Palm Island has a wonderful welcome tradition. When you arrive on the boat from Union Island, you are greeted by the resort manager and several staff people, including a bartender. You are given a tall, beautiful glass of rum punch and escorted to your room. It's a very nice way to begin your stay on the island.
The boat usually arrives right around sunset, so if you are already a guest, and you are hanging out at the bar, you can watch the bartender make the rum punch drinks and you get an idea of how many people are arriving that day.
One night, MT and I happened to be enjoying cocktail hour with some of our new friends and we watched the bartender make six rum punches for the new arrivals. A little while later, the bartender came back with two drinks on his tray. We wanted to know who passed on the drinks, probably so we could avoid them or put peer pressure on them, I can't remember which right now. The bartender told us that only four people came over on the boat; another couple was coming, but the man was swimming across the channel and his wife was in the guide boat, following him.
It's about a mile across the channel from Union Island to Palm Island and the water is deep. And the sun has set and it's dark. "There's another thing about this man," the bartender tells us. "He's a reporter from the London Financial Times. He's coming here to write a story about Palm Island." We are all very curious about this couple now.
We turn to look across the channel, and sure enough, we see a small boat coming toward us with a light shining in the water. He's making progress. We take bets about whether or not he'll make it. We all agree he won't, but we keep watching and toasting every stroke with our pina coladas. Eventually, he gets just shy of half-way across and he climbs in the boat. The bartender scurries over to the dock to give out the rum punch.
It didn't take much to figure out who the writer was. We saw the resort manager talking to a young man and a very tall young lady. Chris, the manager, took the couple for rides around the island on his big golf cart-type vehicle and spent a lot of time talking to them alone. We just asked Chris if the guy was the writer and he told us that he was.
None of the rest of us got to ride in Chris's golf cart-type thing. There were two other couples we mostly hung out with, and each of us decided that we wanted to write for a magazine. I think mine was Caribbean Traveler.
I've checked the London Financial Times website a few times for an article about Palm Island. I haven't seen one. Was the guy just blowing smoke? Were he and his woman having a nice vacation disguised as a work outing? I'll never know. What I do know is that this couple spent a lot of time in the registration/reception area on their laptops. They could not have been having nearly as much fun as we did. I don't think I ever saw them smile or hang out in the sun. I did see them have a drink one night.
What made me remember this couple? I don't really know. Maybe because I imagined them showing up at Stein Eriksen Lodge and being shown around the property by Stein himself. You know, the Stein Eriksen Lodge is one of the Finest Properties in the World according to Forbes magazine. There are plaques in the lobby of the Lodge that say so. It just seems like the kind of place a writer from the London Financial Times would go, doesn't it?
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