St Lucia is so laid-back you'll think you're in a Lilt advertisement, writes Alanna Gallagherin the first of our two takes on the Caribbean. While, Rose Doylewrites the ordinary is hard to come by on Margarita Island, where coconut trees sway in the breeze as pelicans eye their prey
IF YOU LIKE your sun, sea and sand experience unvarnished, then go to the West Indies and the often overlooked island of St Lucia.
This small volcanic island remains one of the last under-the-radar outposts of the Caribbean. It does low key in a big way.
Take Friday night, the highlight of the local week. At sundown, ideally with a rum punch in your hand and a tree-frog chorus to get you in the mood, you should be getting ready for jump-up, a raw and visceral type of dancing at the crossroads, Caribbean-style.
The sun sets early in this part of the world, so it's dark by 8pm. A set of decks and giant amps occupies a street corner in the northern town of Gros Islet, to facilitate jump-up, and street lights provide the only ambient lighting. Locals fire up their grills, to cook jerk chicken, and sell iced drinks from coolers. Two bars fill to capacity while the sound system goes into action.
Then you feel the reverb in your diaphragm, and the locals hit the on-street dance floor. The movers come in all shapes, sizes and ages. Their raw gyrations make palefaces blush with shame over lack of rhythm, but there are no hard feelings.
St Lucians embrace tourists' dance efforts as barbecue smoke fills the air, creating a dry-ice effect. As the evening progresses everyone starts to sing along to the music, turning the night into a big karaoke experience. Jump-up amps up the weekend and leaves you feeling as if you have sampled a real slice of this island's life.
Fish fry at Anse La Raye, on the west coast, is an equally local Friday experience, but it is more food orientated and family friendly. It's a great way to sample Creole cuisine. Hire a taxi if you want to catch both events.
A former French and English colony, St Lucia changed hands more than 14 times, earning it the title of Helen of the West. Like Helen of Troy, its beauty needs to be seen to be believed. When you recover from Friday night you'll see that the island is lush with dense rainforest and that its shallow beaches are studded with golden palms.
As with the rest of the Caribbean, the focus here is on the beach experience. Anse de Sable, near the southern town of Vieux Fort, is the real deal and popular with locals. If you prefer a higher-end beach experience, try Ti Kayne, a small hotel set on a hill where daytrippers arrive by boat to snorkel and have lunch. A conch-blower announces the arrival of refreshments.
The beach, like most here, is well shaded, and cliff steps take you back up to the hotel's wonderfully simple cottages. All come with sea views and shaded Alanna Gallagher continued balconies with rocking chairs.
Anse Chastenet is another beautiful beach, with a hotel of the same name set right on the sand. It offers exceptional snorkelling and dive sites that are available to non-residents.
Towering above this 34-year-old establishment is Jade Mountain, one of the island's new five-star experiences. Its open rooms each have an infinity pool and reach-out-and-touch views of the Pitons, a pair of conical mountains.
Reduit Beach, in the northern town of Rodney Bay, is considered by many to be the best beach on the island. (Accommodation is available at the Rex Royal hotel.)
Rodney Bay is the island's biggest resort. The west side of St Lucia, all the way down to Vieux Fort, is where most of the island's accommodation is available, but that balance is shifting.
New five-star properties are upping the ante, particularly in the southwest of the island. A tourism plan means that in five years this island will have been transformed, but for now the lack of gloss is what makes the place so appealing.
To get a sense of day-to-day life you need to explore beyond the beach-fronted resorts. In the fishing villages women still wash their clothes in the river and leave them on the banks to dry. This may be a developing country, but the people don't chase the dollar. Contribute to the local economy by stopping at roadside shacks, and try coco milk directly from the palm or mango picked from the tree.
The people are engaging and welcoming, very like in Ireland 30 years ago. This isn't a coincidence. Many of the country's children have been educated by Cork's Presentation Brothers, who have been there since 1946. The Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, a French order, also has many Irish nuns in its ranks.
The Pitons frame the southern landscape, and you won't really have experienced St Lucia until you've seen this World Heritage site. The volcanic plugs rise high into the sky. To get a sense of their scale, hire a boat and enjoy sea views of Gros and Petit Piton. Landlubbers can drink in the view from the Pier Restaurant at the Jalousie Plantation, which is nestled between the two.
St Lucia's greatest attraction is its people. They're warm, wry and easy-going to a horizontal degree, which means numerous Lilt-advertisement moments. You may have to wait half an hour for a cup of coffee, but, hey, you won't have come out here just to be in a rush.
