takes about an hour and a half and the one-way fare is about $2.50. The Grenadines Star, known as the roll-on, roll-off because it takes cars, sails to Bequia about three times a week and also makes weekly visits to Cannouan, Mayreau and Union. Among the one-way fares from St. Vincent: Cannouan, $5; Union, $7.50. Boat Charters Visitors can arrange a bareboat or crewed charter with Caribbean Sailing Yachts, which has a marina and hotel, the C.S.Y. Marina, in Kingstown, St. Vincent. Trips are arranged around the Grenadines and beyond, as far as the United States Virgin Islands. A boat with crew and all provisions costs about $132 a day for two people. Rooms at the hotel cost $50 a day for two. Reservations for rooms and boats can be made through Anchor Travel (Post Office Box 24, 29 Engle Street, Tenafly, N.J. 07670; 201-569-5464). Information Information is available from the St. Vincent and the Grenadines tourism representative (40 East 49th Street, New York, N.Y. 10017; 212-752-8660) and the Caribbean Tourism Association (20 East 46th Street, New York, N.Y. 10017; 212-682-0435).
For Sailors: St. Vincent and the Grenadines
By MICHELLE HIGGINS
Published: January 28, 2007
St. Vincent and the Grenadines is an archipelago of 32 islands and cays at the southern end of the Caribbean. With relatively calm waters, a steady breeze and short distances between anchorages, the islands have long been a draw for the sailing and yachting crowds. But it's become more popular in the last year or so, thanks to increased marketing efforts and expansions by charter companies. Barefoot Yacht Charters, www.barefootyachts.com, one of the longest running operators in the islands, organized about 400 sailing trips last year, up 45 percent from 2005. Prices for staffed yachts vary widely depending on the size and amenities. A 47-foot, air-conditioned catamaran with a two-person crew and accommodating six guests costs about $9,660 for seven nights. A week-long charter of a 126-foot sailboat that can accommodate 12 guests will run about $64,000. Footloose Sailing Charters, www.footloosecharters.com, a 12-year-old company based in Florida, opened a new base on the island of St. Vincent in October and is offering 10 percent off five-day May charters booked by Feb. 5.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines Travel Guide
Airlines that fly to St. Vincent and the Grenadines include Caribbean Star and LIAT.
A typical seven-day itinerary setting sail from St. Vincent might include Bequia, an island with a strong seafaring history and where model boats are ubiquitous; Mustique, a private island famous for its celebrity beachcombers; and the numerous islets, coves and coral reefs of the Tobago Cays.
WHERE TO STAY If you need a night on land, the Frangipani on Bequia is a favorite hangout for the yachting crowd and overlooks the island's harbor. Doubles start at $60 a night in season (784-458-3255, www.frangipanibequia.com). On Mustique, the high-end Cotton House offers cottages starting at $700 a night in season (784-456-4777, www.cottonhouse.net). Petit St. Vincent is the only resort on the island by the same name. Rates start at $940 a night for a couple in season (800-654-9326, www.psvresort.com).
Introduction to St. Vincent and the Grenadines
By FROMMER'S
One of the major British Windward Islands, sleepy St. Vincent is just beginning to awaken to tourism. Sailors and the yachting set have long known of St. Vincent and The Grenadines, and until recently it was a well-kept vacation secret. Even if you've not been here, you may have seen its scenery in Pirates of the Caribbean, starring Johnny Depp.
You visit St. Vincent for its lush beauty, and The Grenadines for the best sailing waters in the Caribbean. Don't come for nightlife, grand cuisine, or spectacular beaches. There are some white-sand beaches near Kingstown on St. Vincent, but most of the other beaches ringing the island are black sand. The yachting crowd seems to view St. Vincent merely as a launching pad for the 64km (40-mile) string of The Grenadines, but the island still has a few attractions that make it worth exploring on its own.
