Destination
Saint
Martin
two countries, one island
5 stories · July 2016 · French side + Dutch side
In July 2016 I flew to an island that is two countries at once, and spent most of the week looking at wings. Five posts came out of it: a runway you can stand behind, a garden full of butterflies, and an aviary where the birds land on a paper cup of seed. Ten years on, one of those places is gone and one is still open — so this page carries the trip and what is true now.
The index
Thirty-four square miles, two flags and one week.
Everything on this page happened inside the shape on the left. The dotted line is the border: France above it, the Kingdom of the Netherlands below it, and no checkpoint anywhere along it. Pick a pin, or scroll and let the week run in order.
Saint-Martin (FR)Sint Maarten (NL)The 1648 line
The coastline is traced from the real one and simplified — accurate enough to place things, not a map to navigate by.
15 July 2016 · the first day
I landed, and then I did nothing at all.
My first post from Saint Martin is four sentences long, which is exactly what the day was. I had landed that morning, my access to wifi was “extremely limited”, and I spent the rest of it on the beach and in one of the hotel pools.
The plan for the week was written down in that post and I have never had a better one since: to relax, destress, and reflect on my future — and to do it without the electronic distractions that ordinarily surround me. Ten years later that reads less like a holiday and more like a working method.
This is my first time ever visiting this island so I’m looking forward to discovering what Saint Martin is all about.Hello, Saint Martin! · 15 July 2016Read the arrival post
If you want that week in 2026
The island runs on tourism and has the connectivity to match, which means switching off is a decision, not a limitation. If you are coming to work rather than to disappear, Sint Maarten’s own tourist board points remote workers at Van Dorp’s co-working spaces for a private desk and speeds above island average — and warns, in the words of a remote worker living there, that business may not move as fast as you would like.
18 July 2016 · Maho Beach
Only in Saint Martin can you swim under a landing jet.
Maho Beach sits directly behind the short runway at SXM. Every twenty minutes or so another aircraft comes over the sand low enough that the whole beach stops to watch. That part is wonderful. The other part is what people do at the far end of the beach.
The first thing you meet is the sign, and it is not subtle.
Jet blast of departing and arriving aircraft can cause severe physical harm resulting in extreme bodily harm and/or death.The sign at the end of the runway
Despite the signs, whenever a plane was within sight people all over the beach would run to the fence, grab on with both hands, and wait to be blasted. I was one of them. My sister’s feet lifted off the floor. My dad broke a blood vessel in his eye from getting hit in the face with debris. I heard glass shatter behind us.
Read the Maho postOne year later, someone died on that fence
On 12 July 2017 — twelve months, almost to the day, after I stood there — a 57-year-old woman from New Zealand was holding the airport fence at Maho when a departing aircraft’s blast knocked her down. She died of her injuries at the Sint Maarten Medical Center. It was the first death at the spot; a woman had been seriously injured there in 2012.
I wrote in 2016 that I thought I was going to die and that I regretted it almost instantly. I am not going to pretend, now, that it was only a laugh. Go to Maho: it is one of the great free sights in the Caribbean. The island’s own visitor board tells you how, and it is one sentence long — stay on the beach side of the road and do not hold the airport fence.
Sources: TIME, 13 July 2017 · St. Maarten official visitor guide, Maho Beach.
The oldest line in the Caribbean
You will cross an international border today and never notice.
On 23 March 1648, France and the Netherlands signed the Treaty of Concordia and split this island between them. That agreement still applies: goods and people move freely across it, there are no border posts, and most road crossings are not marked at all.
The story everyone tells is that the line was set by a race — one runner from each nation, starting at opposite ends, the border drawn where they met. The French side is bigger, so the French runner is said to have won. The island’s own tourist office files that under legend, and notes the legend is never-ending. What is real is the obelisk: put up in 1948 to mark three hundred years of peaceful coexistence between the two of them.
My family drove over to the French side one afternoon to find a butterfly garden. That is the whole border experience. You get in a car and after a while the road signs change language.
The 1948 border monument, drawn. Three hundred years of peaceful coexistence, and counting.
North
Saint-Martin
A French overseas collectivity — legally France, but outside the Schengen area. Marigot is the main town; Grand Case is the street you eat on.
- Money
- Euro
- Market
- Marigot, every day except Sunday, 8am–1pm, on Boulevard de France. Fish auctions Wednesday and Saturday mornings.
- Carnival
- February
South
Sint Maarten
A constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Philipsburg is the capital, and the airport everyone flies into is down here.
- Money
- The Caribbean guilder (XCG) since 31 March 2025, pegged at US$1 = 1.79. US dollars are taken almost everywhere.
- Entry
- The free ED card at entry.sx, filled in before you fly.
- Carnival
- April, ending with Jouvert and the Grand Parade.
What changed in 2026
After 377 years, the two governments have finally written the line down. A border treaty signed in 2023 fixes the boundary in modern coordinates, and France’s National Assembly approved the ratification legislation on 16 July 2026; the Kingdom of the Netherlands has still to complete its own. It introduces no checkpoints and changes nothing whatsoever about crossing the island — it is paperwork catching up with 1648.
