*TravelWorld International Magazine Spring 2024

Story by Julie Hatfield
Photos by Tim Leland
and Julie Hatfield
The gorgeous road from St. Kitts to the Nevis ferry is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the left and the Caribbean Sea on the right.
You can’t jet to Nevis, but you can swim there —
if you first fly to St. Kitts, Nevis’ sister island.
ur first stop was the Mount
Nevis Hotel, in a wide-open
17-acre spread of 32 villas
with stunning views of the
Caribbean Sea and St. Kitts
in the near distance. Eating
dinner there on an outdoor deck,
overlooking those views at sunset
as the moon rose in the night sky was one
of the highlights of the trip — as were our
dreamy swims alone in the pool of our
next accommodation, Golden Rock Inn, a
tropical garden high up on a hillside with
private cottages in a setting that makes
you feel you’ve fallen into “The Jungle
Book.” The pool was surrounded by tall
Norfolk pines and flowering bromeliad.
Every experience we had that week in
Nevis was a planet apart from our city life
at home, beginning the first night, lying in
bed in the dark after turning out the lights
and listening to the distant braying of wild
donkeys, the chatter of vervet monkeys in
the trees outside our window, the delicate
singing of the tree frogs in the jungle
around us.
Nevis is a 36-square-mile island — “50
square miles before erosion,” according
to one Nevisian, — that is part of the
Leeward Islands chain in the West Indies.
No building on Nevis is taller than a
coconut tree, and no drive from one place
to another on Nevis takes longer than 30
minutes. It is the smallest country in the
Americas, both in area and population.
It doesn’t have any fast food restaurants
on it, or a single traffic light, either. (“The
wild donkeys wandering the roads are our
traffic lights,” says John Ford Parris, our
genial taxi driver).
The view of St. Kitts from the patio of Mount Nevis Hotel.
At Drift Restaurant you can dine practically on top of the water.
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Most people take the 20-minute ferry from
St. Kitts to Nevis, its tiny West Indies
island neighbor, after jetting to Kitts on
a commercial flight. But once a year,
hundreds of swimmers jump into the
Caribbean Sea in the annual Cross Channel
Swim and cover the 2-1/2-mile- trip through
“The Narrows” on their own steam. They
leave their luggage behind, of course.
We came to Nevis on the advice of a friend who
had traveled here to play golf at the luxurious
Four Seasons Resort and fell so in love with the
island that he considered buying a home there
immediately. We certainly wanted to play a round
of golf at the plushy Four Seasons, but we also
wanted to explore accommodations that provided
more Nevis flavor than that of a huge, globally
owned and managed property.
Parris contends that most of the 12,000
residents of Nevis are interrelated in one
way or another, and we saw evidence of
that as he drove us around the island,
waving hello to everybody along the way.
It’s an incredibly friendly island — and
statistically one of the safest places in
the world. Parris added that on a first visit
to Nevis, you may be a stranger, but ever
afterward, “you are considered family.”
Wild donkeys roam the Nevis land.
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