The Last Resort, page 20
One of the more intriguing proposals for diversification acknowledges the strain on the island and involves the very assets that drew visitors to Barbados way back in the eighteenth century: the breeze and the sun. Experts believe that Barbados is capable of becoming 100 percent energy self-sufficient within the next decade or so by building up its wind and solar power capabilities. Many expect that the country can even become an exporter of sustainable energy.
With a tinge of guilt, Scott and I enjoy the empty beaches. We take our sunset cocktails into the sea with us, and float around with them, undisturbed. Looking back to shore, we can see the mansion that Barbados native Rihanna bought a few years back. Our solitude here is as eerie as it is delightful, and we know that the presence of just two tourists on this normally coveted beach might be enough to make any country look elsewhere for its fortunes.
When I ask locals whether they’d like to see less tourism or more of it, or whether they’d rather see other industries develop, the answers invariably rest upon the assumption that the presence of tourism is a given. Diversifying the economy is a good idea, but tourism will always remain its pillar. Whether or not to cultivate it doesn’t seem up for debate, only how to deal with it as an inevitability. Ask a Bajan, and he’ll tell you that tourism just is.
ST. KITTS
St. Kitts, the Caribbean island fifty miles south of St. Martin in the Lesser Antilles chain, is shaped sort of like a chicken drumstick. Thirty-five years ago, the skinny end of the drumstick to the south stood empty, aside from a few foreign-owned homes and two ten-room hotels, all accessible only by boat. There were no roads. The terrain was dry and had nothing to offer in terms of sugar production, the island’s main industry. At one point, salt had been harvested from a large salt pond here, but that business was long gone. Although the white sandy beaches ringing it were the stuff of Caribbean vacation fantasy, they didn’t receive much attention.
Today I’m on my way to tour the area with Hazel Williams, a native Kittitian and the aunt of a friend, Sacha Phillip Wynne, back in New York. Hazel grew up on St. Kitts and recently moved back after a number of years in the States. She remembers hiking over Timothy Hill, the mountain separating this part of the island from the more northerly parts, for a picnic as a child. This time, we ascend Timothy Hill in her car via the highway that opened in 1989 to encourage development. The view from the top does the Caribbean proud—the Atlantic crashes against one side of the island, the Caribbean laps the other. Just visible in the far distance, beyond the last hills of St. Kitts and the beaches that fringe it, I see Nevis, the island that together with this one makes up the country of St. Kitts and Nevis.
We descend Timothy Hill into what is gradually becoming the mecca of luxury tourism on St. Kitts, dominated by the massive Christophe Harbour development, which so far includes a mega-yacht marina, a Park Hyatt resort, the members-only Pavilion Beach Club, a waterside cocktail bar, and a substantial array of luxury homes and home sites spread across 2,500 acres of land. A golf course is in the works, as is a concierge medical facility that might enable yacht passengers to touch up their Botox before heading back out to sea, among other services.
The previously uninhabited southern end of St. Kitts is being developed as a center of luxury tourism.
The ambitious tourism offerings of Christophe Harbour join a mere smattering of resorts elsewhere on the island, although that too is changing. Compared to other islands in the Caribbean, tourism here is a new phenomenon. The island welcomed the occasional cruise ship starting back in the sixties, then in 1998 opened a dedicated cruise ship terminal that could dock two large ships at a time. Over on Nevis, the Four Seasons opened in 1991, but it didn’t have much of an effect on St. Kitts, which wouldn’t see its first large-scale beach resort until the Marriott opened here in 2003. Tourism development had been incremental and piecemeal until, two years after the Marriott opened, the state-run sugar industry shut down in the wake of long-term unprofitability. After centuries as the island’s key economic driver, what remained of the sugar industry disappeared overnight. The St. Kitts and Nevis government went all in on tourism, becoming the next in a long line of island nations to replace their sugarcane fields with beach resorts.
Fifteen years later, its residents are still figuring out what it means to welcome tourism into their lives.