Sources: Saint-Martin tourist office, on the border · Caribbean Compass, 2026 · caribbean-guilder.com.
20 July 2016 · the French side
Ten dollars for the most peaceful place I have ever been.
The Butterfly Farm cost $10, and the ticket let you come back as often as you liked until the end of your holiday. A guide called Molly walked us round. There was slow music playing, butterflies were fluttering around everywhere, and the whole thing was so quiet it felt like a different island.
Molly told us the species were imported from all over the world, and that the way to get one to trust you is to tap its antennae, gently. It worked. They would sit on a finger for a minute or two before taking off again.
Then I was handed the Atlas moth — the world’s largest moth species — and it turned out to be, in the only word for it, clingy.
You could spot every color of the rainbow as you walked around between all of the butterflies. It was butterfly paradise.Saint Martin’s Butterfly Garden · 20 July 2016Read the butterfly post
Tap the antennae
Six that landed on me
Every one of these is in my own photographs from that morning. Pick one and it comes to the flower.
The part of that post that is no longer true
It is gone. Hurricane Irma, 6 September 2017.
Fourteen months after I stood in it, a category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 185 mph crossed this island and damaged something like 90% of the structures on it. The Butterfly Farm was one of them. The structure was almost entirely destroyed — even the shipping container holding the gift shop did not survive.
It has never reopened. The farm’s own notice still says it was “temporarily discontinued” after Irma; the company’s remaining butterfly farm is on Aruba. If you read my 2016 post and saved the place for a future trip, this is the paragraph I owe you.
What survived on this island is not the attraction but the habit behind it. There is now a free museum of St. Martin nature and heritage — Amuseum Naturalis, at The Old House in French Quarter, run by the non-profit Les Fruits de Mer. Open daily, sunrise to sunset, self-guided, no admission. Go there instead.
Sources: discover-saintmaarten.com · IABES, on the damage · Amuseum Naturalis.
21 July 2016 · Parrotte-Ville
My obsession with birds is a known fact.
I could not leave the island without visiting the bird park. It had opened seven months earlier. Admission was $10 and that included the Saint Martin Heritage Museum next to it — the same price as the butterflies, on the other side of the border.
At the gate you get a rundown of the species inside, and then you get the thing that makes the place: an ice-cream-cone-on-a-stick, a cup of birdseed with a wooden pole under it. You carry it around and the birds come to you.
Not all of them. Several were skittish — I badly wanted to handle a few of them without the cup as a bribe, and could not. The Quakers stuck to the ceiling and the Ringnecks were hostile. Every bird there had been imported, and exactly one had been hand-reared since the place opened. That one was extremely sweet, and let me, a total stranger, pet his head.
Read the bird park postThe list, in my own order
Seven species I could name, and several others I could not.
Drawn, not photographed. “Mountain dove” is the odd one on that list: it is St. Martin’s own name for the Zenaida dove, a bird you can watch for free anywhere on the island — source: Wildlife of St. Martin.
And then the museum
The best part was not advertised
After I stepped out of the aviary the owner invited us into the heritage museum, which was essentially a collection of antiques he had gathered from around the island. That is the bit I still think about: I came for parrots and left having been shown somebody’s private collection of his own island.
If I ever do return to Saint Martin in years to come, the Parrotte-Ville Bird Park will be at the top of my to-do list.Feeding Birds at Parrotte-Ville · 21 July 2016
The centrepiece · hold out the cup
Seven birds, one paper cup.
0of 7 species on the cup
Press the button and they come in the order I met them.
The park is still there. It is on Bishop Hill Road in Belvedere, open daily 9:30am–4:30pm, $15 for adults and $7 for children with a 30-minute guided tour, and the heritage museum is still part of the visit — source: We Are SXM.
25 July 2016 · Simpson Bay
Something like flying, in zero gravity.
My sister and I tried flyboarding for the first time in Simpson Bay. Jets shoot water down below your feet and push you up out of the water. It takes a lot of core strength and it is enormous fun.
I put a line at the end of that post that I would write differently now: I heard it’s not great for the environment, but I didn’t know that at the time. I am leaving it there. If you want the water without the engine, the French side has the better answer — the Nature Reserve runs a guided ecosnorkelling trail off Pinel Island with a marine biologist and rental gear, inside a marine park where jet skis and fishing are both prohibited, protecting coral reef, mangrove, seagrass, lagoon and coastal dry forest.
Source: Réserve Naturelle Nationale de Saint-Martin, Ìlet Pinel.
Read the flyboarding postThe table
Pull up a chair at a lolo.
This is the part of the island I did not write about in 2016, and the part I would build a trip around now. A lolo is not a dish. It is an open-air restaurant set up right by the sea, grilling lobster and stuffed crab, and Grand Case is the street lined with them.
Little fried rolls of flour, baking powder, sugar and butter, golden on the outside. Also spelled journey cakes.
Red Caribbean berries steeped in aged rum with sugar, cinnamon and vanilla. Traditionally a Christmas drink.
Called the island’s great traditional dish: crab, salted pork, smoked bacon and rice, eaten at Easter.
