The Best-Kept Secret in the Caribbean, or, Thrills and Romance in the Leewards and Windwards

The Secret, of course, is that they are wonderful in the summertime. And empty. And cheap. That is because a Grand Old Travel Myth-- the one that goes, Only mad dogs and schoolteachers voluntarily aim for the tropics in summer--continues to live on. Subthemes are that the islands, so close to the equator, must be 140 in the shade in July; and, when you're melting in an oven called Chicago, why pay to fly into a frying pan on Barbados?

The reality is that, depending on the island, the difference between winter and summer temperatures may range from a few degrees to no degrees at all, and hotel and restaurant owners have to chop their summer prices to compensate for the power of the myth. The northeast trades breeze through all year long. The Leewards and Windwards are considerably cooler than Kansas in August, though not so corny.

And there will be hardly another tourist in sight--unlike high winter season, when many of the hotels are crawling with the nouveau jet set and when quiet village streets swarm with mobs of frenzied, wild-eyed creatures briefly escaped from cruise ships. That sort of travel may have its attractions, but you can do it all as pleasurably (text continued on page 102) in the summer and at less than half the $$$$$.

No Man is An Island, But The Leewards And Windwards Are!

Also, you won't be headed for just another pretty beach, although there are many to be found. Unlike flat coral islands such as the Bahamas, where geological doom is announced by magnificent beaches and not much else, these islands, with a few exceptions, are obviously volcanic. Most have at least one crumbling cone or small group of peaks rising high and green from the luminous sea, up to a single cloud--often the only one in view--fluffed solitary at the top like a mascot. But there is more than food for your Nikon. The Leewards and Windwards are ideas as well. They look, some of them, like perfect Schlitz fantasies of South Seas gusto...Bora-Bora, Nuku Hiva... but they have also been exploited and fought for and bloodied and traded for 400 years like fat distant emeralds by kings and queens and presidents and prime ministers. That sort of attention, as you might imagine, has had its effects. Neighboring islands are English or French or Dutch for no more compelling reason than accident of history; they commemorate in the flesh old fortunes of war. They changed hands so frequently, and the boogie depended for so long on the cheap strong backs of unwilling recruits fresh from the African coast, that they are now an amazing stew of people and habits and values. Their up-for-grabs, blood-on-the-bougain-villaea past is everywhere a presence, different on every island, visible in ruins of dead forts and sugar mills and plantation houses again becoming rock heaps among the coco palms--and felt as subtle vibrations from the people who live there and have inherited it all, whose any-thing-goes genealogies usually include whatever you'd care to name but nearly always spin back to slave or planter or ferocious Carib. Levels and levels, as we used to say in the good old psychedelic days, and you don't need to be Melville to find them fascinating or to learn something from them--and you can do it from poolside, while sipping a rum punch. Can you beat metaphysics and a terrific tan?

Disclaimer

Since we are but a mere magazine and not a 1000-page guide, as you have probably noticed, there are too many Leewards and Windwards to treat all of them with any justice. So we have instead been deliberately selective, figuring that a sampling of the West Indies is better than no Indies at all.

T' N' T Tour

On a nighttime taxi ride into Port of Spain from the airport, you may wonder at first if Trinidad was such a good idea, after all. Sweet dark shadows of cane swaying on both sides of the road abruptly give way to a Nestlé's plant, Trinidata Computer Service, a Coke bottler, Colonel Sanders, Modern Wigs, Inc., while women walk along the road with baskets balanced on their heads and a steel band practices at an outdoor pay-by-the-hour stand. It is unsettlingly like Southern California gone yet more surreal. You can't see the bright terrible patchwork of tin-roof slums, shining on many of the hills, until morning.

It is not everyone's cup of tea. So close to Venezuela that birds from Trinidad daily commute there to feed, it was attached millions of years ago to South America. The old connection still shows in its plant and animal life, and this geological difference from the other islands has left Trinidad with something none of the rest have--oil. In abundance, and it's being exploited like mad. The industrial age has arrived on Trinidad with a bulldozer, and some tourists simply don't think they need to travel that far to see an oil refinery. Even worse, there isn't a beach anywhere near Port of Spain.

