St. Thomas United States Virgin Islands. 12.2.09 - 17.2.09
Swiftwing
Sat 21 Feb 2009 12:09
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St. Thomas
USVI. N 18:20.07 W 64:55.61
Bev left you in the last blog with us
just having arrived in St. Thomas. This is the easternmost satellite
of Uncle Sam, the group, consisting St. Thomas. St. John and St
Croix, were bought by the Americans from the Danish for twenty five million
dollars in the last century to forestall any unfriendly foreign power from
parking on their doorstep, which was great bit of forethought by the Roosevelt
administration, foretelling The Cuban Crisis seventy years in advance. The
Spanish Virgin Islands, to the west are also owned by the USA, but are part of
Puerto Rico, which is also American.To gain entry we needed our US visas that
we travelled to London for in the summer when we were home.
St. Thomas, as far as the locals are
concerned, is bolted directly onto mainland America, and it clearly
enjoys the benefits as well as the drawbacks of this link. The island of St.
Thomas is roughly thirteen miles long by three wide and has a population of
fifty thousand. The main town Charlotte Amalie, the capital city of the
group is roughly in the middle on the south coast and is a major seaport
with a long and colourful history. The Danes, who originally owned these islands
opened them up to 'Free Trade'; another way of saying that pirates and
privateers were welcome and their booty sold in the open markets of the
town, no questions asked. A favourite target was the Spanish bullion ships
heading home loaded with Mexican and Peruvian gold.
The town of Charlotte Amalia, named after
a Danish queen, is very clean and modern but the old quarter is beautifully
preserved and in some cases restored and still in every day use as a
working market town. The colonial buildings are built of stone, are narrow and
tall, and very much representative of Denmark. Dronningens Gade (Queen Street),
all the street names are in Danish, is the best example of this with hundreds of
arched and wooden shuttered doorways leading directly off the main road into
individual small shops.
The infrastructure of the island is first
world, the roads are excellent and the vehicles and traffic lights
etc. are straight from Uncle Sam. The port is extremely busy and had a
Hawaii 5- 0 (for those who remember the 60's - book him Danno) feel to it with
bustling ferries, float planes taking off and landing every few minutes,
superyachts at the supermarina and cruise ships in every day. Our anchorage was
just outside this marina where the stores; sorry that should be boutiques, sold
such luxury items as Gucci handbags, Prada dresses and Rolex watches and of
course fantastic ice-cream. As I don't need another Gucci handbag and Bev won't
let me buy another Prada dress there wasn't a lot there for me. Bev didn't want
another Rolex divers watch so we bypassed these boutiques in favour of K.mart
which is Woolies on steroids. Forgot to mention that we were buzzed by a
float plane one day as we dinghied across to Customs and
Immigration.
A lot of subsidy is paid to the
islands in the form of funding for education, hospitals, police force and
housing. The island has the finest housing we have yet seen in the Caribbean
with absolutely no shanty towns. Everyone seems to be able to afford a bright
new truck and again, old vehicles were in the minority. A throwback from the
Dutch ownership is that though all the vehicles are left hand drive, they drive
on the left, which means that there are loads of fender benders; only in
America!
The other side of the coin is that there
are forty- yes -forty murders a year here and for such a small population there
is over one hundred police cars and a couple of hundred police officers. Most of
the murders are drug related or domestics. There are four hundred homeless
persons. My friend told us that you can quite often hear gunshots fired
into the air -or elsewhere- and sirens are an every day sound. When we were
there they were almost constant, so much so that you began not to notice
them
That first day, Martin and Roma showed us
around then left us in K.mart for some retail therapy After buying bits and
pieces for the boat we had a very pleasant lunch in a small Scottish restaurant
called MacDonald's, I think the owners must be from Skye. It was the first
MacDonald's I'd had in a year and only about the third time I have had meat
since we left Scotland in November. We found a quiet corner of the air
conditioned building and spent a very pleasant half hour watching 21st century
America go by.
When we were in Dominica last year,
I tried to look up my old best pal from the early seventies,
Arden Shillingford. We were inseparable and got up to all sorts of high
jinks together. I called at his mother's home but she told me that he now worked
in insurance in St. Thomas. She is well into her late eighties and couldn't give
me his phone number or of the company he worked for. However, she gave me his
son's mobile number which I promptly lost. As we were heading back to the
boat from MacDonald's we passed a shopping mall which also housed an insurance
agents. We entered the office on the off-chance and said to the guy behind the
desk, that this might be a shot in the dark but did he know an insurance agent
on the island called Arden Shillingford. He put his hand up and said "that's me"
When we established who each other was we had lots of hugs (not in a gay way)
and exclamations of disbelief. He was delighted that we had made the effort
to trace him and phoned his wife to tell her, "guess who just walked in off the
street". We then had a couple of hours together where he glowingly updated Bev
of my misdemeanours as an errant teenager, none of which we will go into
here. We then spent the next three days together, he and his family came
out for a sail on Swiftwing and us having a tour of the island in his
truck and dinner at his house, then a picnic and a day at the beach on the
holiday Monday which was 'Presidents Day'. His wife Andrea also remembered us as
my mum taught her and her sister at school and she remembered my
sister Alison though she was a year younger.
We had a terrific time with Arden and his
family and all too soon it was time to move on again, this time to the Spanish
Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
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