Conch, stewed slowly with tomato, onion, garlic and spice.
Salt cod fritters, the snack you eat standing up while the grill gets going.
Not a dish — an open-air restaurant by the sea, grilling lobster and stuffed crab. Grand Case is the street for them.
And the market, six mornings a week
Marigot market runs every day except Sunday, 8am to 1pm, along Boulevard de France by the waterfront near Fort Louis. Cassava, chayote, passion fruit, guava, papaya, mango and coconut; fish, lobster, shrimp and conch off the boats; cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg sold by the amount you ask for. The fish auctions are Wednesday and Saturday mornings and they sell out early.
Sources: Saint-Martin tourist office, culinary specialities · the same office, on Marigot market.
Then and now
Ten years is a long time on a small island.
What I paid, what I saw, and what is actually there in 2026.
$10.00, and that fee included the Heritage Museum.
$15.00 adults, $7.00 children, with a 30-minute guided tour. Still open, still run by George, in Belvedere on the Dutch side.Source: wearesxm.com
$10.00 for unlimited returns until the end of your trip.
Closed. Hurricane Irma flattened it in September 2017 and it has not reopened.Source: discover-saintmaarten.com
The old terminal, with Maho Beach at the end of the runway.
Rebuilt after Irma and reopened in November 2024, to Category 5 standards.Source: World Bank
Netherlands Antillean guilder, with US dollars everywhere.
The Caribbean guilder (XCG) since 31 March 2025, pegged at US$1 = 1.79.Source: caribbean-guilder.com
A line on a map nobody stops you at.
Still nobody stops you — but after 377 years the two governments have finally written the line down.Source: Caribbean Compass
Plan it
Everything I would tell a friend before they booked.
- One island, two sets of paperwork.
- Almost everyone flies into Princess Juliana (SXM) on the Dutch side, then drives wherever they like. There are no border posts between the two countries.
- Fill in the ED card before you fly.
- Sint Maarten’s embarkation/disembarkation form lives at entry.sx, it is free, and the system opens seven days before arrival. Some airlines have turned people away without it. Any site charging you a fee for it is a scam.
- Passport, return ticket, done.
- US, Canadian and EU visitors need a valid passport and proof of onward travel; no visa for a tourist stay.
- The French side is France, but not Schengen.
- Saint-Martin is a French overseas collectivity. You will not be asked for anything crossing into it by road.
- Rent a car.
- It is a 34-square-mile island and the two halves are genuinely different countries to look at. Buses exist; a car is what people actually do.
- You will cross the border without noticing.
- The 1648 Treaty of Concordia let goods and people move freely, and it still does. Look for the 1948 obelisk if you want to know you crossed.
- Carry both currencies, or just dollars.
- Euro on the French side, Caribbean guilder on the Dutch side, US dollars accepted almost everywhere on both.
- Two carnivals, two seasons.
- The French side parades in February; the Dutch side’s runs through April, ending with Jouvert and the Grand Parade.
- Parotte Ville is still there.
- Bishop Hill Road, Belvedere, open daily 9:30am–4:30pm. $15 adults, $7 children, guided tour included, and the heritage museum is still part of the visit. Mornings are when the birds are busiest.
- The Butterfly Farm is not.
- Irma destroyed the site at Quartier d’Orléans in September 2017. Nothing has replaced it. If you were saving it for a future trip, this is the part of my 2016 post that is no longer true.
- Go to Amuseum Naturalis instead.
- A free museum of St. Martin nature and heritage at The Old House in French Quarter, run by the non-profit Les Fruits de Mer. Open daily, sunrise to sunset, self-guided.
- Wild wings cost nothing.
- Brown pelicans, bananaquits and the Zenaida dove — the “mountain dove” from the aviary list — are all over the island for free.
- There is no digital nomad visa here.
- Neither side runs one. You come as a visitor, on a visitor’s stay, and you work quietly on your own clients like anywhere else with no scheme.
- Book the office, not the beach bar.
- The island’s own tourist board points remote workers at Van Dorp’s co-working spaces for private desks and speeds that beat island average.
- Set your expectations with the pace.
- The tourist board’s own advice, from a remote worker living there: business may not move as fast as you would like, and patience is the price of the view.
- Plan around the weather calendar.
- Hurricane season runs June to November. Irma arrived on 6 September 2017. Anything you book in that window needs a refundable rate and real insurance.
The archive
All five, in the order I wrote them.
Ten days in July 2016, on a family trip. Everything above is drawn from these.
01A first day given over to the beach, a hotel pool and almost no wifi — on purpose.
02Standing behind a departing jet at the end of the runway, and regretting it instantly.
03Over the border to The Butterfly Farm, a tour from Molly, and the world’s largest moth clinging to my hand.
04Seven species, a cup of seed on a stick, and one hand-tamed bird who let a stranger pet his head.
05Water jets under both feet, a lot of core strength, and a caveat I only learned later.
The Butterfly Farm post is one of the ten I picked out as an all-time favourite when the blog turned ten.
Keep your curiosity close
There is always another story.
More places, more small discoveries, more reasons to look a little closer — and, where I can, an honest note about what has changed since I was there.