But we liked Trinidad a lot. The Hilton, surprisingly enough, is probably the best place to stay. It's carved into a hill that surveys the entire city, directly above a huge grassy park called the Savannah, where in certain seasons fine-tuned race horses work out at dawn and where during carnival mighty calypso orchestras stir it up all night long. There is also a 150-year-old botanical garden nearby, full of 60-foot incarnations of everything dying on your window sill at home; and beyond that is the Emperor Valley Zoo, somewhat more modest than the name would suggest, featuring this sign just inside the gate: If An Exhibit Is Marked No Feeding This Is Because If Given The Wrong Food The Exhibit Will Die. When we were there last, we saw three cayman lizards that sat blinking in their mudhole, bored, having long ago disposed of biting off each other's tails as something to do; and we admired the parrot that was trying, by God, to pick the lock on its cage.

From the zoo, you can walk the long way round the Savannah past extravagant and whimsical Victorian mansions of the Britain vs. The Tropics school and then aim for the waterfront downtown. You will find that Port of Spain is nowhere near as seedy as the guidebooks would have you believe but that it is what they would call teeming.

If you haven't scheduled much time in Trinidad, be sure at least to take the Saddle Drive, a three-hour circular tour that starts with the city and winds north through mountains thick with rain forest to the beach on Maracas Bay, where you'll have a beer and be calypsoed by local entrepreneurs before heading back another way, past plantations of coco trees protected from the sun by taller tamarinds and groves of lime and nutmeg. All along the way, intense sweating men, carrying machetes like walking sticks, prod and poke the edges of the jungle, foraging for lunch or better. On hilltops, sometimes miles from a road, perch the shacks of squatters, whose tiny fields clutch for dear life to the sides of steep hills. The squatters mostly stay alive by growing chives and selling them in town--such is subsistence there--and the government sensibly calls it a contribution and gives them the land if they can make it work.

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One of the best things about Trinidad is Tobago, a 15-minute taxi flight away. Like a dozen other islands around the world, it claims to be the sole actual inspiration for Robinson Crusoe. It looks the part. In the north, it's nearly untouched, wild virgin Defoe country; and in the south, acres of coc palms weave across the island in expansive leisurely rows' sometimes from beach to beach, hardly interrupted by the few villages and fewer hotels. It is your basic Gorgeous.

And very quiet. The snorkeling trip on Buccoo Reef is not to be missed, even if you only watch through the boat's glass bottom. And a visit to Scarborough, a large fishing village that's considered a town, is worth an afternoon, if just to watch the sunset from gemlike old Fort King George, moldering gracefully on the bluff above Scarborough. After that, you are left to cook it up on your own.

On The Nature Of The Hotel Universe

Which means that on small islands such as Tobago--and St. Lucia, the Grenadines, Montserrat, Nevis and others--you should choose your spot wisely, as Don Juan instructs, because your hotel quickly becomes yet another small island. Strangely enough, the more ambitious and energetic places--100 rooms, golf, tennis, scuba, three dining rooms, nine bars, doctor on call at all times--can offer the most privacy, because they are so big and so devoted to activity. Cuidebooks usually characterize this as impersonal, and it is, but it's great if you really love the one you're with and like a little tennis on the side.

At places catering to fewer than 30 people, however, you can't--and shouldn't--avoid becoming part of a group that goes its various ways during the day but every night becomes a dinner party, with cocktails before, brandy afterward and lies throughout, just like civilized folks in Dickens novels. It's enjoyable because it's not just another gathering of your 16 favorite dull neighbors. These people are at least different and interesting enough to have gotten to Arnos Vale (continued on page 162) Best-Kept Secret (continued from page 102) on Tobago, or Nisbet Plantation on Nevis, or Rawlins on St. Kitts--and how else would we have met an investment analyst in his handsome early 50s who was writing an epic poem in blank verse about a beige Porsche? Who languished by the pool reading Paradise Lost for the fun of it?

