Chapter One : En Route

When I'm researching a trip, I always seem to end up on the Lonely Planet web site. I always find one detail that's worth taking with me. For example, when we went to Japan, the Lonely Planet web site was where I found out that most ATMs in Japan don't accept US credit cards, but that this one bank chain did and here was the map to the closest branch to the hotel we were staying at, so we never had any problems with money. In the case of St. John, Lonely Planet said that, well, go if you had to, certainly in the case of kidnapping or being forced at gun point, but they would not be held responsible if your trip disintegrated into a fruity rum drinks on the veranda at sunset sort of affair. So, I guess this is fair warning that no heavy cranium lifting involved in this trip.

This was foremost in my mind as I sat at the San Francisco airport at 6 am, clutching the Starbucks gallon-o-coffee largest sized paper cup and waiting for a flight to Atlanta. I'd been up since 4:30 am. The "car" we'd hired to take us there turned out to be a van without benefit of shock absorbers. I could predict with great confidence that the next 10 hours would be spent bouncing around airplanes and airports like the contents of a martini shaker. We were completely surrounded by the Berkeley women's swim team on their way to a match against the University of Georgia. These women were tall, muscular, gorgeous. They had the wingspan of condors. I felt remarkably distant from a fruit rum drink overlooking the sunset.

It was wet when we arrive in St. Thomas. And at 9pm, it was dark. It was dark in a way that only small towns in rural places could possibly be. There is no airport on St. John, so to get there you have to fly into the St. Thomas airport, get from there to the ferry landing and take a boat across the channel from St. Thomas to St. John. So, it was that at this moment of disorientation, we were introduced to the Caribbean taxi cab queue. All of the taxi cabs we saw on our trip were large vans or "safari buses", an open air series of benches in the back of a large truck with a striped canopy. And there will always be 5-20 of these vehicles waiting for you and someone orchestrating the crowd, asking you where were you're going and directing you to the right mob to be herded into a van roughly going the desired direction. But because this person directing traffic isn't really officially in charge, there's some yelling and confusion as the drivers fight to get their vans full. Because a full van is the maximum profit for these guys. Sometimes you don't even get a seat. They direct you to sit on the box between the seats or have you sit on the floor. They just wedge you in.

So, the driver dropped us off at what he claimed was the ferry landing. Just a very uneven muddy parking lot next to an old wobbly dock, no ticket office, no signs of activity. Some guy fishing off the end of the dock told us that the crew was off drinking and would be back in 20 minutes or so and that we would just give them the money when they arrived.