The Caribbean Oscars...

We've just had the Oscars, so we've desided to award our prizes for the best performance in various aspects of our stay in the Caribbean...

Best Hotel

This was a tough award to decide, because some of our hotels were spacious resorts, and some were jammed into inner-cities, so the comparison is not apples with apples.

• Stonefield Estate in St. Lucia would be a strong contender due to its fabulous view, generous balcony, private plunge pool and outdoor shower, but its facilities are a little rundown, there was no TV, the resturant was too limited and the hot water failed regularly. The outdoor shower here rates an honourable mention.
• La Pagerie, a fine modern establishment in a busy town in Martinique, is let down by its petty regulations, practically no off-street parking and no hot water. Its live entertainment was a real bonus.
• Sugar Ridge in Antigua is a great and modern resort with two impressive pools and restaurants. Our room in a villa of 4 units had a tiny private plunge pool and a nice balcony, but did have (that Caribbean trait,) poor hot water.
• Sugar Mill in Tortola wins the prize for best restaurant, but our room was too quaint, had no TV and only luke-warm water. The balcony was inadequate.
• W at Vieques is a serious contender with a very spacious room in an ultra-modern and very chic resort. W is let down by luke warm water, a rocky beach, a restaurant requiring bookings and Fawlty Towers type performance when you finally got a table.
• Avila in Curacao is another strong contender, a modern resort on a great but we suspect artificially enhanced beach. The shower water was hot! The location was great. Trouble is the resort was just too crowded, and petty regulations were frustrating. Our room had minor faults which were reported but not rectified.

But our prize goes to El Convento in Old San Juan. This old and compact inner-city hotel was just perfect, full of character and interest, with numerous dining choices within and nearby. No view, no beach of course, but we had a great room, with a kitchenette, safe, and high flow hot water! There was a pool and a jacuzzi on the roof. This is a great place to stay.

The centuries old El Convento Hotel in Old San Juan was our selection for the best hotel we stayed at in the Caribbean.

Generally, in our experience, the good Caribbean hotels we stayed at provide WiFi as part of the package (something Australian hotels could adopt) but don't have guest (coin-operated) laundries. Laundromats in town were hard to find too, and were then open only in odd hours. Breakfasts may or may not be included. Tea/coffee making, refrigerators are safes are highly desirable but not universal. None, including El Convento, had a microwave oven in the room. Most but not all had fitness centres, and all have swimming pools. They include free parking, but sometimes there's not ebough spots. Best Rental Car

The award for the best rental car goes to the brand new and bright red Jeep Wrangler we got from Island Rentals on Vieques in Puerto Rico. The roads on Caribbean islands are typically potholed and rough, and this was probably the most suitable vehicle we had for that type of terrain. Honourable mention should go to the Suzuki Grande Vitara we had on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, also a great car for steep and rough roads.

The registration plate on our Vieques rental Jeep shows the iconic fortifications and sentry boxes of Old San Juan.

The least suitable car we rented was a sports-modified Misubishi Lancer from Avis on St. Lucia. This ridiculous car had spoilers and wings totally unsuited to the extraordinarily rough roads that country has to offer, and its protrusions made it doubly difficult to negotiate deep potholes and ridges, and bumps, which proliferated on the roads.

Worst Traffic

It's hard to believe that traffic could ever be a major problem on tiny Caribbean islands, but Martinique excelled itself and it took us 90 minutes to travel 10km to the airport on our departure day. We had observed this traffic situation on previous days, so we avoided it, but could not do so on the last day. A nightmare in a manual-transmission rental. Fortunately, we allowed plenty of time and didn't burn out the clutch, but we had to get up very early!

Longest Petrol Queue

There was no competition for this award - it went to the only open gas station on the island of Vieques. It took us three trips before we could make a successful purchase. The first time, after queueing for 30 minutes, and being second in line, the station abrubtly closed to clear the way for a tanker which had come off the ferry from the "big island" and was going to top up supplies. Over an hour later, we came back to join the queue gain, but we discovered that the station was still closed. Two hours later, we were successful, with only a very short queue.

Gasoline shortages on Vieques are quite common, apparently. The arrival of the tanker was a cause for comment and some celebration amongst the locals.

