RH note: This week we’re happy to feature posts by Andy and Shaira, who honeymooned on the beautiful Caribbean island of St. John.
Andy says: For all of the good seafood and tropical fruit to be eaten, the real attraction here is nature. In a fitting story for Saint John, the National Park was donated to the US Park Service by Laurence Rockefeller who bought the island earlier in the century after admiring it from his yacht. This has led to the vast majority of the island being protected, accessible only by hiking trail (including several pristine beaches). Trails lead directly from Cruz Bay into the hinterlands. One easy hike (1/2 hour) from the park headquarters in Cruz Bay will take you to the aptly named Honeymoon Beach, which on the day we visited it, we had to share with just two other people.
It is hard to put into words the kind of beauty these places hold – let me just say that when you are here you find the essential – and still pristine – source of all of the television and magazine clichés of the “tropics” you are used to seeing all of the time, in real life (perhaps a bit like being in “Lost”, except there is no man-eating smoke or rampaging, gun-toting hippies). It’s amazing.
A word for the wise though – resist the lazy decision to wear your sandals or flip-flops on these trails: the terrain can be rocky and most of the island is steep inclines and descents, so hiking requires both the right shoes and fair physical condition.
Another great trail is the Reef Bay trail. Although we are pretty hard-core do-it-yourself types, taking the guided version of that hike with a ranger/archeologist is really great. The theme of the hike when we took it was the “edible jungle” so we worked our way through the tropical forest eating incredibly bizarre nuts and plants (including a so-called “natural protein-powder” found in seed pods that tastes identical to bananas). The hike also includes some poignant reminders of the Caribbean’s history of conquest and empire: there are pre-Columbian Taino petroglyphs and the ruins of a sugar plantation (including the slave quarters). The plantation buildings are particularly striking and eerie – they are teeming with bat colonies and the 19th century machinery used to process cane sugar is still present.
From here the walk concludes at a pristine beach, where you rendez-vous with a waiting boat, joining it by way of a rubber zodiac (or if you happen to be a tri-athlete, swimming out to it, as some apparently do). The skipper of the boat, incidentally, is also worth chatting up: he’s a retired coast guard captain who sailed around the world from California only to end up on the island towards the end of his voyage; one of many visitors to Saint John, it seemed, who happened upon the place and never left.
