nawl

Welcome to paradise.

(Comparing to a map, it appears that St. John is in the foreground, and the west end of Tortola is in the background.)

Here, "British" means that they drive on the left and speak English, being next to the US Virgin Islands means that the portion sizes, measurements, voltage, currency, and cars are American.

The taxi ride across the island was fairly hilarious. From one end to the other took more than an hour, even though the island is maybe ten miles long, and included slowing down to pass various chickens, goats, and cows hanging out on the road, and stopping to pick up and drop off two different groups of people.

The afternoon radio programming appeared to consist entirely of the DJ wishing good afternoon to every person on the island, interspersed with the occasional Caribbean-style Christmas song. "To Desiree and Natalia and Cyrus, a good afternoon to you. And a good afternoon to M. Johnson, and your husband too, and to..." When he got done with people, he started wishing good afternoon to all the islands: "To St. Croix and St. Kitts and St. John, good afternoon, welcome aboard, merry Christmas. To Puerto Rico, como estas usted?"

Greetings in general seemed to be extended affairs. Any sort of interaction is preceded with a "good afternoon" and an extended discussion of how the people involved are feeling today. I was amused to discover that this was actually true and not merely the kind of useless "cultural" advice that guidebooks have the tendency to dispense.

Some sort of large sea bird--a brown pelican, my sister has informed me--sits around in the harbors and in the breaking waves along the beaches and goes diving for fish. They hover about twenty feet above the water, and then suddenly *zoom* dive down in a great splash, and resurface a few seconds later, gulping.

Along the coast it they're replanting mangroves, little seedlings in tubes thrust unevenly into the shallow water.

We spent two days looking at boats. This, along with Croatia, is apparently the place to a. charter a sailboat, or b. buy a used sailboat fresh out of charter. Unfortunately for Jan, this is the best time of the year to be sailing, and therefore the worst to be buying a boat. According to one guy we met over breakfast, the best time to pick up a boat for cheap is just before hurricane season, when the dock owners start repossessing boats whose owners have defaulted on payments.

On his recommendation, we traipse over to the nearby boat yard one morning, find two rough-looking men puzzling over linkages in a workshop. "Is James around?" They look us over suspiciously. "He's not in yet. Why?" "I'm looking to buy a boat." "You want to buy a boat, eh? Have you tried lying down until the feeling passes?" They don't like us, it's clear that we're foolhardy young things with too much money. "If you want to know what owning a boat is like, I suggest you go take a cold shower and rip up thousand dollar bills as fast as you can."

There are boats available in the yard--Swedish Gladys, who we had looked at the day before, and "the Tahiti ketch", who's looking for a carpenter with $30,000 to love her--boats with soul, unlike the pristine mass-produced Jeanneau Jan ultimately ends up making an offer on, but too big of projects for someone who's looking for "one of those sweet sail-away deals".

(See Jan's account of boat shopping for boat details.)

That evening we get drunk with Yuri, one of the guys from the yard, and he softens up. We may be young and rich ("You're like the couple from Numb3rs,", he tells us), but we talk about math and Wikipedia and sailing and blogs, and he tells about sailing tall ships along the west coast and falling in love with the boat he's been fixing for years.

The boat broker told us that most tourists come to charter boats, and pretty much leave as soon as they arrive, so for a tourist attraction the island itself is largely free of tourist infrastructure. Hotels are small and funky and car rentals are minimal. Road Town, which the guidebook describes as "the only settlement truly worthy of the description 'town'", is about four roads wide. We're staying in the Jolly Roger Inn, (see "small" and "funky" above, and "expensive", below) just past West End, which, says the tourist magazine, was first settled by pirates. Of course it's flying a skull and crossbones.

Everything is hideously expensive. Restaurant menus make me cry. It's worse than Norway. We discovered why no prices were displayed in the supermarket when we bought cheese, crackers, and a bottle of sunscreen, and the total was $20. I had planned to buy some sandals here, but am refusing on account that it goes against my principles to pay $50 for a pair of flip-flops. The only thing that's cheap here is booze. (Every boat we toured had an extensive liquor cabinet.)

There is no public transportation to speak of, so we got around by walking, hitchhiking, begging rides, and taxis when hitchhiking didn't work. The combination of insane speeding, two-lane roads, and hitchhikers makes traffic control rather scary: cars picking up hitchhikers screech to a halt in the middle of the road, stopping all traffic that direction, while the hitchhiker has to cross to get in the passenger door of a left-driver vehicle driving on the left side of the road.

But it is paradise. The sky is blue, filled with little fluffy clouds, the weather is warm day and night, the breeze refreshing, the seas unendingly turquoise, the horizon dotted with green peaks of nearby islands to explore, and when we walked twenty minutes on a dirt road through the jungle to Smuggler's Cove at sunset, the immaculate white sand beach was perfectly empty, the only sounds the cries of birds and cicadas, the wind in the trees, and the waves lapping gently against the shore.

(Actually, the beach was only empty until two cute teenage girls in bikinis showed up and started frolicking in the waves, and there was visible settlement in the form of a dilapidated bar whose hand-written menu read "Lunch Jerk Chicken Potato Salad $8.00 Chips & Burger $8.00 Smuggler Punch with a smile :)", and the cadillac used to ferry Queen Elizabeth around when she visited decades ago is decaying among the trees. That probably still counts as paradise.)

We went on a crazy hike around the entire western half of the island on my last and only day to explore here, along the beaches of the north side, found an artist's studio where we picked up a map and Jan arranged a place to stay over new years, past the Bomba Shack (home to a full-moon party involving legal psychedelic mushroom tea), up the mountain to the highest peak on the island, down the south side on the steepest roads I've ever seen in my life, and caught a ride home in a taxi-bus made from a couple of benches and an awning welded into the back of a pickup truck.

The taxi ride to the airport used up the last cash I had, the departure tax desk only took cash, the only ATM in the airport was telling me there was a problem with my requested transaction, and according to a taxi driver all the ATMs he could think of in an increasingly wide radius around the airport were out of order. While I was on the phone with my bank, failing to get a human being in order to verify that my card hadn't been stopped for some reason, the taxi driver came back and handed me $20 and his card.