After the quarantine at a government facility in Barbados, I wanted to try the other option – to quarantine at a private hotel. A 14-day quarantine was mandatory for everyone in St. Lucia. This meant staying on the hotel premises and no mixing with the locals. I could go to the beach, hike around, participate in the approved activities, eat at the hotel’s restaurant and spend time with other guests in the common area. This did not sound too bad.
As I wrote in the previous post, Marigot Beach Club Hotel was selected randomly from the list of approved accommodation. It turned out to be a lucky choice. The hotel territory was large enough not to feel confined. It occupied the entire hill slope and had its own beach. Also, apparently it was famous as one of the shooting locations of the original movie “Dr. Dolittle”. I did not know that before coming there and wondered why the hotel’s restaurant was called “Dolittle’s”.
The hotel restaurant was not cheap and the menu was the same dreary choice every day. Soon, I memorized the entire list and ordered without looking at the menu. Watery cappuccino hardly filled a small cup. I wistfully recalled the excellent, full of flavor cappuccino in Greece that I drank only 2 weeks ago.
I asked at the reception if it was possible to buy groceries. My studio apartment had a fully equipped kitchen; I could cook a simple meal myself instead of eating at the restaurant 3 times a day. The answer was ‘yes’ but I could not go shopping myself. I was supposed to give a shopping list to a staff member and they would deliver my groceries to me. Okay, I wrote down a few items on a piece of paper. Milk, ham, and muesli were not available at the nearby grocery store. They could only be purchased at a supermarket and I needed to pay for a taxi ride to it. I’d not be able to swallow the food bought at such a high price. As the result, the shopping list shrank to 3 items: bread, cheese, and apples. At least it was something and I could snack in my room.
I also planned to update my wardrobe in St. Lucia. The only shorts were worn beyond repair and it’d be nice to have a couple of new t-shirts too. However, after the discussion about groceries, I understood that it was pointless even to bring up this subject. Oh well, I’d have to continue wearing the same clothes and throw them away before going home.
Marigot Beach Club Hotel had 40 rooms in studio apartments and cottages; while the number of guests staying in it at any day was under a dozen. We all congregated in the common area after dinner doing something on our laptops, having drinks or just talking and naturally, we got to know each other.
Surprisingly, half of the guests were females traveling solo for fun who were not much concerned about getting ill. One young woman, Anna, from Latvia, went as far as to suggest that people get the coronavirus because they are afraid of it. She bragged about her strong immune system that was capable of fighting any infection. She took vitamins and worked out. Why would she ever get sick? Her audience politely kept quiet.
The other half was just the opposite – retired couples looking to escape from the pandemic.
One couple from Ohio bought a house in St. Lucia. Like everyone else, they had to quarantine 14 days at a hotel before they could go to their own property.
Another couple was from the UK. They recently sold the house near Stonehenge and moved to an apartment in London. Then they found the lockdown in the big city like London unbearable and flew to the Caribbean to weather the pandemic storm. Both were well traveled and we enjoyed swapping stories about our trips.
I had suddenly an idea, that this would be a perfect location for one of the Agatha Christie’s criminal stories. And the arrogant Anna would make a perfect victim. You could play Miss Marple und try to find out who has done it? One of the hotel’s staff or a retired couple from London? What an intrigue!:)
It was actually my comment, the wordpress has obviously the year’s end crisis:)
You know, another one of my friends suggested exactly the same – it was a perfect setting for Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” when the hotel guests died one by one. How funny!