Welcome to Barbados, or, George Washington Caught A Dose Here

Barbados was named by Spanish sailors who thought they saw beards on the fig trees that covered the island. The trees and Spanish sailors are a rarity now. You will notice in your Exxon X-Rated Bicentennial Guidebook that it is the place where Washington picked up the smallpox scars that flattering portrait painters tried to hide for the rest of his life.

Barbados is relatively flat, with low rolling hills and valleys, and the soil is rich, so for 300 years most of it has been planted in vast sections of cane. More recently, its edges have been extensively planted with fancy beachside hotels and villas. A drive along the so-called Platinum Coast (no mere gold, this stretch of perfect beach and sumptuous real estate) rapidly convinces you that there are Big Bux in Barbados. Here in high season you can drop that $200 a day at places where gentlemen are requested to wear a tux to breakfast; and if that's not good enough, there are seriously elegant villas for rent by absentee owners, whose megabucks increase by getting up to $3000 a week for them in season. But that does include all the servants.

Is there A Villa in your Future?

Barbados happens to have the most and the classiest, but all of the islands offer houses or villas for rent. The best are clamored over in the dead of northern winter; they're often booked seasons in advance. But in the summer, they usually sit untenanted, which is why they can be had for sometimes less than half their high-season rate. There is a modest palace in the Moorish modern style on Barbados, for instance--four bedrooms, patio facing the beach, cook, maid, sculptures in the garden, the works--that goes for $1800 a week in season but is $800 in the summer. And, unlike staying at hotels, you can not only eat--and drink--whatever and whenever you like, you can also behave as shamefully as you do at home. With one or two couples of similar inclination, it can be more stimulating and less expensive than a hotel. Whether it's candlelight and corn oil or shouting all night about Proust is, of course, strictly up to you.

Sex and Violence Tour

For sex, it's Club Méditerranée, hands down. For violence, it's Grenada and Dominica, hands up. To dispose of the rough stuff first: It's kind of a shame to steer you away from two of the loveliest islands in the Caribbean. Grenada is a rich collection of spice trees and Easter Parade flowers, Dominica a green swatch of wild and unruly vegetation. But Grenada has its own version of the Third Reich, complete with miniature Gestapo, as Prime Minister Eric Gairy continues to terrorize and dispose of people he considers politically undesirable. Tourists are, in fact, safe there--as they undoubtedly are in Albania--but there's nothing restful about a police state in the sun. Dominica isn't even that restful: A number of tourists have been robbed and a few have been killed there these past couple of years, the result of political agitation. The tourist bureau will insist it's safe now to go backpacking through the underbrush: the government has been rounding up the dissidents and doing God knows what with them. But we'd suggest that a Green Beret would be more useful to you than a green thumb--at least for the next year or so.

As for Club Méditerranée, most of what you've heard about it is probably true, the good along with the bad. There are three club villages in the Caribbean: two on Guadeloupe and one on Martinique. And, yes, two of them are sex factories. (For those of you taking notes, they're La Caravelle, on Guadeloupe, and Buccaneer's Creek, on Martinique. Fort Royal, on Guadeloupe, is family oriented.)

Created in France as a way of getting people inexpensively to exotic climes, Club Méd has a policy of no frills, no tips (plastic beads instead of money), no dressing up, lots of good food and uninhibited socializing. And the tradition of camaraderie between the young, attractive staff and the club members has led to some of the most casual sex this side of a swingers' convention.

But in the Caribbean, either the French have blown it or it hasn't translated well. All three villages appear to have succumbed to their own press hype--and to greed, with gross examples of overbooking (650 people squeezed into accommodations meant for 400, with the overflow put up at adjoining hotels), corner cutting on food and jacked-up prices. Staff smiles have a touch of plastic to them and perhaps, as a result--in contrast to the eclectic Club Méd villages in Europe and Africa--the atmosphere has come to resemble Grossinger's-by-the-Caribbean.