Until recently, real five-star resorts were as rare as genuine treasure maps. The launch of Jade Mountain has upped the ante in terms of accommodation expectations, and with Ritz-Carlton, Westin and Raffles hotels all being built, this island's low-key cover is about to be blown.
Alanna Gallagher was a guest of the St Lucia Tourist Board. www.stlucia.org, 00-44- 20-73417000
Go There
Virgin Atlantic (
www.virgin-atlantic.com) flies from London Gatwick on Tuesdays,
Fridays and Sundays and from Manchester on Thursdays. Aer Lingus (
www.aerlingus.com) flies
from Cork and Dublin to Gatwick and Manchester. Ryanair (
www.ryanair.com) flies from
Cork, Dublin and Shannon to Gatwick and from Dublin and Shannon to
Manchester.
Margarita Island
THERE ARE IDYLLS and there are idylls, but the one to get to before the rest of the known world moves in is in the southern Caribbean. Just 40km off the northern shores of Venezuela is a place called Isla de Margarita; to you and me, in more workaday English, that's Margarita Island. But what's lost in translation is preserved in reality: Isla de Margarita is virgin enough to restore your faith in nature and beauty unadorned and in the therapeutic value of sloth.
There's history, too. Columbus discovered Isla de Margarita in 1498, naming it after the king of Spain's daughter. Pearls in the surrounding waters brought slavery, pirates and, still to be seen, forts. Colonial architecture can be explored in churches and houses that are mostly now museums.
It may be that I was overly impressed, never having been to the Caribbean before. Maybe. But it's hard to be blasé when you're faced with white waves rolling on to kilometre after kilometre of white sand, coconut trees in a silken breeze and pelicans eyeing their prey from boats.
There's fresh tropical fruit for breakfast and fresh Caribbean fish for dinner to think about, with turtles, dolphins, mangrove canals, jungle, cloud, forest and a sun that shines almost all day.
All this is well known to the Venezuelans, for whom Isla de Margarita has long been a getaway - their piece of peace and hedonism in the Caribbean.
Margarita, along with a couple of smaller neighbouring islands, Coche and Cubagua, is one of the 23 states that make up Venezuela. The island is not big: 78km long and 20km at its widest. The shore is a rambling 315km, 93km of this being playgrounds for swimming, surfing, snorkelling - whatever you're having yourself.
Long after the 16th century tidal wave that destroyed the original formations, Isla de Margarita is now two peninsulas, joined by an isthmus. As different as chalk is from cheese, one of these, Peninsula de Macanao, is barely populated and mountainous, an unconfined, savagely lovely place with jungle and wildlife galore. The other peninsula is where most of the 420,000 islanders live, and where the capital, La Asunsion, and centres of commerce, such as Porlamar and Pampatar, have their places in the sun.
The whole of Neuva Estada, as the islands are known together, is close to the equator, which accounts for a climate with no great extremes. It's outside the hurricane belt, too, so there are no great winds on Margarita, just the soothing, balmy kind.
Not that you need to know any of this: Margarita's the sort of place that brings out the sloth in all of us: guilt, chores, clock-watching and such are the peculiar habits of another hemisphere and as foreign as snow on Margarita. This is a place where you'll want to just Rose Doyle continued be, to sit and learn from the pelicans, not moving unless the mood takes you.
The isthmus mentioned previously is called La Restinga and the location of one of the island's three national parks. On a day like any other, sunny and bright and good-humoured, we went there in a jeep with a safari tour company called Life's Beach Tours.
We travelled sand dunes and wide roads - even did Peninsula de Macanao - before abandoning the jeep by the Embarcadero El Indio, on La Restinga, and, joy of cruising joys, drifting off in a craft that took us along the inland saltwaterways of the island's hauntingly beautiful mangrove canals.
The water here, 100sq km of it, is deep and shining and barely moves, penned in by the mass of mangrove vegetation rooted in its depths. There are birds of every kind, local and migratory (20 per cent of the world's population of birds live in Venezuela), from familiar cormorants and herons to local yellow-shoulder parrots and parakeets. And pelicans: always and everywhere are pelicans.
On the day we went to Coche island, 25km farther south in the Caribbean, time, if not the tide, seemed to have stopped 25 years before. Pina coladas and chilled white wine were the things to drink in the shade, sublime to sip while watching kitesurfers on the white waves.
We hired bikes (although, now that I think of it, no one ever asked for the money) and cycled along a white, empty road with an unreachable horizon. We then circled and tried another road, which wasn't much different. We passed the skeletal frames of empty houses and had to veer when a slow thunder swelling from the rear became a 1950s Cadillac, loose and louche and just about holding together. The Coen brothers spend years buildings film sets like this.
