Frommer on St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Arthur Frommer
Special to the Star
For the past week, I’ve vacationed in an unusual part of the Caribbean, shuttling among some of the 32 islands of that nation with a cumbersome name, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. This is in the southeastern Caribbean, about as far down as you can get in these tropical seas before you hit the coast of Venezuela. It’s an area that’s little known to many Americans, a place where you feel that you’ve gone back in time by about a century or two, a group of islands so sparsely populated that some boast a population of only 200 to 300 people apiece. The island where I spent most of my time - Bequia - has 5,000 residents, and once you leave its main city of Port Elizabeth, you see very few other residents.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines is the usual model for that hoary cliche “the Caribbean as it used to be.” It has no high-rise hotels, no international airport, no casinos, no giant modern shopping malls, and is visited by only an occasional cruise ship or two. Its main touristic activities are yachting and deep-sea diving, and to those pastimes you can add long, lazy afternoons on deserted beaches, drinks at makeshift wooden bars erected on an otherwise-deserted beach, lots of snorkeling, hiking to visit remarkable natural attractions and an extraordinary turtle sanctuary (on Bequia) where an idealistic former skin-diving fisherman devotes his life nowadays to protecting the turtle population from extinction.
All this may change about two years from now. An international airport capable of receiving large jets is now in construction on the main island of St. Vincent, and is predicted to become operational sometime in 2014. That will permit people to fly directly to St. Vincent from major international cities. Currently, you get to St. Vincent by boarding a small plane from either Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad, St. Lucia or a few other places. I flew to St. Vincent from Barbados on one of those small planes, spent a few days on that “big” island (100,000 people), then took a ferry from St. Vincent to Bequia. I could have flown directly from Barbados to several other islands of the Grenadines, like to Union Island, Mustique and several others.
Mustique is perhaps the best-known of the Grenadines to readers of U.S. tabloids who follow the antics of the millionaires and billionaires who constitute most of Mustique’s tourist crowd (Mustique has a population of 500 people, most of whom are servants at the 70 or so magnificent villas that make up all the accommodations of this ritzy place, other than the 19 rooms of its sole hotel, the Cotton House ($1,500 a night for an average room in high season). Mustique also was the vacation home of the late Princess Margaret of Great Britain, and her presence here was dutifully noted in the world’s press. Mustique is truly expensive, and it’s a pity that its sky-high costs have stoked the incorrect assumption that the rest of St. Vincent and the Grenadines are just as costly. They aren’t, and on both St. Vincent and many of the Grenadines (other than Mustique), you can find inexpensive bed-and-breakfasts and guesthouses, small tourist hotels and modest villas that can be rented for very reasonable per-person costs if four or more people occupy a villa.
Anyway, if you’re looking for a different kind of Caribbean vacation - one that resembles the Caribbean of old - you’ll want to buy a ticket on American Airlines or JetBlue to Barbados, and then a ticket on either Liat Airlines or SVG Airlines to either St. Vincent or one of the islands of the Grenadines. I can guarantee you it will be a singular experience.
Arthur Frommer is the pioneering founder of the Frommer’s Travel Guide book series. Order your copies of Frommer tour guides at www.starstore.ca. © 2012 by Arthur Frommer Distributed by King Features Syndicate
http://www.thestar.com/travel/article/1148043--caribbean-travel-a-taste-of-old-times-in-lovely-st-vincent
Special to the Star
For the past week, I’ve vacationed in an unusual part of the Caribbean, shuttling among some of the 32 islands of that nation with a cumbersome name, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. This is in the southeastern Caribbean, about as far down as you can get in these tropical seas before you hit the coast of Venezuela. It’s an area that’s little known to many Americans, a place where you feel that you’ve gone back in time by about a century or two, a group of islands so sparsely populated that some boast a population of only 200 to 300 people apiece. The island where I spent most of my time - Bequia - has 5,000 residents, and once you leave its main city of Port Elizabeth, you see very few other residents.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines is the usual model for that hoary cliche “the Caribbean as it used to be.” It has no high-rise hotels, no international airport, no casinos, no giant modern shopping malls, and is visited by only an occasional cruise ship or two. Its main touristic activities are yachting and deep-sea diving, and to those pastimes you can add long, lazy afternoons on deserted beaches, drinks at makeshift wooden bars erected on an otherwise-deserted beach, lots of snorkeling, hiking to visit remarkable natural attractions and an extraordinary turtle sanctuary (on Bequia) where an idealistic former skin-diving fisherman devotes his life nowadays to protecting the turtle population from extinction.
All this may change about two years from now. An international airport capable of receiving large jets is now in construction on the main island of St. Vincent, and is predicted to become operational sometime in 2014. That will permit people to fly directly to St. Vincent from major international cities. Currently, you get to St. Vincent by boarding a small plane from either Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad, St. Lucia or a few other places. I flew to St. Vincent from Barbados on one of those small planes, spent a few days on that “big” island (100,000 people), then took a ferry from St. Vincent to Bequia. I could have flown directly from Barbados to several other islands of the Grenadines, like to Union Island, Mustique and several others.
Mustique is perhaps the best-known of the Grenadines to readers of U.S. tabloids who follow the antics of the millionaires and billionaires who constitute most of Mustique’s tourist crowd (Mustique has a population of 500 people, most of whom are servants at the 70 or so magnificent villas that make up all the accommodations of this ritzy place, other than the 19 rooms of its sole hotel, the Cotton House ($1,500 a night for an average room in high season). Mustique also was the vacation home of the late Princess Margaret of Great Britain, and her presence here was dutifully noted in the world’s press. Mustique is truly expensive, and it’s a pity that its sky-high costs have stoked the incorrect assumption that the rest of St. Vincent and the Grenadines are just as costly. They aren’t, and on both St. Vincent and many of the Grenadines (other than Mustique), you can find inexpensive bed-and-breakfasts and guesthouses, small tourist hotels and modest villas that can be rented for very reasonable per-person costs if four or more people occupy a villa.
Anyway, if you’re looking for a different kind of Caribbean vacation - one that resembles the Caribbean of old - you’ll want to buy a ticket on American Airlines or JetBlue to Barbados, and then a ticket on either Liat Airlines or SVG Airlines to either St. Vincent or one of the islands of the Grenadines. I can guarantee you it will be a singular experience.
Arthur Frommer is the pioneering founder of the Frommer’s Travel Guide book series. Order your copies of Frommer tour guides at www.starstore.ca. © 2012 by Arthur Frommer Distributed by King Features Syndicate
http://www.thestar.com/travel/article/1148043--caribbean-travel-a-taste-of-old-times-in-lovely-st-vincent
posted by Karl Eklund at 8:20 PM
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