Glendale, California
Upon reflection, I realize that in my funk, I neglected to discuss anything remotely positive about the U.S. Virgin Islands. First among these oversights is the great group of people I met on the islands, particularly on St. John. Cinnamon Bay Campground inspires a loyal group of repeat visitors, many of them retired, who come every year to camp for weeks at a time. They are a social and intelligent group and meeting them was among the highlights of my visit, especially since a couple of them took me under their wing and showed me around.
A smaller group of interesting visitors to the campground consisted of young backpackers. I greatly enjoyed an evening of cards and drinking with these folks, too. Two of them were a brother and sister team backpacking around the Caribbean. They spent the night
before I met them stealth camping: sleeping tentless under a tree on the beach at a St. Thomas resort! It turns out the tree was poisonous and they were covered in rash. They were cheerful about their misfortune, though. Another of the young folks was a Republican geography major who voted for Obama. He now works in a real estate brokerage. We had interesting conversations, of course.Also, I should say that there is no doubt that the beaches of St. John are lovely. The sand is soft and white and the water is soothingly warm. Next time I visit this part of the world I will charter a boat so as to avoid the cruise ship crowds and search for the rare coral reef that has not been damaged by carelessless or overdevelopment.
1-23-2009
John F. Kennedy International Airport
New York, New York
Much of the reason I travel is to seek out places that are genuine and unique, places where the cultural landscape draws on the local. The "historic" part of St. Thomas is a waterfront neighborhood of old Dutch warehouses, homes, and churches. The majority of these have been converted into shops selling all manner of clothing, watches and jewelry. Very little of what's sold in these shops bears any relation to St. Thomas, St. John, or even the Caribbean for that matter. Products and shops simply sprout and grow wherever cruise ships disgorge their cargo of eager vacationing shoppers. As a lover of geography I was saddened by this disconnect which, while common, is made worse by the nature of cruise ships and their cargo. On diminutive St. John there were more local restaurants, but the same problem persists only on a smaller scale with a cluster of shops and malls providing more non-essential goods: t-shirts, chocolate, jewelery and the like. These things are neither created nor consumed by locals. They are not required for life on the island. They do not reflect the history or culture of the town. My first day spent in the Virgin Islands was spent wandering in this tourist mess and pondering its meaning. It brought on a funk that I was unable to fully shake off throughout the week.
The placelessness of St. Thomas got me to wondering both about my own wanderings and disconnections from places and about the global trends that seem to be spreading American rootlessness worldwide. For decades American public places became less and less unique as suburbanization, franchises and shopping malls undermined central cities. Tourism and especially mass tourism have created scores of tropical vacation "places" that rely on careless, often drunken, travelers for their sustenance and inspiration. Such "destinations" strike me as analogous to the disconnected wanderings of many American citizens. My life journey thus far is fairly typical of these trends. As we move from city to city our children often are raised far from where their parents were born and raised. Then our families themselves are separated into isolated individual parts by moves made by young adults in search opportunity. My family, for example, now lives in widely disparate corners of this expansive country with members in New York, New Hampshire, Georgia, and Florida. Moreover, while I've spent much of the last decade in Pasadena and Glendale, I've changed apartments and neighborhoods every year or so for about 15 years now. And of course I originally hailed from rural Pennsylvania, but the
n we moved on to Providence. Later I traveled on to New York, Santa Cruz, San Diego, and now Glendale. Maybe this is why I've grown to love places that embrace native characteristics in art, architecture, recreation, music, and food. Remarkably I find myself immediately at home in such places even though I never lived there: places like Flagstaff, Arizona or San Francisco or Portland, to mention only a few. In other towns I'm truly lost, despite knowing literally right where I stand on the globe. St. Thomas and St. John are in this second, ignominious group. Others come immediately to mind: Ixtapa, Mexico, Phoenix, Arizona, and countless stretches of suburban America covered as they are with scattered subdivisions and soulless shopping malls.1-21-2009
Baked in the Sun Bakery
St. John, USVI
The drinking of alcohol on this island is commonplace to the point of absurdity. No open container laws. No enforcement of driving-under-the-influence laws. So much so that locals claim that "it's not illegal to drink and drive." This claim is false of course, but in practice they're correct. Many passing automobiles carry beers instead of coffee in their drink holders. It
