Rapid Travel Chai

Mustique, celebrities, private islands, hidden beaches. This is St Vincent & The Grenadines. I missed all that.

My schedule and flights as they were, I had to shorten my St Vincent stop to an evening arrival and early flight out the next morning.

St Vincent’s airport is served by unreliable LIAT and tiny plane SVG. Many tourists don’t make the effort unless they can fly private so those that do can get a quiet Caribbean experience, accessible to those even on more modest budgets. Even Mustique can be visited as a day trip.

In this series:

• Caribbean Lesser Antilles Island Hopping Itinerary
• US Bank FlexPerks Flight Booking Battle Tales
• Grenada: Everyman of the Caribbean
• Dominica: Pirate’s Cove of the Caribbean
• Montserrat: Volcano Island
• Antigua: Nelson’s Resorts
• Barbados: Flying Fish, Grounded Concorde
• St Vincent & The Grenadines: Gateway to A-List Hedonism
• St Lucia
• Caribbean Island Hopping in the Tropical Storms
• Is LIAT the Worst Airline in the World?
• British Airways Caribbean Hopper Routes on Avios
• Caribbean Tip – Don’t Let Your Phone Auto-Adjust the Time

I based at the Cobblestone Inn, a historic bulding on Kingtown’s main waterfront drag. Kingstown is mainly a transit point for tourists so there are only a few hotels.

Midrange rooms, I liked the towel folded into a swan. The part about the hot water knob on the shower not working elicited this response, “Could you take a cold shower?” That being the limit of the front desk’s problem solving ability I found the security guard who located a screwdriver and we got it sorted. Attached restaurant is one of the few non-fast food chains in town and had a nice conch dinner.

At dawn I took a quick spin through town to see the market vendors setting up, various gourds being central to local cuisine.

Beware the open storm drains.

Then it was off to the airport and to my great pleasure, an on-time LIAT flight. The check-in hall has no AC and only one fan, blowing the rear-end of the LIAT agent. Once you pass into immigration, you are hit with a chill of refreshing AC.