Trip Report: St. Kitts and Nevis
Visited in May 2022
This trip report is part of a five-part series. This is the second part and for a better understanding it is worth starting with the first article and going through the articles in chronological order.
It was already dark when our Winair plane landed in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis, after a 25-minute flight from Sint Maarten. The airport looked deserted and also from our plane only about twelve passengers got off, so that it consequently took just a few minutes until we had the stamp in the passport and could leave the terminal.
When I come to a new country, I always have a certain image in mind or a certain expectation. In many cases, the country turns out to be exactly as I imagined it. With St. Kitts and Nevis, it was the opposite. Somehow I expected the country to be rather “simple”. Some basic houses on a volcanic island in combination with dirt road. Or, to put it a little more directly, a rather undeveloped country in the Caribbean.
However, I could not have been more wrong. St. Kitts and Nevis turned out to be a fairly developed country with good roads and many luxurious buildings. While the country didn’t have that jet-set feel of Sint Maarten, my first impression of this country was: the people here are doing well. Measured by GDP per capita, St. Kitts and Nevis is after the Bahamas the second wealthiest country among the independent states in the Caribbean.
What I also noticed during the cab ride from the airport to our hotel was the strange dialect of the locals. The language in St. Kitts and Nevis is English, as in most countries and territories in the Lesser Antilles. Our cab driver gave us a kind of mini-tour during the ride, telling us which building we were passing. His dialect was so difficult for me as a non-native English speaker to understand that I had to answer with “sorry?” every second sentence. A little foretaste of Barbados, by the way. The dialect was even more difficult to understand there.
Of all the islands we visited during this Caribbean trip, St. Kitts and Nevis turned out to be the least touristy by the way. I realized that even before the trip when I was looking for a hotel. There are not really many on the island and those with a good rating are quite expensive. Our choice fell on the Marriott Resort. Since we were “forced” to spend three nights on the island due to the low amount of flights, we figured a decent hotel wouldn’t be a bad idea. Because one thing I can say in advance, three days on St. Kitts and Nevis is long….
St. Kitts and Nevis is in terms of area and population the smallest country in the Americas. In both categories, the country ranks 190/197 in the world. This means that only seven other countries are smaller. Hence, the country can be seen in a fairly short time. St. Kitts, the bigger of the two islands, is 37km long and 8km wide. Going around it by car takes a bit more than two hours.
We did that on our first full day. We originally rented a car, but two days before our arrival the rental company wrote me that the car had “problems” and therefore could not be given to us. I make every bet that this was a lie. Probably someone wanted to rent the car for more than one day, so they then gave it to that person rather than us.
As an alternative, the company offered me a new car. At a daily rate of just under $120. The thing about rental cars in the Caribbean is that in many countries you still have to buy a local driver’s license for $20-30. Even if you only need the car for a few hours. This rip-off pushes the already high prices of the rental cars even higher. $120 was then not worth it for us, so we joined a tour at short notice.
The tour included the top sights of St. Kitts and lasted about five hours. The most interesting stops were Sir Timothy’s Hill with its spectacular view and Brimstone Hill Fortress, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and by far the best attraction on the island.
We also did some other stops, for example the Botanical Gardens at Romney Manor or the Black Rocks on the north coast of the country. We also drove through Basseterre, where our driver said a few words about the buildings we just passed. These stops were all in all okay, but not particularly noteworthy.
What I also soon learned was that St. Kitts is a beautiful island, although very quiet. Too quiet for my taste. With us on the tour were two Americans, a father and his daughter. They booked a full week on the island because they found an article online that called St. Kitts and Nevis the best adventure destination in the Caribbean. In my opinion, there are few places that offer less adventure than this country. It’s a pity that the two Americans didn’t know me before they booked, because then I would have recommended Haiti to them as a real adventure destination in the Caribbean. 🙂
Anyway, it was also nice to explore a quiet country slowly. As I said, since we had to stay three days and I realized before the trip that St. Kitts and Nevis wouldn’t offer enough for three days, we booked the Marriott as our hotel and also enjoyed a few hours at the pool or the beach of the hotel. Therefore, our time in St. Kitts and Nevis also felt more like a vacation than a real trip. That was absolutely fine, though. As a change from my very fast trips, I was happy to take things slower than usual and relax a bit more. I must also admit that I really needed it.
We still used the second day to further explore the country. For example, we took a ferry to the second island of Nevis. St. Kitts & Nevis is a country consisting of two volcanic islands. The two islands are only half an hour away from each other by boat and there are several ferries going there and back every day.
Fun fact: Christopher Columbus gave this country its name, St. Kitts being an abbreviation of his patron St. Christopher and Nevis referring to Nieves, the Spanish word for snow. Columbus thought when he first went to these islands that the volcano in Nevis, shrouded in clouds, looked like a snow-capped mountain.
We did not do a lot in Nevis to be honest. We didn’t visit any beaches, instead we spent time in the small town of Charlestown. Charlestown is even smaller than Basseterre and is more like a big village, in which everybody knows everybody. There is not much to do, though. So we just drank coffee and walked up and down the streets of the town.
On our way back from Nevis, we also spent a few hours in the capital Basseterre. To be honest, the capitals of these Caribbean islands were in most cases not particularly worth seeing. Basseterre was no exception. But since we had way too much time anyway, we walked around the city a bit, visited the cricket stadium, the Independence Square and Port Zante where all the cruise ships arrive.
After a day and a half, however, I felt like I had seen everything that interested me. We could have done the volcano hike on St. Kitts. However, we refrained from doing that. Somehow the pictures of the view from the volcano I found online didn’t seem worth the supposedly pretty tough hike. Instead, we then spent the last day at our hotel’s pool before returning to the airport for our 15-minute flight to Antigua and Barbuda.
So, how was St. Kitts and Nevis? In summary, it is a tiny country with wonderful and friendly people who live a happy life in their homeland. However, for my taste, St. Kitts and Nevis was not very exciting. You basically don’t need more than a day to see all the highlights of the island. The fact that we stayed longer, however, was also okay. As I said, a vacation in between is also good.
This is not to say that St. Kitts and Nevis is a “bad” country or anything. There were definitely aspects that impressed me. For example, the hilly volcanic landscape on both islands. Or the fact how developed the country is. I was told that the country has a very good social security system. People in the tourism sector were able to live off the support from the state during the pandemic, which is rather a rarity outside of Europe, North America and Australia/New Zealand. In addition, the Kittians’ passport is said to be quite strong, allowing visa-free access to over 150 countries.
I should probably also mention that St. Kitts and Nevis is one of the most expensive countries I have ever been to. Of all the countries we visited on this trip, it was the most expensive. Just ahead of Barbados. Everything has a hefty price tag here, unfortunately: accommodations, food, cab rides (you pay $20 for almost every ride, no matter how short), rental cars, everything. Prices in St. Kitts and Nevis are comparable to those in Switzerland.
Would I recommend St. Kitts and Nevis to others? It depends on what you want, but unless you want an island with nice people where time moves very slowly, I would say no. Of all the countries I saw on this trip, St. Kitts and Nevis was the one that excited me the least. Mainly because it was so quiet and there was so little to do that interested me.
We left St. Kitts and Nevis on day three towards Antigua and Barbuda, which was definitely a more vibrant country. Click here to read that trip report.