strikes me as fundamentally sad how many people view their tropical vacations as primarily an opportunity to overindulge in alcohol. I don't mean to preach or condemn, I mean this comment simply as an observation. I've seen it all over the tropical world. Guests at resort hotels and backpackers alike, often overweight and out of shape, spend a week downing fruity drinks or endless beers from mid-morning until the early hours. They sleep off much of each alternate day and at the end of a week of such debauchery go back to whatever cold climate they'd fled feeling as if they've just had the most relaxing and fulfilling experience. I only pray they don't act like this at home, but I suspect that the beach resorts tend attract a certain kind of lazy alcoholic and that's why I meet so many of them at beaches everywhere.These places make overindulgence commonplace and celebrate abuse. I increasingly understand alcohol as our most dangerous and debilitating recreational drug. There's definitely some ambivalence about the tourism that sustains this place. I find that most of the people who work in service here are quite rude. I'd much prefer to visit the Florida or Texas coast where both the beaches and the people are better. Wow, the English language here is a greatly changed thing. Grown taxi drivers speak a slang that is less than a creole, more a simple pidgin that is nearly unintelligible to the outside world. Great mountains, rocky soil. Tectonic uplift (along the Caribbean plate edges?) and subsequent erosion built these islands. Thin, scrubby trees. Climbing cactus. Hiking was a bit disappointing. The humidity makes every physical activity a sticky, sweaty mess, but the weather is made more comfortable by constant Trade Winds especially at higher elevations. As a result, it's the best air for being next-to-naked I ever had the ple
asure to feel against my skin and this remains true both day and night. Transportation here is expensive with every taxi charging a fixed price per person, regardless of the number of people. Most trips cost between $9 and $16 and you find yourself paying these fees over and over and in each direction. There are no sidewalks outside of shopping areas so walking anywhere is a dangerous game of chicken with the speeding traffic and its drunkards.Obviously, my mood is foul during this trip. I seem to be seeing mostly the bad side of things.
1-17-2009
Cinnamon Bay Campground
St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands
I departed Island View Guest House today by hitching a ride with some folks headed for their charter boat. I jumped out at a waterfront shopping center looking for a haircut. The place
was populated entirely with locals, despite being located only a few blocks from a cruise ship terminal. After waiting for over an hour in a crowded hair salon I was able to get a haircut from Nemis, a soft-spoken guy from Santo Domingo. The salon was packed. There are six female hairdressers, most of them black. The other barber was also from Santo Domingo. It's an education just to sit in a hair salon on a Saturday and listen to everyone chat, though admittedly I misunderstood or simply missed most of their uniquely Caribbean Spanish lingo. Rushed by foot, carrying my heavy pack to the ferry terminal and just barely made it. I eagerly asked a tall, slim black man, "Is this the ferry to St. John?" He stared at me blankly and said firmly, "Good afternoon." I misunderstood him and he repeated his "greeting" more sternly. Apparently you have to greet people politely before you talk with them. He was definitely offended, though I thought his pose a bit contrived.1-16-2008
Charlotte Amalie, U.S. Virgin Islands
Yesterday's flight was a real drag. The 3 hour layover in Miami became a 5 1/2 hour layover because of delays. I ended up arriving at the airport at 12:30 AM and at the Island View Guesthouse at 1 AM. Just as I walked up the young guy working the desk was headed home. A minute more and I'd have had to call him back from home.
While Charlotte Amalie is very pretty, it's essentially one big shopping mall squeezed into a crumbling 17th Dutch town. Walk a few blocks inland and the old houses are inhabited by locals and their scattered belongings. A block further up the hill and I was the only white face. A block more and every few lots on the steep hillside is an abandoned old home, overgrown with
creeping vines. The economic development triggered by the massive cruise ships that dock here is understandably concentrated along the waterfront, but not until you see such a thing do you really understand it.In the old Dutch shops and homes there are now Tag Huer watch shops and endless gold jewelry hawkers. Tommy Hillfiger has a waterfront outlet. But when you walk home to your hotel a few miles outside of town you pass more typical tropical scenes. Rusted out cars missing their wheels sit on blocks. Newish Toyota trucks sit outside of brightly painted little houses that cling to the cliffs like they fear they'll fall off.