Steepest Roads

This award is a tie between St. Lucia and Tortola, where terrifyingly steep stretches are quite common, coupled by exceedingly tight and blind hairpin bends. The Caribbean islands that we drove on were variably hilly and mountainous, but these two were the most extreme, and share the prize.

Lookout & bar over Cane Garden Bay in Tortola. The scary downhills from here to the bay, and Apple Bay, helped Tortola share the prize for the steepest roads.

Weirdest Driving Experience

Driving everywhere in the Caribbean required us to quickly adapt between the two sides of the road. However, the weirdest combination was in Tortola where they adopt the British practice of keeping left, but all vehicles are left-hand-drive, imported from the USA. Gives the drivers a very good view of the edges of the road!

Best Beach

Of course, beaches are a combination of things, like the sand, the water, the surf, facilities, even access, and diferent people will weight these factors differently. But on our assessment, our best beach was Turners on Antigua, based on the colour of its water and the colour and fineness of its sand. It has no surf. Also, we could go to Turners before breakfast and be the only people on the beach.

Turner's Beach on Antigua was our favourite location for early morning swims. Later in the day, bars and restaurants opened, lounge chairs were rented, and crowds built up. On cruise ship days, it was best to go elsewhere.

If clear, beautiful water was the main criterion, then a Curacao beach would win the prize, but they just lost out because of the broken coral underfoot. We believe the clear water and the lack of sand are related, and we can well understand why Curacao is such a diving paradise.

Honourable mention goes to Caracas Bay on Vieques. This beach is so nice that we'd drive from one side of the island to the other just for a pre-breakfast swim. It's attractions were clean sand, clear water and a slight surf. Even early in the morning, this popular beach had a few other people on it.

Prettiest Marina

The Caribbean is replete with marinas, but most of those we saw were pretty scruffy places. The one that stood out and gets this award is Sopers Hole on Tortola. The water at Sopers Hole is crystal clear blue, but also the marina buildings themselves are tidy and well maintained, and quite pretty to boot. This was a very busy marina, lots of yachting activity, tourist cruises and shopping/eating possibilities.

View of Sopers Hole in Tortola, winning our prize for the prettiest marina of the many we saw.

Best Attraction

We almost didn't visit Nelson's Dockyard in Antigua, but when we did, we realised it is one of the great attractions of the Caribbean, and wins our award. This Victorian relic used to house the British Navy and is named after Admiral Horatio Nelson who had tenure here. It is now managed as a National Park, and is kept alive by being a working marina as well as a tourist attraction with interpretative signage, restaurants and bars. A stunning place to visit!

Just one of many historic ruins at Nelson's Dockyard. The cobbled ramp is an orginal use to haul goods up out of the water.

A very honourable mention has to go to the Queen Emma Bridge in Willemstad, Curacao. It's a pontoon bridge which is pulled aside to make way for vessels from yachts up to giant cruise ships and super-tankers. The frequent traffic and its location downtown makes the bridge a unique and fascinating tourist attraction.

And another mention goes to the cruise ships we saw everywhere. Our itinerary was intended to avoid cruise ships and their passengers, but it was impossible. Any maybe just as well, because it was truly fascinating to see these gigantic floating blocks of flats being manoeuvered and parked in tiny harbours. On disgorging their cargo, we saw the entire nature of each location change, only to return to its more languid natural self when the ships pulled out.

Cruise ships dominated every destination. Here we see one sailing out past the opened Queen Emma Bridge in Curacao, past another moored at the Mega Pier.

Best Coffee

Coffee is grown in the Caribbean, and they are proud of it, but finding decent espresso and cappucino (to our Aussie taste) was quite difficult. Lots of places offer cappucinos, but they often don't cut the mustard, mostly being too weak or milky. Our award for the best cappucino goes to Cafe Don Ruiz in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Our favourite cafe, with the best cappucino in the Caribbean, was this one in Old San Juan.

Best Food

We were disappointed at how poor the food was in some locations, in particular St. Lucia and (very surprisingly) Martinique, where the French tourists seemed to quite happy to eat uninteresting meals. We have decided to split this award into two categories...

• Best island - Curacao. Avila food was good, but we also easily found nearby restaurants with excellent quality meals. We ate better in Curacao than anywhere else.
• Best meal - Sugar Mill, Tortola. Grilled fresh lobster was a weekly special at the already excellent restaurant at Sugar Mill, and it was exquisite. We even shared this meal with Richard Branson. The special Valentines Day menu at Carmichaels at Sugar Ridge, Antigua was also very good, but not up to the standard of Sugar Mill.

