St. Maarten

People who opt for resort stays in tropical destinations miss morning arrivals by sea.

Cruising into St. Maarten, we once again enjoyed beautiful, ever changing views with breakfast aboard Celebrity Eclipse.

The natural beauty and plentiful activities on the island of St. Martin, which is the smallest land mass shared by two countries, makes it a great cruise port as well as a popular resort destination.  

For this visit, we remained in Saint Maarten in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, an appropriate final port on a cruise that started with two great Dutch islands.

On our last visit, we went to the French side, but wherever you go on St. Martin, it seems most people speak a form of creole English.

We took a taxi to Divi Little Bay Beach Resort, which sits on a beautiful sandy beach and has decent snorkeling along its rocky coast to the left.  Around the point on the left side, dramatic craggy rocks jutting out of the turquoise water replace resort lodging perched along the coast leading there, and to me that coastal view from the water is better than the snorkeling.  If you want to visit this lovely area without the long taxi ride, you could take a shore excursion to Tiki Hut, which includes arrival by boat.  Snorkeling equipment is available, so it's a good place for novices to see if they like flying above an exotic underwater world.  The floating platform has a swimming pool and lots of lounge chairs on the deck for sun bathing.  With food and drinks available in the Tiki Hut, you can enjoy a full day on this little floating platform.

I should point out that Tiki Hut website photos, probably taken when it was brand new, are quite misleading.  Tiki Hut is as much like those photos as the B-52's "Love Shack" song and video resembles a secluded romantic getaway.  In fact, the Tiki Hut is very much like the B-52's version, but considerably more crowded.

Still, it looked like their predominantly young guests were having fun, and as I said, there is decent if not spectacular snorkeling right where it is located.

I personally was happy we instead rented padded lounge chairs and an umbrella on the beach.  I generally prefer snorkeling from shore rather than a boat, so my stomach has a chance to settle between swims, and while Tiki Hut isn't actually a boat, when I climbed up on its platform to check it out for you, it felt like being on a big, rather stable raft in calm waters.

Upon swimming ashore, we headet to Divi's Bayview Cafe, where we dug into tasty Chicken Wraps before heading back to the ship.

Aboard Celebrity Eclipse again, we enjoyed another great privilege of cruising over land resorts: a scenic cruise from port through ever changing light while we enjoyed our pre-dinner drinks in the Sky Observation Lounge.

Rather than an abrupt return from island life to civilization, we would have two days at sea to savor en route to Miami.  Being aboard an amazing ship makes the return voyage itself another highlight.