Sean Phillips and Louise Knobel, Bird Rock Beach Hotel, March 1999

Our holiday was fantastic! Louise and I went to the island of St. Kitts for a one week vacation. St. Kitts is in the South-Eastern Caribbean near Antigua, Montserrat, etc. We stayed at the Bird Rock Beach Hotel, at which my brother Ian is the resident Scuba shop manager. The trip was booked through Signature Vacations, and had a 5 hour direct flight from Toronto to St. Kitts on Royal airlines. We had a short layover in Antigua on the way back, which actually became a longer stop than expected because of a problem with the airplane. The plane was very cramped, so it probably would have been worth the extra $40 they wanted to pre-book a seat in one of the exit rows.....

The island is extremely beautiful, and very quietly laid back. There's not much of a nightlife, which suited us just fine! We did a two-dive scuba trip every morning except for two days (including Monday because you aren't supposed to dive within 24 hours of flying), and my first night dive on Thursday night. The night dive was amazing with tons of stuff to see. We dove on a wreck that we had already done during the day, so were familiar with the area and knew where we were. We saw several massive turtles (2 to 3 feet in diameter), a couple of stingrays, and a few lobsters. The diving was all incredible! The reef on the northern end of the island is protected within a national marine park, so the structure of the reef was amazing!! Ian, who has over 1500 dives in his log book and has lived and worked all over the Caribbean, called it a "world-class dive site" and said that you won't get anything better anywhere else!! There are incredible reef structures towering 15 to 30 feet above a white sandy bottom, with fish and wild life teeming around everything! The sandy bottom was filled with garden eels which look like weeds, 6 to 12" high, floating on the bottom. If you get close to them they pull back into their burrow in the sand. Throughout the dives we saw too many different types of fish to name, moray eels, and huge barracuda!! On my last dive of the trip I saw a three legged turtle, a school of smaller barracuda, and huge porcupine fish.

The one day that we didn't dive we hiked through a rainforest. It was just Louise and I with a guide that we hired for the day, so we went at our own pace and saw tons of animals and plants that don't grow here. There were many different types of palm trees and other plants too numerous to remember. It actually really surprised me how much it reminded me of walking through the forest in Vancouver!! The highlight of the day was seeing the monkeys roaming wild on the island!

One afternoon we went out on the dive boat for a snorkeling trip on the southern part of the island. This was a great afternoon of swimming, sunning, and playing with the fish. We saw many of the same creatures that we had seen on scuba, including many types of fish, some squid, and a few little crabs under the rocks. We took a disposable underwater camera with us, but it's only good to about 10 feet deep so we couldn't use it on scuba, so this was the perfect opportunity to use it. I followed several fish around until I could get good close-ups of them. Hopefully they will turn out!!

We took a siesta after lunch just about every day, and then lazed around the pool for a couple of hours. Because we were diving every morning, we didn't party very much, but we did have a few of the local beers with most lunches and dinners, and we managed to drain a couple of bottles of Rum through the week too. The food was incredible, but I'm not sure if we saw much of the local cuisine or not. I don't think the locals could afford what we ate most of the time. Although having said that, one of best things we ate was the chicken that the locals barbecued right on the beach. They set up shop with a large cooler full of beer and a barbecue loaded with chicken, beef, or lobster for a couple dollars!

The money used on the island is the Eastern Caribbean dollar, which is fixed to the US dollar with an exchange rate of 2.65 EC$ per US$, but they accept the US$ pretty well everywhere too. Expect to get change in EC$ though. It was really funny to give someone a $20 US bill and get $25 EC back!! The touristy things were not cheap! T-shirts were commonly $25 US!! Most of the tours cost from $30 to $90 US depending on how long it was. We had planned to do a catamaran trip to Nevis (another island right beside St. Kitts), but decided not too after we realized that on the dive boat we had already seen most of what we would have seen on that trip anyway, and the catamaran stopped to do some snorkeling a the same spot we went to. There were several other tours offered though, including a tour around the island of St. Kitts, a ferry over to Nevis and a tour of that island, and others too, but we decided against them too. The cheapest thing on the island is booze!! $5 US for a 750 mL bottle of Jamaican Appleton Rum at the grocery store!!

It was great to see Ian too. We spent lots of time with him, including having breakfast and lunch in one or the other of our rooms most days. We had a kitchenette with a fridge so that we could do just that very easily. His room was only two doors down from ours, so it was easy to share stuff. WE particularly liked sharing HIS potato chips!!! We usually went out or to the restaurant for dinner, but he did make a couple of great meals for us too, particularly on the last night that we were there. That night was pretty crazy though because we sampled many of the local beers and then somehow managed to finish two bottles of rum as well.

Well, that's enough typing! If you want more details about the trip, let me know. There are more photos from this trip in the photo archive.... Check them out!

Cheers,
Sean Phillips
ssphillips@bigfoot.com