St. Maarten - The Friendly Island

Written by Tim Loendersloot 

Since I ever stepped out of the big, white plane which brought me to the friendly island, as the local people would like to refer to St. Maarten, I have been looking around with such amazement and sometimes even confusion. On the one hand they try to be a major player within the Caribbean region, especially with the main focus on the tourism industry, but on the other hand they just don’t seem to know how to exploit it efficiently. I guess it comes with Mother Nature on this specific part of the globe. Is it not possible today? No problem, we’ll do it tomorrow. 

The Dutch side of St. Maarten – there is also a French part in the North – is an ‘independent municipality’ within the Kingdom of the Netherlands since 2010. It has its own government, or better said, had its own government (as it has fallen a couple of weeks ago), but it still rules by the Dutch law. At least, it should be. On the second day of my stay here I woke up with a happy feeling in my quite old but sound hotel room. I looked out of the window and I started to smile. 

The sun was shining, the sky was blue and I looked out over the Great Bay with its turquoise colored water and the huge cruise ships at the pier. I took a quick shower and went out onto the boardwalk at the bay to get some delicious breakfast at a local bakery. After that I went to a local car dealer, by advice of my co-worker I just met, and I managed to rent a car for the full six months I was going to follow my internship on the island. A white Toyota Corolla with a French license plate and compared to most cars on the island it looked quite good. After I checked the car for any damages or deviations I signed the contract and paid the dealer, a local French guy called Serge, having his own little ‘garage’. 

Then I took off for a little sightseeing tour around the island. While driving around on sometimes poor, worn roads, with a lot of holes and bumps in it, I suddenly realized that the guy from the car rental had never asked me for my drivers’ license and I started to laugh out loud. Just imagine I was only about 18 years old or so and I had never driven a car before I could have managed to rent this car. It’s all possible on beautiful St. Maarten. 

Next day I went to the real estate agent who I made an appointment with the previous day. A nice and cheerful fellow who is originally from India and started up his own real estate company on St. Maarten. He took me for a ride to show me two apartments which were available for rent. On our way to the first apartment he told me some rules about the traffic on St. Maarten (at least for the Dutch side as the ‘Gendarmerie’ is much stricter on the French side). When you have parked your vehicle alongside the road and you want to get away you just ‘throw’ your car backwards on the road and everyone on the road has to stop and give you priority. 

As a thank you sign, people hunk the horn twice as they drive off. Besides that you can park your car almost anywhere you like, without getting towed away or receiving a ticket. Furthermore, and this was the most surprising fact to me, you can drink as much alcoholic beverages as you like and still drive home. As long as you don’t cause an accident, you’ll never have a problem. You can even drink while you’re driving and wave to a police officer with a bottle of beer in your hand. Also when all of your lights on the car are working, or you don’t have any damage to your car (think of dents, rust or missing parts), you actually don’t fit in the overall image. You even have a bigger chance to become a victim of a car burglary. That’s why they also advise you not to wash your car that regularly. Funny the way it is on this island. 

The same thing occurred when I tried the rent a boat for a day to go out on the sea with my cousin. I asked the owner (quite an American show-off with a different tough story every time I see him) politely if I needed a boat license and while smiling at me he said: “If I now ask you if you have a boat license, you are going to tell me you do and then we’re all set. May you run into the coast guard when you’re out on the open, you just tell them you have one, but unfortunately you forgot to bring it from Holland. Savy?” So we went out with the boat called ‘Dauntless’ and of course we've never seen any coast guard and we had a wonderful day. 

All these facts together make you realize that people are not really living by the rules here, if there even are any. Everybody just does what they want, whenever they want to, or not. No hurrying, no stress and no rushing. But above all, the people of St. Maarten are very friendly and helpful. There is hardly any difference between black or white (for the eye) and people from all different origins live among each other and most parts of the island are clean as well. The most important reason for this is because people from St. Maarten are very proud of their country and you better don’t say anything ugly about it. Even though they think the island is ruined now, with all the constructions popping up and the growing amount of people visiting the island, they are still proud ‘St. Maarteners’ which belong to this friendly island which once was a paradise to them. To me it still is!