In at least one respect, however, it's still the only game in the West Indies, with topless and nude beaches on both Guadeloupe and Martinique and the sex abundant. Though, of course, there's always the inconvenience of roommates, who are not optional.

Club Méd story number one: A pretty secretary from New York boldly accepted the accidental assignment of a male roommate and looked forward to bedtime. He turned out to be gay and she spent two nights listening to him and his lovers going at it. She couldn't stand it anymore and demanded a female roommate, and the club accommodated her. That night, her female roommate tried to crawl into bed with her. She left the next day.

Club Méd story number two: A member asked his new roommate about his habit of sacking out--alone--at seven P.M. each evening. Wasn't he missing out on all that wonderful French food for dinner? He didn't like French food, the roommate said, being from Ohio. Then how about socializing? "Don't like the French, period." Well, some of the staffers were British. "Can't stand the British." Then how about all those horny American girls? "Yeah, but they're Easterners." Hate Easterners." Hmmmmm. At least he must have made up for it during the day--snorkeling, volleyball, that sort of thing? "Hate exercise." Well, didn't he get bored just swimming? "Never go near the water. Hate it." (All quotes verbatim.)

Obviously, not all Club Méd members go there for the same reason. And it's a shame we can't say more nice things about it, because it was one of the few fresh travel ideas around before it grew fat on its popularity. So our advice is that if it's sex and camaraderie you're after, try the club--by default--but don't set your expectations too high. A better bet is to take your own and try a hotel.

High School French And The Caribbean

The two islands on which your high school French will come in handiest are Guadeloupe and Martinique. While most of the British or Dutch islands are really more West Indian than European, these two are indelibly Parisian. They're both départments of France, and for those of you familiar with Paris taxi drivers, it means you can expect traces of Gallic arrogance only somewhat softened by the tropics; outside the hotels and main cities, folks do not speak English as they do everywhere else in the Caribbean, and best of luck to you if you put the stress on the wrong syllable.

Their main attraction, in our opinion, is the food. It's French, it's plentiful and it's good. Even a restaurant listed as so-so in the travel guides will offer up a meal that's better than most you can get on other islands. But be warned: Prices are the same as in any large French city; i.e., expensive. A rating of the most expensive islands in the Caribbean would place Martinique and Guadeloupe very near the top.

Physically, Guadeloupe is a drabber and poorer island, but therefore less crowded and a touch less spoiled. It's gone through a building boom in the past couple of years that's ridiculously ahead of its time, so many of the hotels are unfilled even in high season. During the summer, the island ought to be virtually empty, which could be a plus. Beaches are excellent, the sight-seeing unexciting, the people generally friendly.

Martinique is lusher and more built up, with Fort-de-France a bustling, sophisticated city. It's the birthplace of Napoleon's wife, Josephine, and they don't let you forget it--there are tours, museums and countless other reminders of the lady Bonaparte left behind. Hotels run the gamut from small pensions to giant, first-rate emporiums and night life is lively. Folks on Martinique are not to be patronized; they have a long, proud heritage and don't feel that tourists are their only bread and butter. Truth is, if you're an American traveler of the Instamatic-and-Bermuda-shorts variety, you're likely to feel less welcome on Martinique than anywhere else. On the other hand, if your French isn't terrible and you throw away certain assumptions, you're likely to end up at a café discussing Camus with someone educated at the Sorbonne.

Off The Beaten Tour Tour

Jets roar into Antigua, Barbados and St. Martin every day, direct from New York, London and Toronto. That's one reason they are so wired for tourists--getting there is relatively easy. Getting to other islands, such as St. Lucia or Montserrat, means connecting with British West Indian Airways (BWIA) or Leeward Island Air Transport (LIAT), which can be an uneven experience at best. Although they have fine safety records, their schedules can provoke you to chuckles, if you're the kind that chuckles at four-hour layovers in hot, tiny airports. The soundest advice we can give is that even if you know your flight is confirmed on BWIA or LIAT, call ahead and check that they haven't changed the hour and the day. Or the year.

