MEGAYACHT GALLIES

An island half virgin half poor.

 I become happy like a child when I set foot on a place that I have never been before. You are acquainted with the fact that I am a frequenter of the Caribbean islands for the last five years.  However, St. Kitts was a place I had not visited before.

Because St. Kitts and Nevis is an island not mentioned a lot when you talk about Caribbean islands. In fact, as it can be seen from its name, it consists of two islands. Two sister islands under the same government half an hour sailing away from each other.

I did not have the chance to visit Nevis. You well know that I am not a tourist and cannot say: ‘OK honey, lets go to the neighboring island’. I’m working on yacht. However St. Kitts is a really nice island that remains untouched. We arrived to the island on the 60 meter long Perseus^3. It was the end of January when we arrived. This date means that the Caribbean season has already started, the popular islands are full of jolly old tourists, colorful sceneries and magnificent superyachts, but the winds of ‘LOST’ is blowing on St. Kitts.  The silence of a deserted island. Because the island has never been popular. Maybe the fact that island had never been a colony of France or England is the reason for the lack of investments that would have developed the island, and it remained relatively a weak spot as a tourist attraction. Therefore it has remained untouched, but the quality of time to spend on the island is also at this low level.

We toured the island on the second day after we arrived.  A nutty citizen, in other words a local and slightly mad black islander had us tour the island on an open-top old and cranky bus. With our newly acquired friend hanging out ‘young’ as all Caribbean natives although being in his 60s thanks to his colorful and chiffonish costume reminding me of a tropical parrot and his half luminous green half pink beard, we toured all around the island.

Half of the island remains virgin and the other is poor. While the poor Caribbean neighborhoods rampant with drugs and crime, their shabby houses with chickens roosting on their backyards and horses tethered on their front yards, stray dogs patrolling the streets and smells of pot and barbecued chicken reign unperturbed, the other half of the island with huge landscapes are beginning to be filled with magnificent villas of Americans bored from popular islands and looking for serenity.  If you wonder how this will breed inequality and contrast, you can get an answer from ‘civilized’ Europeans or Americans that I conversed randomly. They said that like wolves descending down to the city, unfortunately natives descend down to jewelry shops or luxury houses for theft and plunder. In fact, this poverty of the native people and extreme wealth being side by side results in such huge inequality.

Yes, I mentioned jewelry shops or so, but don’t think that the island is a shopping paradise. As the major transportation for tourism is the Cruises, shops in small cities are mainly jewelry shops. Maybe you heard, the Caribbeans is the jewelry shopping location for the Americans due to the high taxation in USA.  Furthermore, the government’s grating citizenship to the ones investing minimum 400,000 USD, make this island scarce as hen’s teeth for petty criminals in USA and South America. However, this does not mean that those criminals are living on the island; the ones that made the investments and granted citizenship just slipped away.  In other words, everything is just on paper.

If you say what is happening on the island besides these, of course not everything looks that unfavorable. As I told you, all these issues actually caused the island to remain untouched and magnificently beautiful although we are in the 21^st century.  Turtle Bay directly opening to the Atlantic and naturally embracing its huge waves, the Shipwreck bar – a typical Caribbean bar where you can watch the magnificent sunset on the serene coast opening to the Caribbean sea extending right in front of it, a number of SPA hotels that bring nature to you on the wealthy part of the island, the new marina where we are in and the near bar & club Salt right on the sea are the places that you can enjoy spending time. And when you visit the historic rum distillation center and the natural forest, all will be OK!

Maybe you would find my words, special to me, written in Shipwreck bar where everybody leave their mark and memories on walls, beams or columns. “You’re tough like Alps, I’m rough like the ocean.”   Do you think this defines me?