Canadian travel advisor Kayleen Hamelin and her husband traded the resort bubble for 24 kilometres of unplanned walking, improvised meals, and stray cat companions to discover that St. Martin's greatest rewards are hiding exactly where the map says not to go.
At a Glance
St. Martin rewards independent travellers who explore both the Dutch and French sides without tours or all-inclusives. The island operates on its own terms: separate currencies, organic architecture, and many restaurants still listed online despite being destroyed by Hurricane Irene years ago. Walking, cash, and cultural immersion are essential.
Picture this: two Canadians sitting on a plastic chair outside a convenience store on the French-Dutch border of St. Martin, sharing a cold beer and a wedge of local cheese, waiting for a restaurant that Hurricane Irene may have already claimed years ago. A stray cat winds between their ankles. The afternoon sun presses down on a road with no sidewalk and no particular plan. It is not the trip anyone advertised. It is, by Kayleen Hamelin's account, the moment that made the whole journey worth it.
"We grabbed a beer from there, grabbed a little bit of cheese, sat outside, just waited," Hamelin recalls. "It wasn't a restaurant. It was just okay to do so. And we made some friends with a couple of the local cats out in that area." For a travel advisor who has spent years matching clients to destinations, this unscripted pause on the border between two nations turned out to be the clearest illustration of why she does the job she does.
Two Nations, One Island, Zero Tour Buses
Earlier this year, Hamelin and her husband made a deliberate choice. No cruise. No all-inclusive. No group itinerary. They booked a fully independent week in St. Martin, flying out of Toronto to Princess Juliana International Airport and settling into a rotating series of accommodations across both the Dutch and French sides of the island. They started at Princess Heights Condos on the Dutch side at Oyster Pond, then moved through Marigot, and eventually to St. Louis near Grand Case. When one property did not meet expectations, Hamelin made the call mid-trip to upgrade. It was the kind of real-time quality assessment that no brochure can replicate.
What she found was an island that operates entirely on its own terms. The two sides share geography but little else. Currencies split cleanly: the Dutch side runs on US dollars, the French side on euros, and prices are listed in one or the other depending on which nation you are standing in. The built environment is not the cookie-cutter Caribbean of resort strips and manicured promenades. "It was made organically as opposed to planned," Hamelin says, describing Phillipsburg's compact town centre, where cruise ports give way to narrow streets lined with convenience stores and small restaurants stacked close together, feeling less like a resort destination and more like a working island city.
The Roads Google Doesn't Know About
The most striking lesson from Hamelin's week on St. Martin came not from any guidebook recommendation but from the gap between digital expectation and physical reality. Hurricane Irene tore through the island years ago, and its absence is still written into the landscape, particularly on the French side. Restaurants were stripped away and never rebuilt. And yet many of them persist as ghost listings online, marked open, complete with hours and reviews, long after their rooftops came down.
"Many of the places that were unfortunately affected by Hurricane Irene are still listed on Google as open," Hamelin explains. "I would walk to those places and not only were they not open, they just didn't exist." It is the kind of on-the-ground intelligence that no amount of research from home can substitute for, and it is precisely the knowledge she now carries for every client she sends to the island.
The walking itself became its own chapter of the trip. Without reliable cab service in the less-touristed areas, Hamelin and her husband covered approximately 12 kilometres on each of two separate days. They walked from Sandy Ground into Marigot, then caught a taxi onward to St. Louis before continuing on foot into Grand Case. On another day, they walked back into town, found a grocery store, stopped at a local bar, and then, without enough cash for a cab home, walked back again. The French side, she notes, largely does not accept credit cards. "It was a lot of walking," she says, "and very fulfilling in that way, but also very hard."
The Invisible Border and the Smell of France
One of the more quietly fascinating discoveries of the trip was the cultural shift that happens when crossing from the Dutch side to the French side, a crossing that requires no passport and no formal checkpoint. The island is, legally and geographically, shared territory. But for Hamelin, arriving from Ontario, the French side announced itself through an unmistakable sensory signal long before any signage: smoke. Indoor dining rooms, open patios, street-side cafes. "Even without the sign saying which side you were on," she says, "you could tell very quickly based on if there were a lot of people smoking or not." It was, she notes with characteristic understatement, quite the culture shock for someone accustomed to Ontario's strict smoking restrictions.
Away from the main tourist corridors, the island offered a different kind of welcome. Nettie Bay and Sandy Ground have reputations that precede them, and not always favourably. Hamelin found something different. The beach at Nettie Bay Resort was immaculate, dotted with tiny hermit crabs moving through the shallows. The food at Mariposa in Sandy Ground was genuinely good. The locals in both areas were friendly and open. "Going a little off the beaten path, if you're comfortable, has a lot of rewards," Hamelin says, and it lands as more than a tip. After cataloguing the hard kilometres and the closed restaurants and the cash-only taxis, it reads as a hard-won conclusion.
The Lego Philosophy of Independent Travel
Hamelin is careful about who she recommends this kind of trip to. St. Martin done fully and honestly, both sides, both cultures, both currencies, and the roads in between, is not a trip for everyone. It suits travellers who are comfortable with ambiguity and genuinely curious about immersion. "This is the type of trip that works for somebody who is very good with time management, who has a good understanding of planning, and someone who is not afraid to immerse themselves in the cultures," she says.
For the professionals planning those trips, the philosophy Hamelin carries home is one she now applies across all her fully independent travel advising. Flexibility is not a nice-to-have. It is the whole architecture of a successful FIT experience. "When you're building Lego, you're probably going to miss a piece and have to undo and put that piece in there," she says. "So having that flexibility to be able to make a change in a hotel you're staying at, or find a different way to get to a place, or add an excursion, or learn that there's no food around, you have to have that flexibility." It is a different beast, she is clear about that, than boarding a tour bus or checking into an all-inclusive resort. There are more moving pieces, and someone needs to understand how they all fit together.
What Comes Next
Hamelin came home from St. Martin with a notebook's worth of insider knowledge: skip Google Maps for restaurant listings and carry cash on the French side; go to Sandy Ground and Nettie Bay despite what you may have heard; cross the border and let the culture shift surprise you; and leave room in the itinerary for the accidental beer-and-cheese moment that no algorithm will ever recommend. Maho Beach is worth the visit, she will tell clients that, but do not let the highlight reel be the whole story.
As for what is next on her own wish list, Hamelin's appetite for unscripted discovery is clearly intact. A two-week independent journey through Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Northern Ireland has been waiting since a certain pandemic intervened and cancelled it. "It's something that is still on the wish list," she says, "and still something I want to do in the next year, year and a half." The roads there, presumably, will have sidewalks. But knowing Hamelin, she will find a way to go off them anyway.
