How did we end up spending eight nights at the chic Jalousie Hilton resort?
Simple. We had gone to the travel agent a week earlier and said: “What have
you got left in the Caribbean?” And no sooner had my credit card stopped
reeling, than somebody told me that the resort was an American millionaires’
playground, built on a fabulous protected site that had been earmarked to
become a national park until foreign dollars changed politicians’ minds.
Gulp.
Let me say, before I get sued, that this is not entirely true. Most of the
guests were non-millionaires (I’d guess) and at least half were
non-American.
Fortunately, the bit about the fabulous site is spot-on. I don’t think I’ve
ever eaten breakfast with a more stunningly beautiful view in my life. As
you sit on the garden veranda of the resort’s main building — a neocolonial
mansion — and chomp on your locally grown mango and papaya, you’re in the
shade of a wooded hillside. Soaring out of the sea on your right is a
2,460ft mountain that looks as if it has been carved from solid chocolate.
This is the Petit Piton, which isn’t at all petit from this angle. On your
left is the jungle-covered cone of the 2,620ft Grand Piton.
Yes, you are nestling between the island’s enormous breasts — a bit lopsided,
but who’s complaining when they’re (on average) a size 2,540DD? The two
mountains frame a blue expanse of Caribbean Sea and cloud-blotched tropical
sky. The air is blood-warm, with the edge taken off it by the lightest of
breezes. You can drink coffee, eat hot cinnamon porridge and still feel that
the world is a cool place in all senses of the word.
Only two things jar in the perfect scene: one — guests are arriving for
breakfast by minibus; more on these shuttles later. Two — the beach is so
pristinely white in this landscape of brown rock and green vegetation that
it looks unnatural. Which it is not. Or, at least, it wasn’t unnatural in
its native South America, before it was dredged up and dumped here to form a
giant private sandpit at the heart of the bay.
The fish you see when you’re snorkelling just outside the sandpit zone seem to
have been created for the Hilton by Elvis’s costume designer. Colours are
impossibly electric, shapes absurdly kitsch. They swim among rocks colonised
by red- coral arteries, immense brown brains and yellow spouts that are now
protected in the island’s marine reserve. And, floating there in the clear,
warm sea, you can’t help wondering what the rest of this shoreline must have
been like before a million-dollars’ worth of sand was emptied over it.
Happily, the 100-odd villas up on the hillside are more environmentally
friendly than the beach. They’re cute, pastel-painted wooden bungalows that
have been very well hidden among the trees. This former sugar plantation is
so huge that if, like us, you’re in a villa near the top of the resort, you
feel as if you’re living out in the jungle. After dark, once you’ve
unplugged everything electrical, you hear only the chirruping of tree frogs.
This, however, means that you’re dependent on the shuttle minibuses to get
around. And even though the drivers, like the rest of the staff, are
incredibly friendly, and the buses are the perfect place to meet other
guests, it does feel like being in The Prisoner. You are a number. “Hi, 809,
isn’t it?” the drivers say.
The restaurants have a similarly unnatural feel. You’re in a Hilton, so you
know that food is going to be (a) not cheap and (b) American-influenced.
Therefore, it is slightly unfair to quibble about an eight-quid hamburger
(plus 10% service, plus 8% government tax). But when coffee is grown on the
island, why does it have to be imported from Bensenville, Illinois? And do
people really come to the Caribbean to eat hazelnut-coated brie, fish in
champagne sauce, or fettuccini with feta cheese? I mean, guys — Italy might
be closer to Greece than Texas is to Ohio, but they are different countries
with their own cuisine.
Yes, I am a party-pooping food snob, but I’m not the only one. I overheard
some all- inclusive English guests in a fit of depression about the lack of
choice at lunchtimes. And an American, with a very large watch, saying to
his wife: “How much? For nachos?” The answer, of course, is to remind
yourself that St Lucia is a whole island and not just this one resort hotel.
You can start gently, by getting the shuttle driver to drop you off on the
Grand Piton side of the resort, at a little restaurant called Bang. It’s a
cute huddle of wooden buildings right on the shore that does tasty local
dishes such as christophine (a marrow-like plant) and accras (cod fritters).
Bang is so laid-back that beer is served in the bottle and vegetables in
Tupperware bowls, though this belies its origins. It was set up by the old
British gent who comes out to meet and greet at dinnertime, with his white
cowboy hat, white hair, white poncho outfit and ghost-pale skin. Clint
Eastwood on bleach.
This is Colin Tennant, aka Lord Glenconner, the man who gave a chunk of
Mustique to Princess Margaret back in the 1960s, and attracted the British
jetset to the Caribbean.
