For our first visit to the Virgin Islands, Varya and I escaped Houston in chilly January to enjoy a warm week in the Caribbean paradise of Saint Croix, easily one of our favorite vacations so far!
The first thing you notice after landing at the little Henry E. Rohlsen Airport (STX) on the small island–besides your rental car being scratched and beat to hell (just circle the whole car on the card and write “damaged”)–is that despite driving on the left side of the road like Brits, all cars come from the US mainland and have steering wheels on the left. So, you the driver navigate the left edge of the narrow, twisting roads avoiding tropical flora while trying to keep the rest of the car and your passenger away from oncoming traffic in the middle of the road…very strange. Peering under a big left-pointing arrow sticker at the top of the windshield, I verbally repeated my Cruzan driving mantra, “Stay left…stay left…stay left…”, but still tended to drift right in parking lots. If they didn’t want to import right-steering-wheel cars, why not switch to good ole American right-side driving? It probably wouldn’t take more than a long weekend to switch all the signage on this small island. 😉
Surviving the wrong-sided drive from the south side of the island over big hills to the north, we arrived at our Carambola Beach Resort, dined on the seaside deck and rested from the journey. It wasn’t until the next morning that we truly appreciated the beauty of this rather secluded beach resort butted up against the green hills rolling into the bright blue sea. Our first day was spent relaxing on the beach and enjoying the resort itself before exploring the island in the coming days.
When we ventured out of the resort the next day, we drove east (on the wrong side) along the north shore to Christiansted for lunch by the docks and marina, watching fishing and recreational boats and seaplanes come and go, before continuing east until the road ended at the easternmost spot in all US territory, Point Udall. It is quite a unique experience to stand on a point surrounded in nearly all directions by endless water.
One of the highlights of the week was our evening bioluminescence tour with Sea Thru Kayaks. Drawn to the idea of maximizing our bioluminescent viewing through see-through kayaks, we soon learned these were designed for little people and kids, so we opted for a larger, quicker, more stable open sea kayak, the better choice for full-sized adults. Regardless of kayak size, everyone gets splashed in these tours, and we dressed for a wet nighttime adventure. The glowing and occasionally sparking microbes in Bioluminescent Bay were clearly visible once it got dark, responding to the agitation of our oars with defensive luminosity, albeit more subtly than I expected. To be honest, more than the bio-glow, I enjoyed simply kayaking through tropical bays and lagoons in the dark, quietly gliding across tranquil black water like people have been doing here for countless centuries.
Carambola was never crowded, so beach chairs and dining tables were always available, and we often felt like we had the beach to ourselves. We rented snorkeling gear for a couple days, awkwardly strode into the surf, and swam over reefs just offshore teeming with colorful fish.
On our final day in Saint Croix, we checked out of Carambola and drove west (on the wrong side) to the larger commercial port of Frederiksted, where cruise ships come to port, for one last seaside lunch before heading southeast to Rohlsen airport for our return flight to the mainland.
Rewind to New Years Eve Day, a few weeks before our Saint Croix adventure. Every New Year by tradition, Russians watch an old romcom movie, The Irony of Fate (worth checking out with subtitles). After rewatching it, Varya asked if Americans have a similar traditional New Years movie. The closest we came up with was Trading Places with Eddie Murphy, Dan Ackroyd, and Jamie Lee Curtis, since it takes place between Christmas and New Year. As Billy Ray and Louis exchanged congratulatory toasts in the final scene on a beautiful beach, triumphant over the evil Duke brothers, Varya remarked, “We’ll soon be there!”, meaning somewhere like that tropical paradise.
Before we flew to the island, she’d learned that the Trading Places ending scene had indeed been filmed somewhere on Saint Croix. “Cool coincidence,” we thought. Then midweek, as I swam out to a buoy and looked back at the rocky hill on my right giving way to the beach on my left, I realized it appeared all too familiar. Back in the room, I grabbed my iPad and confirmed my suspicion: the Trading Places final scene occurred on the very same Davis Bay Beach we’d been lounging on, the movie filming just a few years before the Carambola Beach Resort was built on the same spot! I’d been swimming right where the sailboat was anchored! We hadn’t realized how accurate Varya’s prediction would prove to be 🙂
Varya also informed me that Dmitri, the waiter who takes their “lobster and cracked crab” order at the end of Trading Places, was played by Barry Dennen, the same actor who’d played Pontius Pilate in the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar. Skeptical, I had to look it up to confirm. I couldn’t believe Dennen had gone from so dramatically portraying such a consequential Roman Governor, belting out, “Don’t let me stop your great self destruction!”, to a bit part like Dmitri exclaiming, “Extrrra primo good, sir!” in response to a lunch order. Saint Croix taught me much. 🙂
Moonday 