Day 166 – The end is near
We woke up today and finalised our plans on how to get back to the UK. Iceland baby! We’ve even started to organise viewings of temporary flats when we get back to London and booked a hotel for 3 nights. Sadly, the end of our grand journey is in sight.
We hung out today at the pool and met a nice South African family. They have lived on 3 different continents, most recently in St. Maarten. Arthur is a dentist and owns dental practices in multiple countries. This seems to be a good gig. Ilsa is a psychiatrist. Apparently there’s a big market for both of their services in the Caribbean. Sadly, not as much for J’s.
We talked about the lack of income tax here and correspondingly high taxes on goods and services. This tax system is not ideal for locals. Apparently food and drinks are expensive here as they are slapped with a massive import tax. We had a good time talking with the couple about the different beaches we’ve visited. They think Grace Bay is the second best beach they’ve ever seen. They highly recommend Anguilla and Saba island (a small island off the coast of St. Maarten). Their children all speak Afrikaans and they are thinking about moving to Namibia in a couple of years, so we had a lot to talk about and could actually give them suggestions on where to live in Namibia.
Dinner tonight was at the Bay Bistro, which is a 2-minute walk on the beach from our hotel. The portion sizes were again, generous. S had two starters, the jalapeno soup and conch wontons, which he couldn’t finish because they were doused in hoisin sauce. The jalapeno soup was very good and tasted a bit like queso, but not as heavy. J had the coconut encrusted grouper. It wasn’t quite as sweet as she wanted it to be. Drinks were a bit cheaper here. We’ll probably come back to the bar as it’s much livelier than the pool bar in our hotel.