We had our best Caribbean meal at the Sugar Mill (Tortola) restaurant. The gazebo shown here was a great location for quiet relaxation after breakfast, with a cuppa, and views over the sea.

Best Island

All the islands were good in some ways, and added considerably to our knowledge and enjoyment of the diversity of the Caribbean. Basically, they all share the same history - the original inhabitants, Amerindians, were pretty well destroyed by the mostly Spanish invaders of the 15-16th Centuries, who then established plantations and, needing cheap labour, kidnapped Africans and established slave trading. This is the background everywhere, and we were pleased to appreciate this view of the Caribbean.

We were visiting in the here and now, and our objectives were to relax and enjoy the current ambience of the islands. Because of the diversity, it is impossible to select a single winner, but our favourites are:-

• Old San Juan: not strictly an island at all, but a huge surprise and a great delight. Fabulous downtown and fortifications.
• Antigua: great beaches, easy to get around when you work out where you're going.
• Curacao: the clearest, blue-est water, very civilised, easy to get around.

Magical Martinique...

Our next Caribbean island was Martinique, only a short hop from Castries in St. Lucia on a LIAT Airways Dash-8. It's a short hop to a different world!

Martinique is sooo French! It is legally a department of France (since 1946). Every day we see big jets bringing French people in from Paris - the flight time is about 10hr - and they obviously feel very at home here. The currency is the Euro. The main difference is the weather - Martinique is a Caribbean island, and so far we have found them to be hot, humid and prone to brief tropical showers. We're not sure if that is typical for February, but that's what we are getting every day! Whereas St. Lucia's tourists were predominantly Americans, we haven't seen a single American here. The tourists are 95% French with a smattering of Brits, Germans and Spanish. We did bump into an English sailor, cruising the Caribbean on his 30ft cat, in a bar while his wife had her hair done.

Arrival here could not have been more different either. Immigration, baggage collection and customs were slow and bureaucratic at St. Lucia, but from landing at La Lementin airport to getting into the taxi our hotel had organised for us took less than 10 minutes, no kidding! One quick look at our passports, and the customs guy asked us where we were coming from and waved us through.

We are staying at Hotel de la Pagerie in Pointe du Bout which is in les Trois Ilets part of the island. This was a great choice, including the location, by our Caribbean advisor, Laura. It's well out of Fort-De-France, the capital, but is at the centre of an area very popular with tourists, so we have lots of shops to look at and dining choices to make. The hotel is pretty large and is ultra-modern. Like many, it is built around a central swimming pool, and has its own restaurant, bar and poolside cafe.

The entrance to the little harbour at Pointe du Bout.

One of the most pleasant surprises about La Pagerie is the live music we have been able to enjoy in the lobby area on Friday & Saturday evenings. This is very popular amongst the guests and certainly adds to their bar takings! The lobby is quite open to the street, and many people also watched and listened to the acts from outside. Clearly popular across town! One of the acts was a fascinating and very enjoyable cultural Creole dance and music performance by a large company of about a dozen or more.

Accordian player and MC of the great Creole performance at the Hotel de la Pagerie.

In the lobby of the Hotel de la Pagerie, this Creole performer participated in a stunning cultural exhbition. The entire population of the hotel, and more, enjoyed a wonderful performance.

Pointe du Bout has a spectacular view of the nation's capital Fort-De-France across the Baie, and you can make the journey by ferry in only about 10 minutes. We knew from our taxi ride in from the airport that this would be a lot faster and more convenient than driving. The ferry ride should not make you think of Sydney Harbour. We went over on the "Mona" and it was rough and wet! Our ride back was on a larger ferry and was much more comfortable and dry, although we were worried - we realised that we didn't know where we had come from, and there were three destinations to choose from. Hurried, fractured language conversations with people on the wharf made us feel a bit better, and in the end, we did arrive at the right place. We also noted that the ferries did not run to their signposted timetables, and for some reason they run a reduced schedule on Saturday and not at all on Sunday!

The ferry between Pointe du Bout and Fort-De-France lets a lot of water in on the paying customers.