Introduction to St. Vincent
By FROMMER'S
One of the major British Windward Islands, sleepy St. Vincent is just beginning to awaken to tourism. Sailors and the yachting set have long known of St. Vincent and The Grenadines, and until recently it was a well-kept vacation secret. Even if you've not been here, you may have seen its scenery in Pirates of the Caribbean, starring Johnny Depp.
You visit St. Vincent for its lush beauty, and The Grenadines for the best sailing waters in the Caribbean. Don't come for nightlife, grand cuisine, or spectacular beaches. There are some white-sand beaches near Kingstown on St. Vincent, but most of the other beaches ringing the island are black sand. The yachting crowd seems to view St. Vincent merely as a launching pad for the 64km (40-mile) string of The Grenadines, but the island still has a few attractions that make it worth exploring on its own.
HARD TO REACH, HARD TO LEAVE
By MARGARET ATWOOD; MARGARET ATWOOD'S MOST RECENT NOVEL, ''THE HANDMAID'S TALE,'' IS BEING PUBLISHED THIS MONTH BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN.
Published: January 5, 1986
I first went to St. Vincent and the Grenadines in 1973. I had never before been south of North Carolina; these were my archetypal Caribbean islands, the ones I imprinted on, and so they became the standard against which I have measured all subsequent experiences of tropical islands. I have not yet found any more wonderful.
Part of this wonderfulness consists in what they are not. They are not overdeveloped -no serried glass-and-concrete ranks of Miami Beach or Surfer's Paradise high-rises. They are not overcrowded - you won't find hordes of tourists laid out flank to flank, turning hot-dog color on the beach. These are not - for the most part - islands for people who want to stay in walled-off tourist ghettos. They are also not sleek or slick or chic or twee. They haven't been particularly reconstructed for the tourist trade, partly because the tourist trade is not dominant. Most of the people you will see on the streets roads or paths really live there.
One reason for this is that you have to work a little to get there. This is not a country served by packaged tours or direct flights: you can't just roll off the jumbo jet, roast yourself by the sea, drink a lot of pina coladas and roll back onto the jumbo jet for sluggish re-entry. More is expected of you, which is why you will rarely see a truly overweight tourist in these regions, and why the people you bump into in beach bars will tend to be a shade more fit, or more adventurous, or even more eccentric, than most. There were two Frenchmen going by double windsurfer from Trinidad, up the islands, to Florida, who stopped overnight in Bequia to eat, rest and consult their map, which was plastic-sealed on the underside of their windsurfer; there was the man who built a single-hand sailing boat in Bequia, sailed around the world in it, and ended up in Bequia two years later . . . and, incidentally, if some youngish man with a yacht tells you he's in real estate in Miami, he probably isn't. Half the fun at social gatherings in these islands is trying to figure out what the other outlanders are really doing there.
The usual route to St. Vincent and the Grenadines from the north goes through Barbados, where you may find you have to overnight, due to cunningly arranged air schedules. From there you take the LIAT flight to St. Vincent. LIAT stands for Leeward Islands Air Transport, but local wit has it as Luggage in Another Terminal. Certainly things can be a little casual; we once waited on the tarmac while they removed part of the engine of our plane and did something to it that looked suspiciously like winding it up. But the pilots are all aces, the flight attendants - who, the last time we looked, were wearing hot-pink satin outfits and Rasta beads - are charming and imperturbable, the flight, it's a daytime one, is spectacular, and the steep landing on St. Vincent is not as foolhardy as it feels the first time you do it.
If you want to spend some time on St. Vincent before going on to the remoter islands, you have various choices. You could stay right in Kingstown, the principal (and capital) town; if you want an old-time but not luxurious hotel experience, try the Heron. Or you could stay a little farther from the center, at the Mariners' Inn, which offers seashore, or farther out still at one of several pricier but still modestly sized resort hotels. You could have a look at the Parliament buildings (St. Vincent is a former British colony, and retains the parliamentary system, with 13 seats). There is still a largely oral culture, and the spoken word is very important. Political speeches are, among other things, a form of popular entertainment, and people will turn on their radios or hasten to the scene if a noted speaker is doing his stuff. A politician is judged partly by how long he can speak - three hours is pretty good - and how many jokes he can make at the expense of the opposition, and a good Vincentian harangue is a work of art, replete with wit, allusion and flowers of rhetoric.
