St Martin, Sint Maarten, 17-18 September 2016

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In the morning we went to the Marigot Markets.  Here are some fishermen preparing fish beside the sea.

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A huge array of shells.

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These locals appear to have locked themselves out of their car.

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Markets in the background.

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Next we went to Maho Beach, which is right beside the airport.  This sign on the fence at the beach and also at the end of the runway warns of the dangers but not all people take notice.  It is particularly dangerous when a plane has backed up to this end of the runway to take off.  People can cling to the fence to experience the jet blast but they can get blown away and unable to hang on.  About nine months after I took this photograph, a woman from New Zealand died here when she was blown off the fence and hit her head on te kerb.

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Here is the beach, the runway just to the right.  We saw this view from the air as the plane came in a couple of posts ago.

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And there’s a plane on the way.

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There it goes….

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Nearby we saw these posters for a forthcoming Sint Maarten election.  Lots of big posters may not amount to much it seems.  At the previous election the party of these posters won only around 1% of the vote and it no longer exists.

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Nearby this sailing ship was tied up at a wharf.

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Could it be a surviving Dutch fluyt from the seventeenth century?

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No, it’s quite modern, either a replica or a fantasy.  Semper pro gradiens (always progressing) is the motto of Sint Maarten.

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In the afternoon we went to Petit Plage, just north of Grand case, for a swim.  I didn’t take a camera with me because I didn’t want to leave it unaccompanied on the beach though as it turns out I could have because there were not many people around.  But I have no images of that to show you.  This is the beach at Grand Case late in the afternoon.

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An old house on the street in Grand Case.

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Next day we were due to fly out in the afternoon but had enough time to visit Happy Day Beach for another swim.

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There were no other people around when we turned up.

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Some people turned up while we were there and were swimming as we left.

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