In the capital, we tried to visit Fort St.Louis, easily the most dominant feature on the harbour skyline. It turned out to be a working naval base, and doesn't open for tours. This fort dates back to 1640, when the French were using the local Carib population as slave labour in sugar plantations. The British occupied Martinique for 20 years around 1800, conveniently saving the island from the horrors of the French Revolution. The French took power again, and there is no sign of any Britishness here. The capital used to be St. Pierre on the north-west coast but it was entirely destroyed and everyone killed by a volcanic eruption of Montagne Pelee in 1902.

A remnant of Fort St. Louis at Fort-De-France.

The colourful historical centre of Fort-De-Paris as seen from the harbour. The steeple of Cathedrale St-Louis is the tallest building.

We spent a couple of hours in the narrow CBD streets of Fort-De-France, found a nice deli for lunch, and looked at the shops, before we retreated to Pointe du Bout. The large Cathedrale St.Louis which dominates the CBD skyline seems surprisingly run down, and we wondered why.

Getting a rental car was a drama in itself. Our earely advice was that there were numerous agencies near our hotel, but a day or so before we arrived in Martinique our agent told us that they had no availability. Accordingly, she reserved one for us at the airport. We really didn't want to catch a taxi back to the airport, so from Pointe du Bout, we confirmed what the agent said - we tried Budget, Hertz, Europcar and Jumbo and got the same response, "nothing for a week or more". So, on the third day, we went back to the airport to pick up a Budget car - the agent there asked us didn't we know there was a Budget office opposite our hotel. Obviously, they don't communicate with each other, and they certainly don't deliver cars to each others' locations.

Our car was a tiny Opel Corsa. They don't waste cute little Renaults or Peugeots on tourists in Martinique! It was a two door manual, but it did the trick, and handled Martinique's roads with aplomb. Our first outing in it was to head north and follow the Route de la Trace desrcibed by Lonely Planet as the country's 'must-do' drive. The road was originally cut by the Jesuits in the 17thC and is a particularly scenic inland mountainous road, now the N3. The hardest part was finding it, even after taking the N3 exit of Martinique's only freeway in the middle of Fort-De-France. Massive roadworks destroyed all signage, but we eventually found the right way, in the midst of very heavy traffic.

Our bright white rental Opel Corsa.

The N3 climbs steeply out of the capital, and passes a wonderful small-sized replica of Paris' Sacre-Coeur. We parked here to take a photo, and were lucky enough to stumble across a wedding taking place. We watched it for a moment, but scarpered quickly to beat everyone's cars back onto the road.

Sacre-Coeur de Balata, where we discovered a wedding in progress.

Continuing north, from here on the city retreats and the road twists its way through mountains and lush countryside. We passed the cloud-shrouded twin peaks of the Pitons du Carbet and made it to Le Morne Rouge, apparently Martinique's highest town (450m). Also, apparently, this town was partly destroyed by a separated volcanic eruption to the one mentioned above. We negotiated a baguette sandwich in this town and enjoyed a pleasant lunch. There is a lookout in Le Morne Rouge with a fine view of the Caribbean Sea to the west, and only a few km further along the N3, there are spectacular views of the Atlantic Ocean to the east.

Clouds clinging to the tops of les Pitons du Carbet, as seen from the Botanic Garden near Balata.

At the Site de l'Alma, a river passes under a bridge on the N3.

Restaurant, sculpture and church at the high town of Le Morne-Rouge.

From up there, we finished the N3 and returned to sea level and headed back south down the N1 through a number of coastal towns, like Le Lorrain, Marigot, Sainte Marie and Le Robert. These all have black-sanded beaches, and being exposed to the Atlantic, have rough surfs making them unsuitable for the calm water loving French tourists and their resorts. These towns were pretty but seemed to be more associated with fishing than tourism. The traffic on the N1 was also much heavier than we found it on the mountainous N3.

Real surf pounds black beaches on the North Atlantic coast of Martinique, this scene near the town of Le Lorrain.

On this trip, we bypassed the town of La Trinite from which there is a narrow peninsula poking into the Atlantic. It looks interesting, but would have taken us hours to go into and retreat from. Returning to Pointe du Bout, we picked up another hitch-hiker, but this time we actually knew him! He was the barman from Le Bistro d'en Face on the way to work, and we recognised him from a night or two previously when we had a few rum cocktails there. This young fellow, about 20, surprisingly spoke no English, and what's worse, he missed calling us to take the hardest to find intersection on the way back. We cheerily told him that navigation was why we picked him up, but he didn't understand a word of either our English or our French.

