Journey to SXM

St Maarten – or Maho Beach in particular, was one of those awsome places in the world that I never thought I would get a chance to visit.

But a friend was travelling there on his grad trip (with some other friends), and ask if I was interested, and off I went (to get the flights). Or so I did, after a lot of thinking, because it was a fairly major (and costly) trip to embark on…

My flights on this trip consisted of, heading there: SYD – SFO – EWR – SXM, and returning: SXM – IAD – LAX – SYD

The journey was long, but was quite an experience in itself. I actually stayed overnight at Newark Liberty, and managed to catch a fairly awesome sunrise.

The weather upon arrival at St Maarten wasn’t that great as the skies were grey, and it rained on and off.

But the day after, the weather started improving, and by the end of that day, it was fairly nice, and it stayed that way for a majority of our stay there.

Most of the trip was spent watching planes landing and taking off, and it was awesome. Many of the arriving planes flew low overhead, and we could stand relatively close (Closer than I’ve ever been) to the departing ones. I like planes, as I mentioned before in an earlier post, but this trip brought everything to a whole new level. The next few photos can probably speak for themselves.

One of the fairly interesting (and somewhat amusing) thing to watch was when the planes prepared for take-off. As the runway at PJIA (that’s the airport) was fairly short, the planes start their take off from the end that is closest to the beach – as such, the jet blasts that are produced can be fairly spectacular, and people love to get blown around by it, even though it can be a potentially dangerous thing to do.

I took some footage of these instances, and below is what I’d consider to be one of the best jet blasts that I saw, produced by Insel Air’s MD82:

Apart from watching planes, we also visited other parts of the island, driving around the island at least once. Some of the places we stopped at included the capital of the Dutch side, Philipsburg, as well as Orient Beach, and Mullet Bay.

We also visited a small town named Grand Case on the French side, where we found some of the best food you could have on the island – In fact, the row of restaurants there included many that were well recommeded by magazines and online travel sites (such as trip advisor). More about the food we had will be posted seperately to my food blog [To be linked when post is up].

Overall, it was a really great trip, and I would like to thank Benny once again for inviting me, and Aaron and Vernon for being great travel companions 🙂

Even as I get back into my crazy schedule of honours research. I can’t help but think of travelling once more.

Till the next time,

Raylen