The Savage Traveler: US Virgin Islands Part 1

I am sitting on our porch overlooking Fish Bay. The 8:00 sun is shining out of a tropical blue sky and an elegant breeze is whiffling my hair and rattling the palm fronds at rail level next to me. Our villa is partway up the hillside, just outside Cruz Bay on St. John Island in the US Virgin Islands. The hillsides are sprinkled with villas large and small but the roads and driveways to them are hidden in the green foliage of a jungle restoring itself since the eighteen hundreds when the entire island was razed to grow sugar cane. We are near the end of a several mile dead end road where no one comes near and we don't need curtains or anything else for privacy. The entire house stands open all the time and our host assures us we can leave it without concern; there aren't even any keys for us! We are on the middle floor of a building built into the side of the hill, in a two bedroom/two bath apartment with large windows (two in the shower!) and sliding doors on three sides, and a porch that goes the length of the apartment and wraps around beside our room. Below us is storage for beach toys and snorkeling equipment that is ours to use, and a laundry room at our disposal. Our hosts, John and Linda, live above us but at least one of them is usually in town from 6:00-10:00 handling their coffee shop/bookstore and their gift/jewelry store. With a 20,000 gallon cistern that gathers rainwater from the roof and a good filtration system we can drink the water and the apartment truly has all the comforts of home and more so. After our Sunday, April 19 3:00am wake-up and uneventful flights from Flint to Atlanta to St. Thomas and a ferry ride with our Jeep Cherokee to St. John, our host met us at the ferry dock and had us follow him up to the villa. We would have never found it on our own on these twisting, turning roads up the steep hillsides, where they drive American cars (driver on the left) on British roads (cars on the left side of the road). Luckily Marv is up to the challenge and when we arrived about 15 minutes later he punched our location on the GPS as our "Home". Wherever we end up all week, the GPS and the four wheel drive should be able to get us back to the villa. John had brought us ground coffee from his shop and skim milk and Linda had left us a wonderful loaf of homemade almond orange bread so we were set for breakfast. They had placed deep pink bougainvillea everywhere to decorate--on the beds, counters, on a basket of hand towels, even on the toilet paper rolls. Any that we left in place dried to a tissue-paper consistency and still looked lovely. After unpacking and unwinding a bit we fell gratefully into bed with all the windows open and the ever present breeze blowing through this little slice of paradise.

Ferry from St. Thomas to St. John

The Villa from the driveway

Steps down to our apartment

Porch on the East side of the apartment

Kris in the apartment living room

Our bedroom with a door out to the north side porch

Monday, April 20 the sun rose through the reed drop blinds of our sliding door and into our faces around 6:00. But after our good night's sleep we were ready to go. Marv made coffee and we slowly gathered on the east facing porch to enjoy the coffee and bread. We made our way down to the Virgin Islands National Park Visitor Center by 9:00 and found out where to go for the 10:00 ranger-led Water's Edge hike we wanted to do. It took us about 20 minutes to drive to the north shore of the island to the Annaberg ruins parking lot. We were met there by Ranger Laurel who told us we were being joined by a high school Marine Biology class from St. Thomas. There is no high school on St. John but two on St. Thomas that serve both islands. We learned that this school will graduate 300 this year and the other school is like-sized. Another couple vacationing on St. John joined us and then we began the hike. We knew that we should have water shoes on and did, but hadn't been told we should be prepared to get wet up to our thighs! And Kris and Heidi fell on the uneven bottom, destroying one of their cameras so that was a bummer. But the hike was fun and informative and we saw an amazing amount of creatures including sea urchins, coral, sea stars, sea cucumbers, conchs, crabs, a ray and even a sea turtle. Laurel talked about the ecology of the mangrove swamp beside the shore and the coral reef of the bay. It was a good hour well spent and we enjoyed the kids and their teacher, who is a native of the Virgin Islands. Back at the parking lot we took the long stairs up to the ruins of the Annaberg sugar cane factory which includes the base of one of the five windmills on St. John, built to grind the sugar cane. The juice would run downhill through troughs to the factory where it was used to make sugar and molasses. The industry flourished on the island from 1795 until 1848, when slaves were emancipated and it was no longer financially viable. Miss Olivia was in the small restored cookhouse making "Dumb Bread" which we could sample with cheese, guava jam and fruit punch. We hung around on the pleasant hillside, just talking and enjoying the magnificent view of the British Virgin Islands right across the Narrows. Everywhere on the island there are deep pink, purple, orange and yellow flowers in full bloom framing every magnificent vista. When we had dried off and were feeling pretty hungry we headed back to town and found the shopping center. We got lunch at a deli on the third floor and ate it at a table outside before buying groceries and beer on the first level across from John and Linda's coffee shop. Back at our villa we relaxed and read for the rest of the afternoon and about 7:00 we made red beans and rice to go with the rotisserie chicken we had bought and celery sticks. Food is really expensive on the island. There is a brewery on St. John called Virgin Islands Brewery and we got their IPA and their Amber Ale but everything else is imported. (we later found out that the beer is now brewed from the Island recipes but in Maine, not on St. John). Luckily we brought quite a bit of food with us so we should do okay eating out one meal a day. We hoped to catch Lansing native Josh Davis in The Voice but thought of it too late and missed him. We saw the last two singers and then talked and read until going to bed.