My first visit to St Barts is one I am not likely to forget. I caught a connecting flight at Saint Maarten and was the only passenger on the plane. 'Cava?' asked the moustachioed French pilot as we taxied down the runway.
Fifteen minutes later, after skimming the blue-green waters of the Caribbean, the little six-seater plane ducked through a gap in the hills and landed on a narrow airstrip running down towards the beach. If the brakes had failed, we would have decapitated a bikini-clad blonde as she emerged from the sea. It was quite an entrance. I felt like a movie star arriving at the Ritz by private limo. Goodbye, Barbados. Hello, Chicville-sur-Mer.
In a region of luxurious island hideaways, tiny St Barts is one of the most luxurious of the lot. It is pricier than other Caribbean islands, byt when did mixing with the beautiful people come cheap?
'It looks like St Tropez without the hustle and bustle' remarked a fellow guest at my hotel, as we surveyed the scene at Baie de St Jean, the main beach on the island.
Nut-brown bodies were splayed out under beach umbrellas. Brightly coloured kayaks bobbed up and down in the water. A gleaming white yacht glided across the entrance to the bay.
The ratio of beautiful people to slobs was about 20 to 1. Forty to one if you were to promote the pot-bellied American reading the New York Times from slob to beautiful person on account of his jaw-droppingly gorgeous trophy wife.
Greek gods strolled past with snorkelling equipment. The woman who handed me my beach towel,took my drinks order and rubbed suncream into my back was a dead ringer for Sarah Jessica Parker.
For anyone used to the British Caribbean, with its higgledy-piggledy charm, this oasis of French sophistication, irrigated by Americal dollars, feels like a different planet.
Most of the native inhabitants of St Barts are white descendants of the original settlers from Normandy and Brittany.
They in turn are out-numbered by the French and American visitors who descend on the island in high season.
It may be snowing in New York and Paris but for the rich, the famous and the unashamely hedonistic, who rent private villas, haunt boutique hotels or moor their yachts in the capital, Gustavia, the party is just beginning.
Eating out in the Caribbean can be pot luck to a degree, but the food at the hotel is preposterously good. Preposterously beause none of it, not even the fruit, is locally produced. The rocky landscape is unsuited to agriculture and so the finest food and wine in France is air-lifted here like emergency aid to a disaster zone.
One may call the French frivolous, but their frivolity has a tinge of genius. The exquisite sea bass I was served for lunch had been swimming off the coast of Brittany the day before, to which one can only say... Zut Alors!
Aesthetically, St Barts is pretty but a touch twee. Houses have to have green or red roofs, which gives the island a rther bland appearance. Although there are some lovely sandy coves, one misses the unkempt, unregulated sprawl of other Caribbean islands.
Gustavia, the capital, is quite antiseptic. Fine if you are a well-heeled Frenchwoman looking for the right pair of flip-flops to go with your new leopard-print bikini - every label in French fashion is here. Not so fine of you like urban excitements of a coarser kind.
It was only really at nightfall that the town came into its own. Locals and visitors mingled happily at Le Select, an old established bar with an outdoor garden.
Eddy's, another local institution, was also heaving, serving Creole food to the well-tanned Amreicans spilling of the flash yachts in the harbour.
'Brad darling, I'll give you a dollar if you come to bed now,' pleaded one father, as a family party threatened to get out of control.
But if the lifestules of the super-rich are not wholly appetising, you have to admire the way St Barts distils the deep, pure essence of a Caribbean beach holiday: sun, sea and sand, untainted by mass tourism.
The morning after my Creole blow-out, I was taken out in a motor-boat by a marine biologist, with the looks of a Bond girl, a bikini that left nothing to the imagination and an ice-box buckling under the weight of champagne.
The sea was so clear you could see turtles swimming 50ft below the boat.
The champagne was so cold it took away the heat fo the sun. And the marine biologist held forth about dolphins and sea-urchins in the sultriest French accent you could wish to hear.
For a few sweet, carefree hours, I felt like that man in the poem by Coleridge:
'For he who on honey-dew hath fed/And drunk the milk of Paradise.' |
