AFR Sophisticated Traveller, May 19 2023
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So this is what happened. My wife and I turned 50 five weeks apart, and decided the joint birthday warranted an audacious celebration. So we booked the trip of a lifetime: a voyage through the Windward Islands of the Southern Caribbean on a magnificent five-masted square-rigged tall ship called the Golden Horizon.
Imagine our surprise when it turned out the ship was Russian-funded and the whole enterprise got shut down under international sanctions.
Sympathy among our friends was limited. It was perhaps the most first-world problem ever: our Caribbean sailing voyage got canned because Russia invaded Ukraine! We’d be willing to concede there are more directly affected victims of that brutal conflict than us.
But, still, we had non-refundable flights, and a call to make on where to go. So we went to the Grenadines, looked for rich-listers, and drank a hell of a lot of rum.
We base ourselves in the island of Bequia, part of St Vincent and the Grenadines, an island reached by a light aircraft flight from Barbados so casual it never even appears on the departure boards at Grantley Adams International.
Bequia is how you want the Caribbean to be. One beach, called Princess Margaret (her name is everywhere in these parts), brings the whole picture together.
There’s a man selling coconuts which he lops with a machete, before pouring rum from a bottle of Captain Morgan’s into the top to mix with the coconut milk and handing it back to you with a straw.
There’s a woman called Fay who has, she will tell you with some pride, been sitting in the same chair inside a shack of purple-painted wood for about 20 years now, serving drinks behind a sign daubed with the words Fay’s Local Bar.
And there’s a man in a kayak who reaches the shore with 24 beers balanced on his head, relaying between the beach and the many fine boats anchored in the bay. Oh to be the level of rich where you can pay some bloke in a canoe to paddle a slab of beer on his head out to your superyacht. I’d be happy to just be rich enough to pay an extra $1 for oat milk in my latte without massively overthinking it.
Bequia is a beautiful spot but without a whole lot to do, so mainly we eat and drink. There is a remarkable variety of rum-based cocktails, plus everyone has their own particular secret recipe for rum punch, so it is quite possible to drink a different rum concoction so frequently that you can no longer remember what you’ve tried already and feel obliged to start again.
There are your classics: daiquiris, mai tais, pina coladas, dark and stormy (I’m pale and ginger, as my wife never ceases to point out as I drink them, which for some reason amuses her greatly). Then there are the more niche options: the painkiller (terribly named based on the next morning’s self-loathing agony), the hurricane (a dicey choice of name in a Caribbean island, in truth), a planter’s punch, various sours.
But by day three I hit real innovation and order an Electric Smurf, so named for being resplendently blue. Curacao gives it the tint, apparently; maybe it’s that, and maybe it’s the two different kinds of rum - coconut and pineapple - but the following morning we awake to find we have superglued one of our shoes to the hotel floor but can’t remember how or why.
“What kind of a grown man orders an Electric Smurf cocktail?” my wife asks Facebook. “The Bad Idea Bears pay yet another visit.”
Several days in, we run out of bars and beaches in Bequia, so it is time to sail to nearby Mustique for the day. Chic Mustique, the glamour-set’s favourite getaway. Dazzlingly beautiful with a reputation for scandals, louche living and a heady whiff of flamboyant wealth. We will fit right in.
First we must get there, on a lovely sailboat called the Friendship Rose. This is filled at first with cheerful holidaymakers enjoying a breakfast champagne, and then, as the boat pitches and yaws in a decent swell, with vomit from the same breakfast champagne rolling down the decks from the queasy on the port side to the alarmed on the starboard.
On arrival, to the soundtrack of occasional private jets arriving overhead, we set about doing what everybody except the ultra-rich does when they get to Mustique: try to establish who lives where. There are informal tours that take place in electric buggies, but they’re mainly tours of the ends of people’s driveways with a commentary of “Mick Jagger lives there sometimes” or “David Bowie used to live there,” rather than any hope of seeing the actual homes.
Bowie apparently sold his Indonesian-styled villa because it was too peaceful to get anything done and it turned out he needed a bit of mental torment, or at least an actual thought, if he wanted to write a song.
Princess Margaret had a fine old pad called Les Jolies Eaux at the tip of the island, having received the land as an extraordinarily generous wedding present. She still seems somewhat revered in the Grenadines despite almost every first-hand account involving her deeply unpleasant attitude to everybody else. Bill Gates, another sometime resident, gets a better rap: great tipper, apparently.
There doesn’t honestly seem to be all that much to do in Mustique, but maybe when you’re that rich, the party comes to you. It’s a curious set-up. While territorially part of St Vincent and the Grenadines, the whole island is owned by a private limited company, and that company is owned by the people who have homes on the island. In order to keep the visitors at bay, there’s only one hotel (the company owns that too, and the beach café).
Mustique’s weird cachet dates from a man called Lord Glenconner – Colin Tennant, to his mates – who bought the roadless island for £45,000 in 1958, initially as a cotton farm. He formed the Mustique Company in 1968, the shareholder model followed in the 80s and through a combination of publicity and parties an image was successfully built as a jetsetter hideaway out of the public eye.
If you’re truly loaded, you can rent the villas. Bowie’s old place, the Mandalay, rents for $75,000 per week, including a couple of private cottages. Toucan Hill, based on a Moroccan theme, goes for a more modest $42,000 a week, or a bargain $33,000 off-season. These days you can even stay in Les Jolies Eaux, the royals having sold out of it some time ago: $44,500 from January to April, plus, as with most of these places, 11% government tax, a 10% island fee, and a recommended 10% tip for the staff (a butler, a chef, a gardener and two housekeepers).
Most normal people lack these means. The modest harbour therefore fills with day-trippers like us, who depart again some hours later without having seen any celebrities. We have glimpsed the rich-list idyll, where Prince William and Princess Kate come to chill out when they need a break from all that Royalling, where McCartney, Depp, Travolta and Bon Jovi have all spent quality time, but there are limits on our access.
We depart from Bequia the next day, in my case having consumed so much rum punch I am advised by a doctor to book an endoscopy when I get home just to be on the safe side. We leave on a plane no more official than the one we arrived on, and as the rugged green terrain hemmed by infinite shades of blue sea recede from view, we realise this is as close as we will get to being rich-listers.
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