By Neil Manthorp
‘Smokey’ the taxi driver has very quickly become our surrogate big brother. We lean on his every word, though most of them are unintelligible to us. He knows where everything is, naturally, and the likelihood is that will, too, after a week on this tiny but perfectly formed island community.
He mockingly berates one of us for referring to the capital as ‘Bass-e-terre’ instead of ‘Bass-terre’. The ‘e’ is silent. “Dis no Frech island, dat pleeass (‘Bass’e’terre’) be in Guadalope,” says Smokey.
Before arrival we had been led to believe that St.Kitts was little more than a large rock with two hotels, a couple of restaurants, a port and church or two. How wrong that impression was.
A population of 36,000 certainly makes it sound small, especially when the illegal hotel operating next door to my home in Cape Town has that many guests over for Sunday lunch, but that number discounts the tourists inhabiting the enormous ocean liners which cruise into the harbour on a regular basis.
As we flew into the larger and more established Antigua en-route to St.Kitts there were four enormous ships docked in the harbour although St.Kitts could never manage those logistics at this stage of it’s tourist economy life.
The sugar cane industry on which St.Kitts and the neighbouring Nevis islands depended for centuries was finally shut down after years of loss-making forcing the islanders to confront the stark reality that their visitors were now also their bread and butter.