Did you see that ass on the beach?

I’m publishing a blog for my sister and brother-in-law’s entertainment, since she’s in nurse mode following Tom’s knee replacement surgery. Most people don’t get a lot of joy from seeing other people’s sunny vacation photos when it’s minus 18 outside, but it’s all I have to work with at the moment. It’s stormy here this morning, if that helps at all.

Ray and I are in Sint Maarten / Saint-Martin, a half-French, half-Dutch island in the Caribbean. We’re staying on the French side near Orient Beach. The south end of the beach is the only official nude beach on the island. Despite our brief foray into nudism, Ray and I felt no particular urge to hang out on the south end. We quickly learned, though, that the rules are very loosely followed. On our morning beach walks, we regularly encounter older men who apparently forgot to pack a swimsuit. We’ve seen far fewer naked women outside the official nudity zone. I recognize that Europeans have a much healthier attitude towards nudity than North Americans do, but it’s still a bit jarring to see an old guy jogging towards you on the beach with his bits bouncing freely in the breeze.

One morning, we saw two dogs sitting side-by-side in the sand. Ray said they looked like they were plotting something. All of a sudden, they both took off to chase a donkey. We hadn’t seen the donkey. They raced around for several minutes in what appeared to be a game of donkey-in-the-middle.

Saint Martin, like so many places, is feeling the impact of too much tourism, and doesn’t have the infrastructure to accommodate the growth. They rebuilt after Hurricane Irma in 2017, then weathered the pandemic. Now, tourism and cruise ships are back in force, but traffic grid-lock has become a daily occurrence.

We’d originally planned to spend time touring the Dutch side of the island, including Maho beach, famous for the jet planes that take off and land just past the beach. After experiencing gridlock on the ride from the airport to our hotel, we revised our itinerary to avoid the Dutch side of the island, where thousands of cruise passengers arrive daily, sometimes as many as 20,000 in a single day.

Our plans to rent a kayak and paddle to Pinel Island were also adjusted, as it was a wee bit too windy. We took the ferry across instead.

Ray and I enjoy getting away from the crowds when on vacation. We have three tricks for doing that: 1. Start early; 2. Put in a little effort – do research, be willing to hike in, go somewhere that’s a bit harder to find; 3. Go where there’s no drink service. The latter technique cuts out all the people who come to the Caribbean specifically to have someone deliver a frozen daiquiri to their lounge chair.

Having had a daiquiri day on Pinel Island, we drove to the other side of the island and walked from Friar’s Bay to Happy Bay, where we had the beach to ourselves for at least a little while. Even at its peak, there were only a couple of dozen people on the beach…mostly nudists, as it turned out.

The storm has passed and it’s now hot and sunny, so time to go sit by the pool. I’ll be back in the deep freeze soon enough.