Or you can go to the market, on Bay Street; or you can visit the extensive and beautiful Botanic Gardens, started in 1765 and among the oldest ones in the New World, with breadfruit trees introduced by Captain Bligh. Right in the Botanic Gardens is the tiny but fascinating National Museum, which houses pre-Columbian artifacts. The museum is the brainchild of Dr. Earle Kirby, who is also its curator, and visitors lucky enough to find him there can find out just about anything there is to know about the history of St. Vincent. On the other hand, he may be off digging artifacts out of a bog, or watching the elusive and endangered St. Vincent parrot (he is also a naturalist) and if you are a bird watcher he might be able to give you some pointers. Or, if you're in good shape, you can rent a jeep, pack a picnic lunch and go to the Soufriere, the volcano that blew up in 1979, something it does at about 80-year intervals. We climbed it before the eruption, but after it had begun to smolder, and had sore hamstrings for a week, but the experience was well worth it.
When it's time to move on to the Grenadines, there are again several choices. To get to Bequia, the largest and most northerly island in the chain, you can make the classic trip on the Friendship Rose, a large, chunky motorized sailboat that does a cargo-and-passenger trip every day except Sunday. Or -some days - you can take a thing called the roll-off roll-on, so called because it can take cars, although you won't see many of those. Or you can charter a boat. A friend of mine used to go back and forth in a twin-engine motorboat, but this is not recommended, as she found out when both of her motors conked out in the middle of the channel, noted for its choppy tidal currents.
St. Vincent is lush, mountainous and volcanic, Bequia flatter and drier. This is a hiker's paradise: hardly any cars and much variety of terrain, from the palm-fringed shores and truly deserted beaches to the somewhat wild avocado plantations, the rocky but manageable cliffs around Shark Bay and the highland plateaus, which were settled by Scots in the 18th century, some of whose descendants are still there. People are friendly but not intrusive, and they will expect you to be the same. Bequia is an island of seafaring men, who do quite well by island standards and are self-reliant and proud of it. The harbor at Port Elizabeth is one of the safest and best harbors in the Caribbean, and you will usually see sailboats from all parts of the world at anchor there, being repainted or refurbished or just resting up. If you want to meet the sailors, hang out at the small but charming Frangipani Hotel, especially on barbecue night; the Frangi specializes in homemade local-ingredient cuisine, and is one of the best places to eat in these parts, as the boat people know. Don't miss the key lime pie.
If you want to see the other Grenadines, the best way is to charter a boat. In fact for most of them it's the only way, unless you have a boat of your own. You could make a day trip to something nearby - Battowia or Baliceaux, or Isle a Quatre, all of which will raise visions of Treasure Island, so admirably suited do they seem for pirates. Then there's Mustique, hangout of Princess Margaret, which is a different story. I went there once but don't remember much about it, as we made the mistake of going in a motor launch instead of a sailboat, and the big item for me was not the scenery but whether or not I was going to keep my breakfast down. (I did; others didn't.) Should you wish to go all the way down to Union Island or Petit St. Vincent, you should overnight in the Tobago Keys, a cluster of tiny uninhabited wonders that, unlike most things on tourist brochures, really do look that perfect when you actually get there. The next day you can go on to Union Island, where there is a real French restaurant in the Anchorage Hotel, or to Petit St. Vincent, which is - all of it - a private resort, with discreet but well-equipped individual cottages along the shore. If you've been on a boat for a while, you may want to spend a night there in hot-water luxury. There's even breakfast room sevice, which you get by putting a note in your individual mailbox: the ultimate luxury is no telephones.
