Adventure in Paradise: Gridlock in the Diamond Lane

My wife and I are home from a 10-day cruise of the Caribbean aboard the Motor Ship Noordam, of the Holland America Line.

The Noordam is a ship, not a boat, being more than 100 feet longer than two football fields. Neither is it a Love Boat, with sex running rampant. Most of our fellow passengers appeared to be in their 70s.

“These people are old,” I said to my wife as we reclined in deck chairs, watching them trot or walk around the promenade deck.

“So who isn’t?” she said.

Funny, how one never thinks of one’s self as old.

I’m not sure it wasn’t a love boat, though. Most of the passengers, if not all, held hands as they promenaded. They seemed to have a great deal of affection for one another.

We boarded the ship in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., on a Saturday afternoon, and disembarked at the same wharf 10 days later. We had spent three days at sea and five straight days in Caribbean ports.

The five islands run together in my mind. I am not sure whether we saw the topless sunbathers in Guadeloupe or Antigua. I believe it was in the Virgin Islands that my wife bought some exotic T-shirts for our grandsons.

There was hardly time to explore an island in one day. Mostly we were trapped in shopping districts whose narrow streets redefined gridlock. It seemed that every other shop was a jewelry shop. In St. Maarten four jewelry shops existed side by side in one short block.

The islands, of course, were gorgeous--lush with tropical trees and flowers, sparkling beaches and pink mansions, many owned by rich tenants from the mainland. The towns were edged by suburbs of quaint tumble-down shacks, each with its own wild garden.

St. Maarten is oddly divided between French and Dutch control. After a century of fighting, with the Spanish and British also involved, a treaty gave France 21 square miles and Holland, 16. Like most inhabitants of the Caribbean islands, its people are descendants of slaves. It is interesting to note that France abolished slavery in 1848 and Holland in 1863--before America, the land of the free, did so.

Marigot, the French town, lies on a pretty bay under a ridge on which stands the remains of an old fort--a symbol of the folly of those nationalistic wars.

We took a shore excursion on Guadeloupe, an island that has been French since 1815. Like St. Maarten, it was discovered by Columbus, but the Spanish showed no interest in it. Our bus took us into a rain forest that rewarded us with a pretty waterfall.

We encountered a peculiar circumstance at Barbados, which became independent in 1966 after 350 years of British rule. Our ship’s announcer informed us that all the shops in Bridgetown would be closed until 12:30 p.m. to allow their employees to take part in a protest march.

A general shop closing is rather a disaster on a Caribbean cruise, but we went ashore to see the march. There were thousands of demonstrators, eight or 10 abreast, marching, or rather dancing, through the town’s narrow streets, joyously singing “We Shall Overcome” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

We engaged a taxi driver to take us into the interior, since the shops were closed. I asked him what the march was about; he said it was against the government, not the employers. Anyway it was peaceful and everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time.

Back in Bridgeport, we ate lunch at a seafood cafe overlooking the harbor and Trafalgar Square, with its statue of the British naval hero, Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson. This statue was erected in 1815, 16 years before the famous statue of Nelson in London’s Trafalgar Square.

At Antigua we took a 25-minute boat ride to a coral reef where we transferred to the submarine Atlantis and descended 90 feet to look through windows at the fantastic undersea life. Being claustrophobic, I was reluctant to go, and my wife was astonished when I finally agreed.

As they do on airplanes, they gave us a briefing on the use of life vests, but I knew that if the sub ruptured none of us would get out alive. The fishes darting back and forth in our windows seemed so safe and serene, however, that my anxiety subsided.

Our next landfall was St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands. Historically Danish, this paradise was bought by the United States for $25 million in 1917 to keep it from the Germans. The legend is that Columbus, so enchanted by the islands’ beauty, named them for the 11,000 virgin followers of St. Ursula who were martyred in the early days of Christianity. Doesn’t ring true to me. I suspect he named them after some virgin of his acquaintance.

Tuesday, Nassau. (If it’s Tuesday it must be Nassau.)