JUST AS DUSK SETTLES IN ON THE EVENING OF MY FIRST FULL DAY ON ST. Kitts, I head down to the shore for a swim at my resort, Timothy Beach Resort in Frigate Bay, north of Christophe Harbour. I say shore instead of beach because directly in front of the resort, there is no beach. I’ll learn later that the beach here has been dealing with erosion for several decades. It’s been renourished previously, and plans are once again under way to replace the sand. For now, a row of boulders keeps the land in place.
I throw my towel onto a lounger and survey the water from the ladder leading down to it. Below me, two local women are floating around and chatting with each other. Like more than 90 percent of the population here, they are Black. Of the dozens of beach resorts I’ve visited over the years, this will be the first swim in a low- or middle-income country that I am sharing with locals who don’t look like me. Even in Barbados, where the locals by law have access to every beach on the island, I never found myself in the water with them. I hesitate, rendered cautious by the possibility that my presence as a white tourist will make them feel they need to clear out, or that by mistakenly swimming at the locals’ beach, I will cause resentment from their end.
As I lower into the water, one of the women says hello to me. How are you. Very well. Unmoved by me completely. My hesitation finds no validation, and it demonstrates to me how accustomed I’ve grown to being isolated from brown and Black populations on beaches during my travels. Also, how accustomed I’ve grown to internalizing this as normal, conditioned by common beach resort practices barring locals outright at worst, making them feel unwelcome at best.
Across the parking lot of the Timothy Beach Resort, which incidentally is the only resort on the island that’s locally owned, a row of beach bars and food joints known as the Strip hug the sand, Mr. X’s Shiggidy Shack Bar & Grill, Vibes Beach Bar, a Mexican restaurant. At its far end, Sacha’s other aunt owns Buddies Beach Bar & Grill. The Strip is a melting pot for every type of person who finds herself on the island—locals, tourists, and the thousand or so students, mostly from the States, at the veterinary school. It’s known as a great place to party. I order veggie nachos and a beer one night at Mr. X’s, and when they arrive, there’s chicken all over them. For a vegetarian like me it’s not ideal, but it’s also a sign that foreign vegetarians are maybe not the only priority here.
Integration with the locals turns out to be one of the delights of St. Kitts, and something that distinguishes it from many other Caribbean beach destinations. To not feel separate from the place you have visited makes travel feel like actually having gone somewhere, which is of course how travel should be. Instead of experiencing the island from inside a sequestered resort bubble, throughout my stay in St. Kitts I mingle with locals at the coffee shop, at the beach restaurant, and at the hotel bar. I find myself mentioning to every person I meet on St. Kitts—government officials, restaurant owners, taxi drivers—that tourism development here needs to involve the preservation of this organic integration, which benefits the locals as much as it does the visitors.
The government seems aware that the country is in a position to do things differently. “We are the new players on the block,” Lindsay Grant, St. Kitts and Nevis’s minister of tourism, tells me when I meet with him in his office in Basseterre, the island’s main city and the country’s capital. “An advantage for us because we have learned from the mistakes of others, and we had basically a virgin industry to fashion how we felt it should be fashioned.” It’s a great situation to be in, depending on how the government proceeds.
Already some key decisions have been made. St. Kitts needed only look to a couple of its closest neighbors, St. Martin and Anguilla, to see how two divergent approaches to beach tourism have played out. St. Martin long ago embraced mass tourism and accommodates millions of annual visitors, including those from cruise ships, and not unlike Barbados, has suffered resulting environmental and cultural challenges. Anguilla (which until 1971 joined St. Kitts and Nevis as a single British territory), meanwhile, leaned into its inaccessibility, eschewing midrange tourism altogether by opting out of the cruise-ship circuit, among other tactics. Most of its resorts fall into the luxury sector. Just under 100,000 tourists traveled there in 2019, and as a result, its beaches remain untrammeled, while its residents easily outnumber visitors at any given time.
