St.
Barths

I knew two things about St. Barths before I went, and both of them were wrong, or at least incomplete. The first was that it was a place where billionaires kept their boats. The second was that the plane ride in would frighten me. I had been told this by several people, none of whom had been on the plane.

So I went at the start of the off season, on purpose. The big yachts come in January and February. The harbor fills, the streets fill, the restaurants fill, and there is dancing on tables and champagne and cake delivered by waiters holding sparklers. I have nothing against any of that. I just did not want to be standing next to it. I wanted to see whether the island was good without the show, on the theory that a place is only as good as it is on a Tuesday.

The flight is the first thing, so I will deal with it first. You take a small plane from Saint-Martin. It is fifteen minutes. The part that gets people is that you can see straight out through the cockpit, which means you watch the pilots do their job and you watch the plane behave like a plane, tilting and adjusting in a way you normally do not have to think about. The landing has a reputation. The reputation is louder than the landing. I sat near the front, put my headphones on, looked out the window, and it was over before I had finished deciding to be nervous. I had been playing Montego Bay by People Under the Stairs, and it was still going when we landed.

The thing nobody told me, and the thing I keep coming back to, is that St. Barths is French. Not French-influenced. French. It is a small piece of France that has been set down in the Caribbean and left to get on with it. Everyone is speaking French. The bread is the bread you would expect from France. The grocery store, a Monoprix, sells prepared food better than most restaurants I have eaten at in the United States, and I am including the hummus, which I bought twice and would have bought a third time if I had stayed longer.

This matters because it changes what kind of trip you are on. I went to several of the very good restaurants, the ones people book a whole week of dinners around, and the standouts are written up in The Table. Ti' Corail and the Sand Bar are the two I keep recommending. They were excellent. But that is not the part I think about. The part I think about is buying a baguette and some cheese and a bottle of wine and eating it on the deck of the villa while the light went down, having decided, with some effort, that I did not need a reservation that evening.

You have two decisions to make and they sit on two separate axes. Hotel or villa. And which end of the island. I will not pretend to be neutral. For a longer stay I want a villa, because after three or four days a hotel starts to feel like the same morning repeating, and a villa gives you a kitchen, a fridge that is yours, a balcony with a view, and often a small pool. The catch is that villas usually come with a six-night minimum, which sorts the decision out for you if your trip is short. The hotels here are all small and individual, each with its own look, none of them cheap, and their advantage is the beach. Villas almost never come with one. You solve this by paying for a chair at a hotel or beach club for the day, which is how I ended up seeing five hotels' beaches without staying at any of them.

Renting a car is the other thing I would tell you to do, with one condition attached. The roads are narrow and steep and they wind. You will pass a truck coming the other way with a stone wall a few inches off your mirror, and there will be mopeds and quads threading through all of it, and speed bumps to keep you honest. None of this is a problem if you are a confident driver. If you are not, it will be the opposite of a vacation, and you should not do it. Taxis are expensive and slow to arrive, which is a bad combination when you are meant to be relaxing. I had a Mini convertible. The island is small enough that fifteen minutes from Gustavia to Grand Cul de Sac is nothing, and worth it, especially if you are going to swim where the sea turtles are.

Since I saw all five, here is the part of this that is closer to a guide. The five main hotels run roughly east to west along the island, each with its own look and its own kind of guest, and each with a beach, which is the thing villas do not have. I have put a US town next to each one. This is not an insult. It is the fastest way I have found to tell you about the design, the crowd and the general feeling of a place without making you read a paragraph, and a photograph would not do it either. They are all good. I ate well at almost all of them.

The sea turtles are at Grand Cul de Sac, in the shallows off the bay, and they are worth the drive on their own. They do not particularly care that you are there. They float in that weightless, unbothered way, like astronauts who have stopped being impressed by space, and you can swim near them without disturbing anything. It is a strange and good thing to be allowed to do. You also see turtles on the roads here, the regular kind, the land ones, which sounds like a joke and is not. I saw two in a week, plus a few more around the beach clubs. You drive accordingly.

I should be honest about what I did not do. There are hikes here, to views and to beaches, and people post photographs of them, and I did not take a single one. I am not going to dress this up as a philosophy. I just did not get to them. What I did instead was stop, without planning to, at a hotel restaurant for a late lunch, or pull into Gustavia in the afternoon and sit at Bar de L'Oubli with chicken wings and fries while the breeze came off the water and a cold beer on tap tasted better than a beer has any business tasting.

That is the dispatch, really. I went looking for the island underneath the headlines, and it was there, and it was easy to find, because I had chosen a week when most people were not looking. You get all the benefit of the money that has been spent on this place, the same views and the same kitchens, without the cost of being in the room while it performs. I came home already working out when I would go back. Not in January. I do not have a yacht, and more to the point, I do not want to be there when everyone with one is.