But having said that, and even admitting that all the Caribbean islands are nicer in the summer, there's still a hangover from a spoiled winter that can make the people on the jet-linked islands somewhat snottier than their more insular neighbors. So even if it means lopping a full day off each end of your vacation, why not try our Off the Beaten Tour Tour--featuring:

**Montserrat **St. Kitts/Nevis **St. Lucia & St. Barth's **St. Vincent and the Grenadines & More Special Guest Stars**

Montserrat: The landing, like the one in Dominica--where you come zooming down the mountains 50 feet above thick jungle and clear cascading streams, onto an airstrip scraped from the middle of nowhere--wakes you right up. Your trusty LIAT pilot aims first at and then alone the shoulder of mountains that plunge into the sea--a few hundred feet above the water, at least a few from the mountainside--and then drops over rocks onto a landing strip that ends in the ocean if you don't watch out. Nice, huh?

Montserrat is otherwise terrific. It is all of 39 square miles and rather happily remains a British colony, having been settled early on by renegade Irishmen who were busted out of England by Cromwell. People with ears for such things swear they can still hear the trace of a brogue in the Montserrat accent. So not just for the scenery has it been nicknamed the Emerald Isle.

It presently stands ready to take on a travel boom with three entire hotels. Two of them are on the other side of the mountains from the airport, near the quiet capital of Plymouth (population 1200 or so). The drive over is a treat. We did it last in fog and rain, climbing on curving thin roads through high meadows and rain forest, with old stone houses looming suddenly out of the gray, and muted golden ravines disappearing into mist.

In sunlight, Montserrat is tranquil and truly beautiful--and very down home. The Emerald Isle hotel, for example, is a plain little heap of concrete block painted aquamarine, on a hill well above the black volcanic beach.

Every Friday night, the hotel hosts one of the larger events on Montserrat--the weekly crab races. They are emceed by a platformed calypso singer; betting is encouraged and the locals turn out in bunches. A circular green-felt pad with concentric chalk circles drawn on it is put down on the floor. In the center, restrained under a clear Pyrex lid, are the contestants: six hermit crabs with numbers pasted on their backs. After much slick touting by the emcee, the betting closes, odds are given, the lid is yanked up and they are off--some of them, anyway. For variety, an obstacle race follows and later a slow race--which, when we saw it, was slower than expected until someone realized that the favorite had died. The hit of that evening was a splendidly drunk old gent who looked like Chuck Berry and who seemed to believe the green felt meant a crap game--and so kept throwing red Eastern Caribbean dollars onto it, waiting with a grain for someone to fade him, fade the crabs, fade anything....

St. Kitts: Fodor's this year calls St. Kitts exactly right: "The island has little to gain it great acclaim, but a lot to recommend it for a quiet West Indian holiday." Its 65 square miles are like an average of the other islands.

From the water facing Basseterre, the rest of St. Kitts looks like an idealized Indie: gingerbread capital town strung in sun-bleached pastels along the shore, green land behind converging upward to the dark focus of the soufrière, hung with brooding clouds and draped in necklaces of cane--the definitive Norman Rockwell island.

Up close, it's not quite that. Basseterre is plainer than some of its neighbors, devoted entirely to the needs of the islanders; it doesn't sparkle with razzle-dazzle shops and restaurants. Beaches are fairly few and far between.

The only thing really to do on St. Kitts is spend part of a day wandering around Brimstone Hill--but it's one of the genuine wonders of the Caribbean. A majestic 18th Century British fort sprawled over the top of a bluff 700 feet above the sea, it took more than a century to complete and was constructed with an eye for graceful detail that's surprising when you consider the real point of it all. It was called Brimstone Hill because it lies downwind from the sulphurous rumblings of Mount Misery, the best-named volcano we know. Parts of the fort are still pretty much intact and one large section has been restored. The rest is crumbling into romantic Gothic ruins--you half expect to see Lord Byron appear from behind a pillar, limping along in a melancholy mood.

