"How did you find Anguilla," asked the man sitting next to me in line to obtain a temporary drivers license. Thinking he was asking my opinion of the island, I said, "I like what I've seen so far." He repeated, "no, I meant how did you know to come to Nevis?". Not knowing how to answer his question (because, after all, it is on ALL maps), I paused for a moment and then said "well, we hadn't been here yet and we heard there are monkeys here."

And that is pretty much the reason. We'd heard Nevis was beautiful and one of those islands not overrun with cruise ship passengers and duty free shops. But what drew us to this island was it's reputation for being home to free roaming troops of green vervet monkeys.

"Nevis: Not easy to get to, and even harder to leave." That's from a tourism brochure, but it sums it up nicely. We flew to Nevis from Anguilla, via Antigua, in a very small plane whose doors didn't completely seal shut. But we made it, and it was worth the trouble.

I won't bore you with the daily play-by-play here - if you're interested you can read it in the journal.

We stayed at the Oualie Beach hotel - a charming group of bungalows on a calm bay. We rented a car from Noel's - an old Corolla with 200+ thousand miles on it. A car is a must if you plan to leave your hotel - and you can easily see the entire island in a day. Well, everywhere except the Four Seasons because they only allow guests on the property. Driving is interesting - one the left but with left hand drive cars - and on "roads" that are sometimes no more than rocky trails through the brush. The botanical gardens (where most of our pictures are from) is beautiful, and we also enjoyed hiking in the rainforest and looking for monkeys behind the Golden Rock Hotel. Other highlights on our circle-island drive included seeing wild pigs, donkeys, and goats. If only we'd seen as many monkeys as we saw goats!

It's hard to tell from the pictures (since ours are limited to flowers and monkeys), but there are beaches - Oualie Beach and Pinney's Beach being the best in our opinion. It's definitely not somewhere to go for beaches though - for that we still think BVI, St. Johns, and Anguilla are tops.