Snorkeling in St Maarten, at Dawn Beach #2

More photos from Dawn Beach. The pincushion-looking things are sea urchins. You don't want to touch these, because the spines will pierce your flesh. Some of them were quite large.

Snorkeling in St Maarten, at Dawn Beach #1

With half the day gone, it was time to zip back to the ship to change into swim suits and grab our snorkel gear. Before leaving, we ate a quick lunch at the Café Promenade on Deck 5, then headed back to the rental car to find Dawn Beach. Many more steep hills and turns later, we found the Westin Hotel – it appeared to be in the same place as Dawn Beach on the map, so we stopped to ask the door man for directions. He said we were there, and that we could park in the hotel’s parking garage, walk through the lobby, and the beach would be right there.

This was the most beautiful beach from the entire trip, and unfortunately, I don’t have a single picture of it because we only took our snorkeling gear out of the car and left the other cameras behind. The sand was pristine white and there were no boats or jetskis. The hotel was also incredible, and if I were to stay for an entire week in St Maarten, this is the place that I would pick. The snorkeling here was absolutely fabulous with real reefs, and at least 30 to 40 feet of visibility. However, the surf was very strong and even with dive fins, I had to work hard to swim back to shore. The wave swells were at least 4 feet tall, consistently. With a mask and snorkel, I could see and breathe just fine, but I got bowled over by the waves trying to get out of water. An hour later, it was time to go.

Orient Beach, St. Maarten

Our next stop was brief, just long enough to take a look at Orient Beach and get some photographs. There are a lot of watersports here, i.e. jetskis and parasailing, so it would not be a safe place to scuba dive. Since it’s on the French side of the island, there was also some interesting beach-goers. Look closely at the beach photo with the woman walking back to the beach chairs.

I want Bud Light in our pop machines!!

Back in the car to continue driving around. We saw some more wild goats along the road. Caitlin was getting stuffed up with a cold, so we found a pharmacy on the French side to get her some decongestant. After that, we found the island’s Harley Davidson shop, and had to stop there so Sharon could get a t-shirt for Stuart (my nephew, her son). The choices in their pop machine are awesome.

One Hoe Lane?!?

Our next stop was at a grocery store. Sharon is fond of wandering through foreign grocery stores to see what they have. We did this in Aruba and Curacao also. Most of the time, we each leave with some strange beverage concoction and a package of unusual cookies. This store was located next to a Domino’s pizza (the fast food chains run rampant in all the islands we visited) – the street sign in the background says “One Hoe Lane.” Ironically, this is the store where Sharon found a brand of crème-filled sandwich cookies called “Bimbo”.

Markets in St Maarten

All over St. Maarten we saw wild chickens. They peck around like we see pigeons do here, and occasionally we saw little chicks too. Our first lengthy stop was at a street market in Marigot. I picked up some jewelry made from abalone shells here.

Forts on the Island

On the tops of a couple of the mountains, we could see the ruins of some old forts. The one in the upper background of this harbor picture is Fort Louis. The southern half of “Sint Maarten” is Dutch, and the currency is the guilder. However, the northern half of “Saint Martin” is French, and they use the euro. It was interesting to see the differences from one side of the island to the other. The harbors, like this one, contained a large number of sailboats and catamarans.

Driving around St Maarten

We put Sharon in the driver’s seat for the third day in a row, and began the tour around the island. There are several small mountains on island, and some of the roads were so steep that Sharon had to downshift the automatic transmission all the way to Low in order to keep the car moving up the hill. It freaked me out more than a little bit, and there was more than once that I had my eyes shut.

Picking up the rental car in St Maarten

The first stop was at the rental car place, where we picked up a Yaris. You can see it in the photo here. Although she was really friendly, the clerk at the Budget rental counter kept eating her sandwich and licking her fingers the entire time she was filling out the paperwork. That was a little off-putting. While we waited for her to finish, I snapped some more pictures of the ship.

Day Six: Sint Maarten (aka Saint Martin)

Today we wanted to see a lot of the island, do some shopping, and still get in some snorkeling, so we got up earlier than usual for breakfast. We made it out the door and down the gangway by 9am. There were some little bluish crabs crawling around on the rocks by the pier.