After that, the main attraction on St. Kitts is loafing, best done at the Rawlins Plantation or the Fairview Inn. Neither is anywhere near a beach. They're both restored plantation houses, but Rawlins is like a reincarnation of colonial times, still surrounded by the ancestral plantation, while the Fairview Inn is more out of Sadie Thompson and more comfortable if you are, too.

Nevis: There is even less going on on Nevis, an hour's ferry ride south of St. Kitts. It was named by Columbus because the clouds hovering over it reminded him of snow, so long had he been out in the sun, and it's smaller yet than Montserrat. In this Bicentennial year, it is remembered by Exxon and others as the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, a smart little bastard if ever there was one. Hamilton House still stands, sagging some and painted blue, home every Thursday of the weekly meeting of the Nevis Lions Club. Such are thrills and chills on Nevis.

It's one of the best places to do absolutely nothing we've ever seen. The Nisbet Plantation, especially, encourages cardinal indolence. It is another restored plantation house but with a true 18th Century--style view of the beach 300 yards away, cut in a generous landscaped swath through lofty rows of coco palms. It is so laid back that the bar is do-it-yourself, strictly honor system. The people who run Nisbet, Geoffrey Boone and his colleague Harriet, live there full time with Sammy, their beautiful cat--and that makes it a warmer, more casual place than most. They should at the very least be commended for throwing a dinner party for 24 every night and not going berserk.

St. Lucia: It's hard to pick favorites, but St. Lucia has to rate somewhere among our top three. Not necessarily because it has more of anything than the other islands but because there's so damn little to fault--except, perhaps, its quiet night life. St. Lucia is still British, as evidenced by the cricket games you see from the road, and the natives are probably the friendliest of any we got to know. And, God, how St. Lucians seem to love their island! A cabdriver with the snappy name of Lord Jackson drove us around the island on roller-coaster roads and serenaded us with calypso songs praising St. Lucia's natural beauty. We felt it was for the delight of singing, not for the tip, and felt good about it.

It's a hilly, luxurious island with a pair of jutting pitons at one end that are usually irresistible to photographers who want to start a pictorial on the Caribbean with a smashing panorama (our photographer was no exception). On the road south, you may stop at the world's only drive-in volcano and watch black water boil and steam, gorge yourself at The Still, a rum distillery turned restaurant, then run down to Chastenet beach to snorkel and snoop around the brilliant reefs. The capital village of Castries is usually not included on postcards, since it's a rather nondescript collection of buildings that went up after a fire in 1948. But there are wonderful little restaurants, including Rain (with propeller fans on the ceiling and posters of Joan Crawford on the walls) and the Coalpot (built on stilts over the water). You can stay cheap or expensive, but the medium-range hotels (Vigie Beach, the Malabar Beach, for example) are probably your best bet. We'll be going back.

Fear of Flying?, Can You Top This?

St. Barth's: It's so good it's the place where people who live on nearby islands go for vacations. But it is also our flapsdown nominee for the hairiest landing in the Caribbean. As in the approach to Montserrat, your plane at first seems insanely to be heading directly toward solid rock; but here it keeps on going, dead at a hill stretched between two higher rock masses like the trace of a web between human fingers. Instead of hitting it, if you are fortunate, you barely skim over the crest--to the right of a large white cross, just for a little cheap Fellini symbolism--so close to the road that cars parked there to gawk scatter when they see you coming, and then hit the hooks as hard as you can, because the landing strip starts right on the other side, yes, and goes downhill for a time before leveling off and ending too soon in the ocean. A pilot we talked with who's been doing it for years said he's never landed there without seeing at least one mistake lying lunched and twisted next to the runway.

Why make this kamikaze mission? Because St. Barth's is ridiculously picturesque. Why else would the Rockefellers have a house there? In its eight square miles are great craggy hills, cliffs and upthrust igneous slabs softened in places by trees and tough desert scrub; wheat-colored fields divided by meandering stone fences decline from hills to rocky windward beaches. On the leeward side, miniature cookie-cutter lagoons in turned-up shades of green and blue are fringed by flawless white arcs of sand; and Gustavia, the tiny pink capital, laid out in a U shape around a deep safe harbor, looks so much like a postcard it ought to be mailed somewhere.