Our local bar at Le Bistrot d'En Face as seen at sunset from our hotel room.

Speaking of rum, we went out of our way to sample the signature cocktails of Martinique, including at the d'en Face bar. A ti punch is pretty simple - it's straight rum with some palm sugar thrown in, but not dissolved, and a slice of lime. It comes with a spoon so you can squeeze the lime and stir the sugar. It is a revolting drink of fire-water! Clare only had one during the week here, Mike managed two, but has sworn off rum forever! A more pallatable cocktail is the Planteur which has fruit juice added to disguise the rum.

Two ti-punches, now consumed, are absolute fire-water, maybe lighter fluid?

The "best" beaches and hence the most tourist resorts are on the southern half of Martinique, which includes our part, les Trois Ilets. There we tried Anse Mitan as well as coming across private beach restrictions again. The best part of the beach at Point du Bout is owned by the plush Hotel Bakoua, and they charge E10 to use it. Next door though, is a highly developed couple of bays and groynes that look as though they were sculpted by a huge, now defunct, hotel (we called it the Club Med). Because it's defunct (and populated by squatters) the beach is now "public" and there's also some parking to be had. These beaches were quite pleasant and popular. If that site gets redeveloped, we image the beach there will be privatised.

This public beach at Pointe du Bout looks as though it was originally landscaped by a now defunct resort.

Relaxing on the beach at Anse Mitan.

Crowded beach near the end of the day and Anse Mitan at Pointe du Bout.

We did a day trip in our little Opel to see the rest of the south. We called in at l'Anse a l'Ane and Grand Anse. By then we surmised that Martinique beaches are mediocre at best - they are pretty clean (but the water tastes of things other than salt) but the water is not the colour we expect of the Caribbean. What's more, parking is nigh impossible - we spent way too much time looking for a spot at several Anses, only to find the beach fairly unappealing. There is no surf, we understand that the French seem to like standing around in calm waters, but the sand is grey and coarse (lots of broken coral), and the water is barely blue. There is also the attraction that at many beaches you can easily rent a bed and an umbrella, as well as a kayak and a jet ski. Most importantly, you can get a meal and a drink right on the beach. The French give up a lot to be amongst there own, and to be in a familiar environment.

Scene on many of the beaches at Les Anses-d'Arlet on Martinique's south western peninsula.

As we wound further round the coast, we passed Le Diamant but there were real waves here, and thus the beach was not so popular, and parking was easier. Then through Ste-Luce (but we had given up on the beaches by now), and through the big and crowded town of Marin with a huge marina, on the way to a very cute and touristy town of Ste-Anne. This is where we decided to call it quits and head for home after having a delicious fresh fruit cocktail from a roadside stand.

The town and marina at Le Marin, and unfortunately crowded town that you have to drive through to get to Ste-Anne.

Martinique does not seem to be a destination for the young and beautiful of France, or at least not the parts of it we saw. Most tourists are quite "senior" to say the least - the youngsters are locals. There's a lot of wrinkly flesh exposed on the beaches, and we're not talking about ours! While having a coffee one morning at a Baguette Shop, we met an old lady who told us her son was a teacher in Melbourne. She wanted to chat, although our combined language skills were poor, and she managed to hurry up croissant production inside for us, when we told her they had none!

Of course, this is the biggest advanatge to living in a part of France, the availability of good bread, baguettes and croissants! It seems to us that the French are very ritualised in many ways, so that different food and drinks are able to be bought and consumed at particular times of day, and then not at all available at others. When we felt like something, it was a disappointment to find that particular shop closed. But when you fall into sync with the French habits, the rewards are very nice!

Fresh-squeezed juice stall at Ste-Anne. A delicious and healthy reviver on a hot day.

We had to return our car to the airport to fly out to Antigua. We already knew that Martinique traffic was abominable near Fort-De-France and this early morning (weekday) trip proved it. It took us about 90 minutes to drive the last 10km into Le Lamentin on a four lane highway, so heavy was the traffic, aggravated by entering traffic at every roundabout. Luckily we had anticipated this schemozzle, and left in plenty of time.