Bequia: Getting There

As this blog’s loyal readers (hi again, Mom) know, Active Voice is transitioning from a moderately successful writing and editing firm to pretty-much-destined-for-failure vanity publishing house specializing in Nick’s adventures novels (well, really only one at this point) and textbooks and my…various writing projects of an undefined nature and genre.

(This is the point where I remind everyone that I will still happily take speech and other writing gigs or corral my editors – who aren’t as enthusiastic about publishing our own stuff as they were about, say, real jobs – to clean up your presentation, proposal, report, or capabilities statement. The joy we feel at fulfilling our destiny as writers – not unlike the joy we felt at fulfilling our destiny as farmers – has yet to put any bread on the table (at least with farming we got the odd zucchini)).

The Active Voice offices are currently running our of a small apartment above Princess Margret Beach on the West Indian island of Bequia. We have been here two weeks and will stay another two.

Before we came, I decided that my first writing project would be a tourist guide to Bequia, with Nick filling in some of the historic bits, since he has researched the history of St. Vincent (Bequia is an hour ferry ride from St. Vincent, where the capitol is, and is part of the country St. Vincent and the Grenadines). He had planned to write a book on colonial times down here, which were quite exciting, with the British and the French both trying to wrest control of the various islands from each other and from the fierce native Black Caribs. Meanwhile, pirates sailed around through it all – Blackbeard spent a good deal of time in Bequia – wreaking havoc and conveniently crashing into rocks and spewing treasure around (that is Nick’s theory, anyway, which is why he brought his metal detector down here, and why he only has one pair of pants: he had to dump almost everything but the metal detector to make the Liat air baggage weight limit).

Nick pulled together a lot of source documents. We planned trips to libraries in New York and London to look at some of the original diaries written by the settlers (actually, Nick planned that, and I planned where we would go out to dinner afterwards). Then, a few months before we got here, Christopher Taylor – a real professor of Caribbean studies, if you can believe it, with a publishing company that he didn’t have to found himself -- released “The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna.” We knew Nick’s project was dead when we read in the introduction something along the lines “thank you, Pierre François, for your help with my rusty Old French in translating a bunch of letters we had never heard of (of course not! They were in Old French! We don’t read Old French! We don’t even read Menu French!).”

So, we had to admit that the world probably didn’t need another history of the islands. No, what the world needed was a detailed work discrediting everything this so-called “Christopher Taylor” has ever written -- with chapters making fun of his physical features, which we hope and assume are grotesque (still looking for a picture). But, as we developed the business plan for the project (unless Christopher Taylor has some bitter ex-wives, probably fairly small target audience) and reviewed the libel laws, we realized that all the guy ever did was share our interests and be a lot smarter than us. So Nick decided instead to spend his time here looking for gold (which, if he finds it, he will take to Christopher Taylor’s house, fling it at him, and yell: “So, Pepe Le Pew, How come you didn’t know about this!”) and I was going to write a guidebook.

Was.

OK, maybe still am, but I have encountered several false starts.

Our first day here, I sat down to write the chapter that everyone knows is the first chapter in a guidebook: “Getting There.” Having just got here myself, I felt unusually qualified. I gathered:

The several grocery store-like receipts, stapled together and to my passport, that make up Liat air’s complicated ticketing system for its multiple stop flight (through three Caribbean countries and their unique and colorful immigrations and customs systems) from Puerto Rico to St. Vincent.

The schedule for the ferry from St. Vincent to Bequia. I didn’t have a ticket because we just got on the ferry, up the creaky metal plank behind the cars, then further up some very steep metal stairs (tip for the disabled traveller: Don’t get on this ferry.  I have no idea how you are supposed to get to Bequia) to where they store the humans for the ride. We had tried to buy a ticket at the office outside the ferry, the one with the sign that says “TICKETS FOR THE FERRY TO BEQUIA,” but there was no one in, and a guy in an official looking jumpsuit told us, derisively, “That’s not where you get tickets.” When Nick asked him, “Where then?” -- the guy yelled, “On de ferry! On de ferry!” introducing us to the quaint island tradition of explaining things to idiotic tourists (usually white, usually us) by bellowing simple instructions twice – under the assumption, I suppose that we are both deaf and incapable of understanding complete sentences. So, of course, no one asks for or sells us a ticket on the ferry, and we see no one else engaging in ticket commerce. Nick finally ended up just giving some money to a confused guy handing out mail on the lower deck when we arrived in Bequia.

These source documents assembled, I settled down to write and immediately realized I had missed several important steps. First, I should have a section on flights to Puerto Rico where you catch the Liat flight. But seriously, I would hope my readers are smart enough to know how to look up flights to Puerto Rico online, and if they aren’t, then I would not recommend Bequia as their first foray into air travel. Start someplace easy, like Cleveland.

Second, I needed to list some interesting hotels in San Juan, PR because, though your savvy Internet searches will show that American flight arriving in plenty of time for you to transfer to Liat and get to St. Vincent, in truth, Liat often pushes up its departure an hour or so if they have someone who wants to go to an island not normally on the itinerary.  And no, they don’t tell you when they do this. They don’t even announce it at the airport. You just have to be at the right gate within three hours of the scheduled departure, and eventually someone will open a door and say “Walk to that plane over there.”

Third, I forgot to explain how to get from the airport to the ferry once you land in St. Vincent. You can’t. The plane doesn’t get in until late and the last ferry goes at 5 PM. So you will be spending a night in St. Vincent too. Again, a proper guidebook would have a list of hotel options for St. Vincent and information on how to negotiate with the cab drivers outside the airport (you can’t. It is dark, you have no idea where you are, you forgot the exchange rate, and you can’t understand anything they are saying), but what is just much easier is for you to stay at Tranquility Beach Apartment Hotel, and Lucelle will pick you up at the airport and take you to the ferry the next morning.  Just don’t ask her to go early, because of all the traffic, and there is no sense in that (or, as she told us: “No sense in that! No sense in that!).

Lucelle, smiling because you are not making her go into town during morning rush hour.

Bottom line: It takes three days to get to Bequia through St. Vincent, making it not the best place for a one-week vacation.  If you are determined, you could try a regular airline to Barbados then SVG airlines to Bequia’s own airport. The New York Times ran an article on Bequia a couple of years ago (“Bequia: Getting AwayFrom the Getaways”), and their reporter left New York at 8 AM and got to his hotel on Bequia by 5:30. (He said that “getting there requires a bit of effort, patience and expense,” but, since he did it in less than 24 hours, I would have added to his list “…and incredible luck”).

In the interest of a well-researched guidebook, I checked out SVG’s website to see if perhaps we had been foolish to use the St. Vincent route all these years, and pretty much the first thing they tell you is to make sure that before you board, you have a toothbrush and any medicine you might need in the next week or so, because chances are, you -- or you and your luggage -- are not getting “there” anytime soon. 

Chapter One of the book, therefore, remains unwritten because I am afraid that compiling all this inside information in a useful way will be (a) exhausting and (b) depressing, so I put this chapter aside to tackle the also-standard: Where to Eat.

Next blog post: Why I also do not have a chapter yet on where to eat.