20 Years; 20 Places: No.1 Saint Barthélemy (St. Barts)

20 Players and 20 Places to celebrate my 20 years of writing this Blog. No order, no ranking, just those that were meaningful in my life.

This is the first Place of 20 that has stuck with me, the volcanic playground of the Caribbean island of St. Barts, or Saint Barthélemy in the French West Indies.

The island has a jet-setting reputation of photo shoots, paparazzi and huge homes owned by billionaires that garnered its haunt mode reputation in the 1950’s when the Rockefeller’s and Rothschild’s planted their flag on sands surrounded by untouched emerald green hills.

The island does have an air of chic, a mixture of St-Tropez sophistication with Caribbean laissez-fare becoming of its French heritage.

In between the French, the Swedes had possession of the island. Handsome wooden and stone buildings remain in the capital of Gustavia with vestiges of the Swedish era everywhere and surrounding this simple port town with its deft defying airport and runway are little Anglican churches perched on hills among houses coloured in Caribbean pastels that glimmer in the sunshine.

I’ll be honest, it’s the people watching I really remember. Pretty young things, men and women in beach restaurants sipping on French rosé dressed in a mere nuance of a bathing suit by day.

By night elegant tourists and locals alike sipped on fancy drinks from waterfront cafe terraces in Gustavia. Above the narrow streets hidden in the shadow of hills were restaurants and bars.

Me and the thirsty-other-half still talk about a hillside place we visited which had the most extravagant of drinks list. One was served in a miniature bubble bath complete with a rubber duck. We went for it that night and it amuses us that it was one of our fondest memories of our St. Barts holiday because we hardly remember it at all!

After living in Bermuda one becomes very snooty when it comes to beaches and island refinement, and have therefore been against exploring what a lot of the other reaches of Caribbean have to offer, but St. Barts had always intrigued me, and it stole my imagination. It is certainly on the list to go back.

St. Barts. Family holiday 2017.