Across from Petit St. Vincent is Petit Martinique, which is geographically part of the Grenadines but politically part of Grenada. The people there are as individualistic and resourceful as Newfoundlanders and, like the Bequians, are noted sailors. As there is no electricity on the island, they build their boats by hand. If you know someone who knows someone, this is a great island to visit. If not, you may find you attract suspicion. The story goes that when the previous Grenadian Government tried to impose some regulation on the islanders - who are used to managing their own affairs - by sending a couple of soldiers, no one would rent them a room or sell them anything to eat, so they had to stroll about on the beach until picked up.
When you want to go somewhere else, you can either do it by boat, or make use of the airport on Union Island, which will get you somewhere else, from where you can get somewhere else. By that time you'll probably be so relaxed that the actual timetable won't worry you a lot.
But beware of these islands. Fifteen years ago, a friend of mine - she of the twin-engine motorboat - was going around the world for the second time. She stopped over in Bequia, and has been there ever since. On the spot, on the move in an island chain Accommodations The Heron in Kingstown, St. Vincent, close to the anchorage and the market, has 15 rooms, each with private bath. The veranda at the rear, overlooking a tropical garden, is a favorite meeting place. Meals are served family-style. Rates are $54 a day for two, including breakfast and dinner. Outside the capital, on Villa Beach, the Mariners' Inn overlooks a channel and across to Young Island. It has 21 rooms and charges from $70 to $80 for two, with breakfast and dinner. The Grand View Beach on Villa Point is a former estate house with 12 rooms and it has a pool and squash court. The daily rates for two are $94, or $118 with breakfast and dinner.
On Bequia, the Frangipani, on Port Elizabeth Beach, has 12 rooms and charges from $30 to $60 a day for a double room. The hotel, owned by the Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, James (Son) Mitchell, is a favorite gathering place for island politicians and artists, and the Thursday evening barbecues held on the patio and in the garden are a major social event. The barbecues, which include entertainment, cost about $35 a person. Queen Elizabeth II had tea in the Frangipani's garden during her visit to the Caribbean last fall.
The quieter Friendship Bay Hotel on Bequia is a small resort with 27 rooms, a pool and beach bar. It charges $150 a day for two, including breakfast and dinner. The Sunny Caribbee has cottages at $60 for two, or $100 with breakfast and dinner. Rooms in its main building are $30, and $70 with breakfast and dinner. There's a beach, and an anchorage nearby.
Petit St. Vincent, a resort occupying an entire island of the same name, has 22 villas, all with views of the sea. The rate of $420 a day for two includes all meals. Island Hopping Among the interisland boats is the Friendship Rose, which sails from St. Vincent to Bequia every day except Sunday. The trip takes about an hour and a half and the one-way fare is about $2.50. The Grenadines Star, known as the roll-on, roll-off because it takes cars, sails to Bequia about three times a week and also makes weekly visits to Cannouan, Mayreau and Union. Among the one-way fares from St. Vincent: Cannouan, $5; Union, $7.50. Boat Charters Visitors can arrange a bareboat or crewed charter with Caribbean Sailing Yachts, which has a marina and hotel, the C.S.Y. Marina, in Kingstown, St. Vincent. Trips are arranged around the Grenadines and beyond, as far as the United States Virgin Islands. A boat with crew and all provisions costs about $132 a day for two people. Rooms at the hotel cost $50 a day for two. Reservations for rooms and boats can be made through Anchor Travel (Post Office Box 24, 29 Engle Street, Tenafly, N.J. 07670; 201-569-5464). Information Information is available from the St. Vincent and the Grenadines tourism representative (40 East 49th Street, New York, N.Y. 10017; 212-752-8660) and the Caribbean Tourism Association (20 East 46th Street, New York, N.Y. 10017; 212-682-0435).
posted by Karl Eklund at 6:18 PM
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