It was coming up to sunset as we cruised back to Margarita. The Caribbean lay still and was beginning to darkly glitter, and fishermen in lonely, far-off boats were drawing in nets.
We made it to one of the many sunset-viewing points on shore and stood with other silently gobsmacked admirers as a blazing orange sky devoured an even more intense sun, in seconds.
Go There
There are direct flights to the island's airport in
Porlamar from Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Birmingham, Amsterdam
and Frankfurt. Better to fly direct than go through Caracas, which
can be irksome. Ticket prices vary, so investigate online.
Where to stay, eat and go on St Lucia and Margarita Island
St Lucia
Where to staySeven nights all-inclusive at Almond Smugglers Cove (00-758-4500551, www.almondresorts.com) starts at £959 (€1,200) per person. This price also includes return flights with Virgin Atlantic from Manchester to St Lucia; it may be subject to a fuel surcharge. Prices are based on two adults sharing in June.
For families with small children, try Coconut Bay Beach Resort Spa (Vieux Fort, 00-758-4596000, www.cbayresortcom), a large resort near the airport. The accommodation and edibles err on the bland side, but the water park, kids' club and early-evening babysitting facilities (all included) make it especially appealing to parents of small children.
The Landings (Rodney Beach, 00-758-4587300, www.landings.rockresorts.com) is a new development that fronts on to Rodney Beach. Its opening-season offer has prices from $225 (about €145) per night.
Beach bums should rock up to Anse de Sable beach, where beach shacks cost from $50 (about €32) per person per night. They lack air conditioning, of course, and a mosquito net is essential, but this is lo-fi living at its most unadulterated. The Reef Cafe can offer all you need by way of refreshment.
Where to eatDebbie's Home-Made Foods (Laborie, 00-758-4551625) is practically a national institution, with visiting dignitaries and celebrities sitting cheek by jowl in this very ordinary eatery, offering local delicacies from fish cakes to fried plantain.
Where to goTake a road trip. Although small - only 45km long and 23km wide - St Lucia is cursed by hairpin bends that quadruple travel time. Driver Mac Charlemagne has an air-conditioned van that can fit up to 12 people comfortably. 00-758-4510930/4859213, www.airtravel.com/sluground.html. Self-drivers could try Cool Breeze jeep and car rental (00-758-4597729, coolbreeze@candw.lc), at prices from $15 (€10) per day.
Zip through the rainforest. Adventure Tours St Lucia ( www.adventuretoursstlucia.com, 00-758-4580908) takes you through the forest canopy, 10m to 15m above the ground, on 150m runs of cable.
Get up close and personal with hawksbill and leatherback turtles on an overnight excursion from $70 to $90 (€45-€55). Season runs from March until August; 00-758- 4581454, www.heritagetoursstlucia.org.
A cruise is the best way to see St Lucia. Endless Summer Cruises (00-758-4508651, www.stluciaboattours.com) charges $90 per person. Its catamaran picks up at every hotel along the west coast from Windjammer Landing south to Castries.
Take a day trip to Pigeon Island National Park, the site of Fort Rodney and the annual jazz festival. Pay Jambe de Bois a visit. This is a waterside bar serving cold Piton beer and an array of Creole favourites.
See the island from above. Contact St Lucia Helicopters (00-758-4536950). $155pp.
Have a local treatment -the aloe vera wrap at Discovery's Lapli spa (00-758-4585300, www.discoverystlucia.com) is made with freshly cut plants from its zen garden - perfect if you've taken too much sun.
Isla de Margarita
Where to stayThe island has a selection of good, often charming, mid-range hotels. We stayed in the five-star Hisperia Isla Margarita (Playas Puerto Viejo y Puerto Cruz, 00-58-295-4007111, http// tinyurl.com/5ftkgj), which has a beach to die for.
What to doA Margarita holiday is about being oudoors, offering the wherewithal to wind- and kitesurf, take jeep safaris or horse-riding excursions, snorkel, scuba dive, discover three national parks, swim with dolphins, birdwatch, golf, fish or do nothing at all.
Life's Beach Tours (Pampatar, 00-58-414- 7923072, www.lifesbeach tours.com) offers excellent safari trips to all parts of the island, taking you in hand with brio and fun and just the right amount of carefree abandon.
Where to eatEl Pacifico restaurant (on the beach at Playa El Agua, 00-58-295-2490749, http://bus cacaribe.com/cuisine/ elpacifico) serves very good traditional food, such as el colgado mar y tierra (Caribbean lobster grilled with jumbo shrimps).