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It’s sort of like Jamaica, except better.
We’re staying in a gorgeous resort (though not as good as the Grand Mayan in Playacar–today we came back to the hotel room and all three of our keys were magically not working, so I scaled the ledge to climb over the balcony and open the sliding doors to get in). It’s nice, but hazy. Probably better that way, since BMW’s already been branded with a tourist backpack tan. It’s pretty awesome.
View from Fort Amsterdam
Anyway, our resort is on its own mini peninsula, and at the tip is an old fort that served to protect the dutch capital, Phillipsburg. The fort is situated atop steep cliffs overlooking Great Bay and Little Bay. Cliffs that I wanted to climb down and take pictures (I was pulling an MM– BMW told me not to climb down because I only had flip flops on, but he turned around and I started climbing anyway and almost tore up my Reefs on the cacti. It’s strange–the landscape is arid in parts, but the humidity is around 83% right now. I hope I’m sweating out some of the guavaberry–a liqueur native to the island.
Fort Amsterdam (the old battalion and one of the must-see spots in St. Maarten, conveniently located at the end of our resort) has signposts and historical stuff, but is pretty unkept and we found it only by research. None of the staff thought it was a big enough deal to tell us to check it out. Some vinyl siding had been tossed over a rock in one part, looking like someone had a little campfire action going on.
Roosters!
It offered gorgeous views of Phillipsburg, and there’s even a protected pelican reserve where about 15 pairs mate from May to November. We stumbled upon where the resort gets their poultry (a bunch of roosters at the top of the fort), but they scattered before we could catch any.
Yesterday we went snorkeling, since our resort offers one of the best off-beach dive spots on the island. There were a ton of wrecks to dive in, and one sunken submarine that some diver wrote “MIKEY’S TOPLESS” on it with his finger. The marine life was pretty good, but the visibility was low and there wasn’t any coral. We swam for about an hour (I had a life vest on so that I didn’t have to swim too hard, and I felt like looking like a major tool, also), and then when it started raining we swam for a little longer and then went back.
From the Tip of the Fort
We’re going to the casino tonight and eating a gourmet meal, which hopefully will be better than the rest of the stuff we’ve had (which has been pretty unimpressive–I think all the produce is shipped to the island, since most of the land isn’t arable because of the rocky soil). We’re also going to do a super extreme zip lining course (somewhere in between the canopy jumping MM & Dad did in Costa Rica and what I did in Jamaica).
Keep you posted the next time I hack into the resort’s internet.