St. Kitts decided it liked the Anguilla model better. From the outset, it pursued high-end tourists, in part to keep the industry on a human scale. “We don’t want mass tourism. . . . Yes, we want tourism, but not mass,” says Grant. “We don’t want explosive growth, because explosive growth brings its own challenges and consequences.”
For St. Kitts, focusing on the high end of the market ensures a few things in addition to preventing overdevelopment. The country won’t need to import labor, for one. As an island with a population of just 35,000, St. Kitts only needs to create so many jobs. As it has for places like Sumba, going upscale will also maximize St. Kitts’s income from the tourism it does develop. Better to have one couple spending $900 per day than six couples spending $150 per day—same revenues, fewer crowds, the logic goes.
The focus on luxury has helped the country’s tourism industry grow robustly—by almost 15 percent in 2019 alone, far higher than the Caribbean average of 3.4 percent. And it’s been great for many local businesses, like those lining Cockleshell Beach at the southern end of St. Kitts, one bay over from the Park Hyatt and looking directly across to Nevis. Here a row of beachfront spots have resisted Christophe Harbour’s expanding footprint.
One of those is the Spice Mill, where I sit down with the restaurant’s owner, Roger Brisbane, a native Kittitian who opened the place in 2009 after years spent working in resort hotels, including as general manager of the Four Seasons on Nevis. He does a brisk business here catering to both tourists and locals, and appreciates the type of development under way on the island. “It is a good thing that we started late [on St. Kitts], because now we only have really higher-end brands, and we can look forward to more high-end brands. High-end brands attract high-end brands,” Brisbane says.
The high-end influx includes those coming onto the island via the new Christophe Harbour Marina, forged from the repurposed saltwater pond that had long ago been harvested for salt export. People on St. Kitts can be discreet, but they can’t help but whisper that Jay-Z and Beyoncé docked their yacht here recently.
At first, the benefit of such a marina is lost on me, especially in the context of making the tourism industry into something that works for the locals. But later, I’ll talk over lunch at the private beach club with Aeneas Hollins, who runs the operation, and it starts to make more sense. A former yacht captain to the superrich, Hollins lived on a series of luxury vessels for twenty-five years, deciding to live on land again only after coming to St. Kitts. He was drawn to it for the same reason I am: St. Kitts isn’t segregated. “There are not local bars and tourist bars, there are just bars,” he says.
Hollins finds the yacht-based tourism a natural fit with St. Kitts’s high-end approach to tourism. “Yachts have everything you could want,” Hollins tells me, “except a beach.” Passengers on even the fanciest yacht have to come ashore to put their toes in the sand. Once here, they continue to spend lavishly. A Saudi royal reportedly spent some $200,000 in four days on St. Kitts, renting out a villa for his staff, hiring four chauffeured cars to be stationed around the island just in case he wanted one of them, and renting out the entire posh beach club in which we are sitting, then renting out another place on the spot when this one proved too windy that day. Hollins tells me it’s not unusual for a yacht to require $10,000 worth of fresh flowers when it docks. Good business if you’re the local florist, and as a middle-income country well before tourism gained supremacy here, St. Kitts has a well-established shop that was ready to handle yachts’ flower orders from the outset.
The mega-yachts coexist somewhat awkwardly alongside the cruise ships that come to St. Kitts every day, unleashing as many as 15,000 visitors on the island for the afternoon—an increasingly common occurrence since the country opened a second major cruise-ship pier in late 2019. It’s the island’s lone nod to mass tourism so far, and one that St. Kitts hopes will augment the revenues from its high-end industry without requiring the hotel beds to accommodate millions of additional tourists.
JUST AS MASS TOURISM COMES WITH CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES, so too does the tourism of the elite. As St. Kitts reaches ever further upscale, some concerning signs have emerged for locals amid the successes. When the Park Hyatt opened in 2017 as the island’s first ultra-luxury resort, it was legally required to provide public access to the beach in front of it. Because construction blocked the old public access point, the resort had to create a new one. Throughout my visit to St. Kitts, locals complain that the public access point at the Park Hyatt is unmarked and difficult to find, located near intimidating security guards and far from public parking.