He bought the Jalousie estate in 1981, and put his weight behind a plan to
develop the site for tourism. An alternative project to turn the Pitons into
a national park was initially supported by the Saint Lucia Archeological and
Historical Society, but the society’s vice president was the prime
minister’s wife, and the PM supported the tourist development and the 400
jobs it would bring, and ... you get the picture.
Suffice it to say that Tennant sold most of the estate to developers, and you
can now play tennis on courts that (so I read on the internet) cover an
ancient Amerindian cemetery. I didn’t play — my backhand is already cursed —
but as I walked past one afternoon, I’m sure I heard Arawak spirits giving
decidedly dodgy line calls.
After this tentative excursion into the outside world, we even summoned up
enough moral fibre to walk the couple of miles to the nearest village,
Soufrière. Soufrière itself is a miniature New Orleans, a fishing village of
balconied clapboard buildings and rutted streets, where a small, air-
conditioned mall sits opposite a “supermarket” that is essentially a shack.
When the wind is blowing in the right (or wrong) direction, the air is
filled with pungent eggy smells from the sulphur springs that give the town
its name.
The area is still volcanic, and we visited the springs and bathed in the muddy
waters alongside a Rasta who was using the hot mud to shock some life back
into his limbs after a stroke. The temperature of the water almost gave me a
stroke and I got out before certain parts of me were turned into a boiled
Creole boudin sausage.
Our most memorable outing was to the Fond Doux Estate in the hills behind the
resort, a 250-year-old cocoa plantation where you wander among the cocoa,
banana, mango, avocado and papaya trees and watch hummingbirds pricking waxy
tropical flowers with their curved beaks.
The guide broke open a bright-yellow cocoa pod, like a slender, varnished
melon. Inside were large bean-shaped seeds covered in white goo. She dipped
her fingers in and invited us to do the same. It felt a bit like doing an
autopsy on an alien with 50 kidneys, but, sucking on the beans, I had to
agree that the goo was very tasty. It was also very moreish. As we continued
the tour, I kept dipping into my alien and sucking on its kidneys. Only
trouble was, in my enthusiasm, I sucked a little too hard and swallowed a
bean. In 10 years, I should start bearing fruit.
After an authentically Caribbean lunch of spicy fish, grilled plantain, rice,
beans, green-fig salad and Piton lager at the plantation’s restaurant, we
returned to crash out in the sandpit and concentrate on repairing our own
ecosystems.
This is where the resort comes into its own. By the fourth day, all my toxins
had been relaxed away. Swimming and back massages had restored the wasteland
of my deskbound spine to its virgin state. And my sock-free toes couldn’t
stop wiggling in ecstasy.
The only thing still nagging away in my chilled-out brain was the air
conditioning. I asked one of the chambermaids what she thought about the
subject. “Well, we try to accommodate everyone,” she said. “Some people like
it cold.” Cold is right — the housekeepers turn it to 17C when they do your
room, and that’s a windy bank holiday in Scarborough.
I admitted that there was one time of the day when I appreciated it. If you go
for a post-lunch siesta, it is a delicious sensation to enter a chilled
room.
Apart from that, I said, her island’s climate was perfect. Cool and breezy in
the early morning, then beautifully balmy, with clouds sliding across the
mountaintops from the Atlantic and sending down miraculously light, short
showers that feel as if the sky has been equipped with a giant facial spray
(you never know, this is the Hilton, after all).
Either side of noon it can get very hot — skin-cancer time. The
melanoma-growers lie facing the sun and you watch their thighs turning
coral-red. This, I finally realised, is why they don’t turn their air
conditioning off at night — they have burnt themselves so badly that they
need to sleep in a fridge.
But if you’re in the shade, and as near naked as St Lucian law allows (no bare
Pitons, ladies), it’s heaven.
That must be the definition of the ideal climate — when you never even notice
that there is a climate.
Stephen Clarke is the author of A Year in the Merde (Black Swan £6.99)
Travel brief
Scott Dunn (020 8682 5020, www.scottdunn.com) has seven nights at the Jalousie Hilton
Resort (00 800 8884 4888, www.hilton.co.uk) from £1,830pp, including flights
from Heathrow with British Airways, and transfers. UK regional add-ons are
available from £69. Or try Barefoot Luxury (020 8741 4319, www.barefootluxury.com)
or Exsus Travel (020 7929 5060, www.exsus.com).
The Fond Doux Estate (00 758-459 7545, www.fonddouxestate.com) is open daily from
8am to 5pm. A tour, with lunch, costs £10.50pp.
Car hire can be cheaper than taking taxis, but beware of spectacularly hilly roads.
Cool Breeze Rentals (459 7729, www.coolbreezecarrental.com) has inclusive
4WD rentals from £40 a day. Or try Avis (0870 010 0287, www.avis.co.uk).
For further information, visit the excellent www.stlucia.org.
