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For better or worse, tranquil, St. Croix is a bubble of calm in a roiling sea of amped-up Caribbean tourism.
TRAVEL
Just arriving in St. Croix is enough to send your blood pressure down to perilous single digits. Stepping off the puddle-jumper from San Juan, Puerto Rico, there's no boxy gangway. Instead, you deplane to concrete and walk a few yards into what amounts to more of a hangar than an airport.
Car-rental counters are along a breezy loggia, and the rental agent talks to you like a long-lost Jamaican auntie. The speed limit away from the airport is around 30 kilometers per hour, and the initial jitters of driving on the left side of the road (although in a U.S.-style, left-side-driver car) melt away when you realize that nobody exceeds 65 kilometers per hour anyway. The roads are narrow, winding past the island's enormous highschool complex, then the University of the Virgin Islands in quick succession, then an open ramble through country scenes of green grass, cattle and rolling hills. It might as well be Pennsylvania. Until it begins to look like California. The largest of the U.S. Virgin Islandsand the least visited-St. Croix's northern side is a steep, ancient volcanic ridge crashing swiftly into tiny coves and spits of white sand on clear blue water. Dry rainforests carpet the nearly vertical hillsides, thick with tropical vines and flowering trees.
Turtledoves fidget in the bushes and the occasional mongoose dashes across the road.
And it's quiet, oh so quiet. Other than the hum of frozen drink machines and the distant grinding gears of the occasional four-wheeler, the loudest noise around...