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| Welcome to St. Kitts! Here’s your Monkey! |
At least that’s how it seemed, with the guys running around the cruise ship terminals looking for women and children to put monkeys on for photo opportunities (suggested monkey rental donation…$2.50 per person).
We’d read about the fact that there were monkeys on St. Kitts, but the cruising guide said they were shy. They are, sort of.
St. Kitts (also known as St. Christopher) is part of the two island country of St. Kitts & Nevis. Both are volcanic islands, and the volcano on St. Kitts still emits steam and occasional bad smells. So…dormant, maybe? It’s a moot point anyway, as we decide that having a climbed a volcano earlier in the week we had in fact reached our weekly limit on volcano climbing.
We started our visit in the town of Bassterre, the capitol of the country and the cruise ship landing port. We arrived in the late afternoon with enough time for me to rush into customs and clear us in for the evening. When I returned to the boat no one was particularly interested in heading into town, we were all tired and spent a quiet night – we figure to check out the town the next morning.
One night anchored in front of Basseterre was enough to convince us we didn’t want to spend another. For whatever weather reason this normally placid anchorage was plagued by rolling waves from off shore, making for a bouncy and restless evening trying to sleep. We’d had similar, but not quite as rough, nights at the anchorage in Statia the prior couple of days so we all were looking forward to anchoring some place…flat.
After breakfast we headed in to check out the town. One thing we’ve learned cruising the Caribbean is that most of the cruise ports are really, really similar. You’ve got duty free shops for booze, smokes, watches, jewelry, etc. Some restaurants and bars, hawkers and aggressive cab drivers, and a lot of “specials” targeted at the Cruise Ship crowd. Yes – there are some differences…Phillpsburg on St. Maarten had a beautiful beach and a busy board walk, and in St. Kitts there are guys running around sticking baby monkeys on strangers.
After a stroll around town and a refreshing drink at the Ballahoo restaurant (which has a lovely balcony where you can watch the goings on in the traffic “circus” down below”) we decided we’d seen enough of “town”, and we headed back to the boat to sail down the coast a few miles to Whitehouse Bay.
Unlike Basseterre, Whitehouse Bay has…nothing. There is allegedly a dinghy dock; we saw a flat rock that you might be able to step off of. This is NOT a bad thing in our book by the way – we like quiet anchorages without music, noise, jet skis, and the like. This particular anchorage had a wreck close to shore in snorkeling depths; that was pretty cool. We did find ourselves followed by a curious? barracuda as we swam from the boat to the wreck. He kept a polite distance behind us but stayed with us all the way until the water got shallow.
Christophe Harbour
Later in the day we did head around to nearby Ballast Bay by dinghy to check out what was supposed to be a large project in development. Christophe Harbour is indeed the brainchild of many big thoughts. Most of the Southern end of St. Kitts is owned by the brains behind Christophe Harbour. Over the next few years this relatively quiet and uninhabited part of the island will be turned into a thriving community of condos, luxury homes, golf course and a 300 slip marina.
Little of this was known to us when we headed in to take a look around just to see what was near by. Our cruising guide had vague descriptions that sounded like much of the marina was done and there were lots of restaurants nearby, but while we saw active dredging of the salt pond that had been opened to the sea for the marina there wasn’t much more there at that site than a nice dock, a road, and a porta pottie. We got off the dock and started walking.
There was much excitement on board about the possibility of seeing a monkey in the wild. St. Kitts is populated by Green Vervet Monkeys which were originally brought as pets many years ago. They escaped in the wild, and now numerous troupes of monkeys roam the island. Our cruising guide described them as shy. We had little expectation of seeing any monkeys, particularly not walking down a ROAD for cryin’ out loud – monkeys are supposed to like jungles and trees and
HEY LOOK, A MONKEY!!!
Not a few hundred yards into our exploratory walk we spotted a small group of monkeys, even as we were discussing how unlikely it was that we would get so much as a glimpse of one. Several of them walked in to the road and one of them sat in a tree very close by us, apparently just keeping watch. Of course we were totally fascinated by these critters, it’s not every day you see wild monkeys just walking around.
Apparently there are now so many monkeys that many of the residents aren’t so fond of them. They have a tendency to forage for food in large groups and may not be so discriminating about cultivated versus wild when it comes to food selections.
We continued our walk down the road looking for…stuff…when a car going the opposite direction pulled over and offered us a ride. Astute observer that I am I noted the “Christophe Harbour” logo on the side of the car. We’d been picked up by a fellow named Aeneas, one of the managers, who offered to give us a ride down the road. “Would you like me to drop you at the beach, or do you want to check out our private beach club?”
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| View of the Private Club |
Well, yeah. That one was kind of a no-brainer. The club is lovely and secluded with a solicitous and friendly staff. We walked around the grounds a bit (more monkeys on the drive in) and settled ourselves down on the really, really comfy deck couches for some top shelf Piña Coladas while we looked out over the water. It sounds like the model for this whole development is one of ownership – they are selling homes, condos, and dock space to build the community. I’m guessing the club membership comes with it. It’s very well done and tasteful, but it sounds pretty expensive.
Hearing about a project like this leaves me a little torn. On one hand, there has to be huge negative environmental impact, and the buy-in will be pretty large and limiting, cordoning off this space for a small group of people. On the other hand all of these islands struggle to keep pace economically; tourism certainly suffers in a weak global economy. A development like this will bring jobs and revenue in to the country, quite literally by the boatload. I do like that they will be trying to reach out also to smaller boats and transient cruisers. A few more marine facilities and another safe harbor on an island that could use more of both aren’t the worse things to build.
One the walk back we were treated to…even more monkeys. Aeneas had mentioned that a little later in the day more of them come out and we were not disappointed. Parts of the lowlands by the water looked like the African veldt, with large numbers of monkeys off all sizes and ages scampering through the grass. On the way back we also saw a number of mongooses (mongeese?) and birds of all sorts Sadly the mongooses were too far off and too fast to get a decent picture even if I had my good camera with me. But the walk back was a nice, quiet end to an interesting day.
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| The Salt Pond, opened to the sea where the marine will go. |
