The Last Sunset

The flight home is tomorrow. I have known this all day the way you know a dentist appointment is coming — it sits in the back of your mind and colors everything slightly. The bags are not packed. The room is not clean. I have not started the process of returning to the person who has a job and a routine and a winter coat hanging in the closet. That person feels theoretical right now. The person standing on volcanic rock at Maho Beach, on the western coast of Saint Martin, watching the sun go down feels significantly more real.

The Two Versions of Maho Beach

You know Maho Beach from the internet. It is where Princess Juliana International Airport’s runway ends about 50 meters from the sand, and arriving planes come in so low that the jet blast from departing aircraft has literally knocked people off their feet. Entire tour groups show up with phones pointed at the sky. The Sunset Beach Bar posts the arrivals schedule on a chalkboard. There is a fence to hold onto during takeoffs and a sign warning you not to, because the airport means it and people have been seriously injured. It is a real thing. People line up for it.

That version of Maho was not there when I arrived on the last evening of the trip. The runway was quiet. The chalkboard was blank, or nobody was reading it. I had driven until the road narrowed and the coast came into view and the light looked right, and then I stopped — because that is the thing about renting a car on an island this size. You are not dependent on what is walkable or what the shuttle covers. You go find the place. And between flights, the place turns out to be this: dark volcanic stone, black and rough, the kind that shreds flip-flops and does not care. Waves hitting the rocks with a low, constant percussion that was less like crashing and more like breathing. In, out. The water pulling back over the stone made a sound like gravel being sorted by hand.

I sat down on a dry section and watched. The sun was still above the horizon, golden and heavy, doing that thing it does in the tropics where it seems to slow down right before the end, like it knows you are watching and wants to give you time. The rocks stretched out in front of me, dark against the gold water, and for a while I did not take any photos. Just sat there. It felt like the right thing to do with the last evening of a trip — to not try to capture it, to just be inside it for once.

That lasted about four minutes. Then I picked up the phone.

130 Photos of One Sunset

I know the number because I checked later. One hundred and thirty photos. Of one sunset. From one spot. The light kept changing and I kept thinking this is the one, this is the frame, and then it would change again and I would take six more. When you know it is the last sunset of the trip, you photograph it like you are trying to take it with you. Not preserving a memory. Negotiating with time. Saying: I know I have to leave, but I am taking this part.

The clouds banked and shifted. The orange deepened into something closer to red, then pulled back to gold, then went somewhere that does not have a name in the standard color vocabulary. The horizon line blurred where the water met the sky and for a few minutes they were the same thing — just light, in every direction, pressing against the underside of the clouds like something trying to get out.

The Sailboat

And then a sailboat crossed the frame. I did not plan it. Did not see it coming. It just appeared — a dark silhouette against the orange, moving left to right, slow enough that I had time to adjust the phone and shoot but fast enough that I only got a few frames with it centered. The sun was behind it, sending rays through breaks in the clouds, and the sail was a black triangle against all that gold, and it was the kind of shot that happens once. Not once a trip. Once. You cannot set it up. You cannot wait for it. It either happens or it does not, and the only thing you control is whether you are paying attention when it does.

I was paying attention.

There were no planes. The light had taken over, and everything else — the airport, the bar, the tourists at the fence — belonged to a different version of the same place. This is the other Maho: the one that exists between flights, when the sun is going down and the only sound is water on stone and a sailboat does not know it is in your photograph. That version of the beach is better. Fewer people know to look for it.

If you want the famous version, Maho Beach plane-spotting tours are a real thing that real people pay for, and watching a 737 clear your head by thirty feet is not something you will forget. The Sunset Beach Bar posts the arrivals schedule on a chalkboard — you can time your visit to a specific flight.

Most Sint Maarten island highlight tours include a Maho Beach stop as part of the full Dutch-side circuit — a good option if you want to see it alongside Philipsburg and the other landmarks without building your whole day around it.

The Week

I turned 36 on top of Pic Paradis, the highest point on the island, eating a seven-course dinner while looking at two countries. I ate Indian food three times in a place most people associate exclusively with beach bars. I got stopped at a protest roadblock on the French side on my birthday night — vaccine mandate demonstrations, November 2021, because even paradise has politics. I spent an entire day doing nothing and it was one of the best days of the trip. I booked a boat called the Rum Bum and rode past Hurricane Irma wreckage that was still being cleaned up four years later. I stood next to an iguana that had no business being that orange. I watched a bar cat walk through a bar like she owned it, because she did. I watched a drawbridge open four times and never got tired of it.

Saint Martin is the smallest inhabited island divided between two nations — roughly 34 square miles split between France and the Netherlands. Two flags. Two currencies. Two sets of laws. One island. The border is unmarked in most places. You cross it without knowing, and nobody on either side seems particularly concerned about it. The Treaty of Concordia, signed in 1648, is still in effect. That is 373 years of two countries sharing an island smaller than some national parks, somehow making it work — or at least, making it work as well as anything does.

I came here because it was my birthday and I wanted to be somewhere warm. I am leaving because I have a flight tomorrow and a life that requires me to be somewhere else. But the thing about a place like this is that it does not stay behind when you leave. It follows you out. Not the beaches or the restaurants or the rum punch. The light. The sound of waves on volcanic rock. The rooster that owned the resort. The sailboat that crossed the frame at exactly the right second.

The sun sets on the same ocean no matter which side of the border you are watching from.

Trip Essentials: What Actually Mattered

A week on Saint Martin taught me a few practical things worth passing on:

Rent a car. Every good moment on this trip that was not the hotel pool was possible because I had a car. The mountain dinner, the Maho Beach sunset, Philipsburg on my own schedule, getting lost in the interior (intentionally and otherwise). A rental car from the airport is not optional if you want to actually see the island. Budget for it and get it.

Get travel insurance. I covered this in the birthday post, but it bears repeating here at the end: November 2021 was not a calm moment in the Caribbean. Protests, COVID protocols, the tail end of hurricane season. I had a World Nomads policy and it covered the missed sunset cruise. Get coverage before you leave home, not after something has already gone wrong.

Sort your phone before arrival. The island has two sides, two sets of carriers, and your roaming situation can change depending on which country you are standing in. An Airalo Caribbean eSIM loaded before departure removes that variable entirely.