St. Barth's was originally Sweden's lone attempt at a New World colony, a fact you still can see in the square features and blond hair of many people living there--the only mostly white population in the islands. But St. Barth's has belonged to France for so long that the local patois, fluid gibberish to anyone but another local, is said to be classic 17th Century French in tropical mutation. But St. Barth's is so small, and so accustomed to day-trippers from St. Martin, ten minutes away, that you can get along better there in English than on any of the other French islands.

The best way to get around is to rent a car--the Volkswagen Things are cheapest--at the airport. Driving is on the right, unlike on the British islands, but there isn't much right. The roads are an existential lane-plus. Some are so steep that the first time up them, roaring nowhere in first gear, you're certain that you're going to flip over backward, hood over ass. But you don't. And it's easy once you get used to it.

The drive up to the Santa Fe Bar and Restaurant is like that. You're ready for a drink when you get there. If you've been on vacation long enough to be suffering hamburger withdrawal, the specialty of the house is a burger-and-fries combination that's like a shot of grease from home. And from the covered porch on a clear day you can see not forever but Montserrat, St. Kitts, Nevis, St. Eustatius, Saba and St. Martin.

St. Vincent and Friends

St. Vincent is one of the poorest of the islands and hasn't really tooled up for tourism, though there's no reason you can't enjoy its dark-sand beaches if you want to rough it a bit. It serves mostly as a jumping-off point for the string of islets that wend their way south known as the Grenadines. They're all small and beautiful but are usually reserved for the yachting crowd, since air service is private and irregular. But St. Vincent offers access to two other delights as well: Young Island, a tiny, self contained Disneyland of a hotel, moored like a buoy several hundred feet off the coast of St. Vincent. And, if you're willing to clamber aboard the mail boat for an hour-and-a-half ride, there's Bequia, an impossibly perfect South Sea island we shouldn't even be telling you about. In fact, we won't.

St. Martin Combination Plate

For the past few years, so many New Yorkers have been blasting into St. Martin that the island is busily altering itself in their image. That makes it a good place to begin or end a trip. If you're just arriving, pale and twitching, it means the culture shock is considerably less than if you were dropping straight into a timeless dream like Montserrat or St. Lucia. And if you're heading back, it will remind you that New York still exists, in case you have forgotten.

That's another way of saying that St. Martin is a place to boogie, not rest. It closes down when you do. You can wear yourself out in all the standard ways during the day, and after dinner there are first discos and then casinos to occupy your attention.

Compared with the casinos on Curacao or even in Las Vegas, the ones on St. Martin look less like palaces than road houses--but they get the job done. Around closing, at three or so, when they are down to the serious, the drunk and the crazy, they are amazing, indeed-- and just like casinos anywhere else. Suntanned honeys kissing the dice of leisuresuited high rollers, painted old ladies and their debutante daughters covering every combination at the roulette table, silent blackjack junkies talking to their dealers with flicks of their fingers....

What makes St. Martin our choice combination plate is, of course, its variety. There are Bali Ha'i beaches, quiet and isolated, as well as Miami Beach beaches, bustling and glistening with oiled bodies. There are tiny, exquisite inns such as the Pasanggrahan, medium-sized, frill-filled hotels such as The Caravanserai, a number of Hiltontype behemoths such as the Concord and architecturally unique hotels such as La Samanna and Oyster Pond Yacht Club. But perhaps the main attraction is the coexistence of the Manhattan-Dutch portion of the island with the tropical-French portion. St. Martin is the world's smallest patch of land shared by two countries; you can stay in Holland and eat out in France. Customs consists of a couple of cows grazing by a stone marker as you drive past.

The island may not have the very best of anything in the West Indies, but it seems to have a little of most everything you'd want. If it's your first trip to the Caribbean, there are worse places to start.