The problem repeats at Sand Bank Bay, the beach that the Pavilion Beach Club overlooks, and one that locals used to be able to drive right up to. Now getting to this beach requires a ten-minute walk. As I write this, one beachfront lot in Sand Bank Bay—house to be built—is listed for $6.9 million. It stands to reason that whoever shells out that kind of money might be anticipating privacy. A Kittitian who used to frequent the beach told me she hasn’t been back since they blocked the road.
June Hughes, a director in St. Kitts’s Department of Environment, attributes the substandard beach access partly to the loose letter of the law here. “Our law says that you must provide an access to the beach. It does not say what type of access,” she says. “It doesn’t say you have to put back the equal to what was there before, and that is a challenge. We’re trying to fix those little loopholes.”
Roger Brisbane has run into his own challenges with the Park Hyatt. The Spice Mill lies a four-minute walk from the resort, an easy outing to a locally owned spot for hotel guests. But Brisbane tells me that in its early days, Park Hyatt staff led guests to believe his restaurant was too far away to visit without calling an expensive taxi, which would take its time arriving to the southern end of the island. Presumably, the hotel then directed its guests to one of its own, more expensive restaurants. To the hotel’s credit, after being called out on the practice, guests are now encouraged to embark on the easy walk to Cockleshell Bay.
Ultra-luxury resorts like the Park Hyatt and the Four Seasons on Nevis also consume far more resources than lower-end accommodations, sometimes leaving the locals with fewer for themselves. When the Four Seasons opened in 1991, for example, its golf course alone required more water every day than Charlestown, the island’s capital. This in a country where water availability poses increasing challenges. One major well that supplies the St. Kitts population has already been abandoned after its water became brackish, says June Hughes. While we discuss this in Hughes’s office in Basseterre, the power cuts out and returns several times on this blindingly hot day, when air conditioners are cranked up across the island. It’s an inconvenience the guests of the luxury spots probably don’t experience.
WHEN THEY HEAR ABOUT THE FRUSTRATIONS OF LOCALS ON TOURISM-HEAVY islands like Barbados, residents of St. Kitts may not see many parallels with their own lives at the early stage of tourism development on the island, although likely there’s a spark or two of recognition. To its credit, the St. Kitts government is taking steps to make the industry work for its population. Officials hope that an emphasis on cultural tourism as a complement to the beach will benefit the local community in ways that Barbados neglected when it was developing its own tourism sector.
“We have the sun, the sand, and the sea,” says Lindsay Grant. “But we are fashioning our niche market . . . we focus on the culture, the heritage, the history, and the people.” Part of this strategy involves heritage projects—the old sugar train has been repurposed for tours. Brimstone Hill Fortress, a former British fort built by slaves, was named a World Heritage Site in 1999 and has been meticulously restored. Romney Manor shows visitors what an old sugar estate was like. It also involves celebrating the living, breathing local culture. Locally owned bars, restaurants, shops, and other businesses are being promoted, including the ones that the Kittitians themselves hang out in.
The government considers the direct participation of the local population to be key to the industry’s success and has created a community tourism program to train citizens in their options. Carlene Henry-Morton, St. Kitts’s permanent secretary of tourism, says, “We are doing a lot of training because a lot of [local] people add value to the experience.” She believes that the tourism industry’s community engagement and inclusiveness put St. Kitts over the top in winning the World Travel & Tourism Council’s Destination Stewardship Award in 2019, and wants to see it become a cornerstone of the island’s appeal for visitors.
In A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny, the journalist Mark Kurlansky observed that “attracting tourists to one’s culture rather than isolating them on a beach makes locals feel better about tourism, because it is drawing people out of a sense of pride rather than sequestering them out of a sense of shame.” Ideally, St. Kitts’s approach will help its people preserve their culture at the same time they benefit from it materially.
