Orient Expression

Dangling from a parasail 300 feet above the watercolors of Orient Bay is a wonderful way to get acquainted with the sexiest side of St. Martin. Aside from occasional wind gusts that yank on the nylon harness and cause flying wedgies, it's a peaceful, comfortably paced tour of one of the Caribbean's most celebrated strands.

Orient Beach is as famous among American tourists for its bathing suit optional policy as it is among European travelers for the fine cuisine served at its seaside restaurants. And while the Continental purists seek the Riviera of the Caribbean, many American travelers are searching for a place with all the benefits of French influence — incredible food, a relaxed way of life and stylish, sexy people — without the Parisian poseurs and without feeling excluded because they don't parlez Francais, aren't up-to-date on every vintage and the last time they looked really sexy in a bathing suit was 20 years, and pounds, ago. I'm here to discover the real character of Orient Bay, to find out whether it's true bleu French or a friendly faux.

Oh Oui Can See

Orient Bay is known as the St. Tropez of the Caribbean, but that's a lazy way to describe something. A singer billed as the ''Elvis of Afghanistan'' will turn out to be much different than the King, and I have the same feeling about the Cote d'Azur/Caribbean comparison.

Orient is corralled by a backdrop of sharp hills covered with green scrub dusted brown because there hasn't been much rain yet this season. I can see the ridge where the island's main road elbows past the bay on its way from Grand Case to Quartier D'Orleans. On the far side of the road, brand new villas step up the hills in clusters somewhat reminiscent of the village perches (perched villages) behind St. Tropez. But those in the South of France are medieval; these are 21st century luxe. Green-, yellow- and red-roofed buildings — the charming French Colonial-style villa hotels Esmeralda and La Plantation where I'm staying, the sunny Palm Court Hotel, the new Mediterranean-style Cap Caraibe Hotel right on the beach and other hotels, condos and villas — spill downhill from the road to sea level where they pool just behind the sand. There's new construction, too. The bay is under a three-year master plan that will create an entire Creole village of small hotels, restaurants, boutiques and nightspots designed to make Orient Bay a one-stop vacation destination.

Orient Beach itself is a gently curving border between the development and the deep blue sea. The sand runs in a wide, 6-mile swath from the low cliffs of Mount Vernon to where it peters out on a small peninsula at the far end of Club Orient, the bay's dedicated nudist resort. Just offshore, Ilet Pinel (Pinel Island) to the north and Caye Verte (Green Island) to the south bookend the bay, each providing a lee anchorage for a flotilla of private sailboats. The entire length of Orient Beach is clothing optional, and many women go topless. But there are fewer sightings of sunworshippers sans Speedos the farther north you are of Club Orient.

Far below me, the beach is laid out like a formal French garden. Row after row of umbrellas — a different color for each section of the beach — bloom brightly amid regimented ranks of chaise lounges. I see what appears to be a preapple Adam and Eve leaving the protective shade of a vivid orange umbrella to take a stroll through the garden. The laissez-faire attitude toward public nudity is very French, very St. Tropez, and it's usually the first thing visitors, especially Americans, notice. It deserves a closer look.

The Naked and The Red

When I get my bare feet back on semisolid ground, I can instantly tell one major difference between Orient Bay and St. Tropez: the beach itself. Most people assume the French Riviera has great beaches. They're wrong. The shoreline at Cannes for example, site of the famous film festival, is covered with stones the size of a starlet's implants. St. Tropez does have the nicest beach on the entire Cote d'Azur, but any one of St. Martin's strands is better. And Orient is spectacular. In France, I hit the beach in hiking boots; here my toes sink deep into a talcumy soft sand so light that even the gentlest of waves nudging the beach stir it into suspension. The fine white grains, scattered throughout the water and lit by the afternoon sun, turn the shallows a brilliant shade of turquoise.

Though it's really only one stretch of shoreline, Orient Bay is split into six major sections: Coco Beach, Waikiki, Bikini Beach, Kon Tiki, Kakao and Club Orient. The first five beaches and their bar/restaurant/water-sports concessions account for the meat of the bay and its activities. A jumble of smaller bars, boutiques and sports shacks form a busy border between the big five and the beautiful southern stretch of beach where the naturists of Club Orient roam free. As I wade through the sand toward Kon Tiki — a little city of thatch huts backed by an oasis of palm trees — I spot a wooden sign decorated with flowery Eastern designs advertising temporary tattoos. St. Tropez may have had Matisse, but Orient Bay has Samy, the body-painting artist.

Samy is creating a henna sunburst on the shoulder of Claudia, who says she's originally from France but lives in the States and is spending a week's vacation on the bay. Claudia sits serenely, wearing nothing but a diaphanous blue wrap low on her hips, as the artist dabs the brown liquid on her skin. When Samy finishes, Claudia unceremoniously unwraps herself and stands, full-frontal facing me, wearing only the still-wet sunburst and a Mona Lisa smile. She says something to me that could be in French, English or Swahili for all I know, because my comprehension skills have gone all to hell as my eyes dart from the sandy floor to the thatch ceiling, desperately hunting for something other than that to focus on.

I consider myself well-traveled, even somewhat worldly, but suddenly I feel very American. I also feel that any moment Sister Perpetua Guilt will swoop down to lift me up by my hair and tell me I should be ashamed of myself for peeking. Claudia settles down on a barstool, leaning forward as Samy applies brush to butt cheek to put another sun where, back home, it would never shine. I look out onto the beach just as a bear of a guy with, coincidentally, more hair on his back than Gentle Ben, ambles by also in the altogether. He snuffles along beside a slight, Goldilocks of a gal who, by comparison, seems absolutely Victorian in her stringy black thong.

Sitting across from Claudia at the bar are two couples from the States wearing baggies, ''been there'' T-shirts and big cover-ups. Interestingly, they fit in here on eclectic Orient Beach just as well as those supremely comfortable in their own skins. I get up to leave and say, ''See ya'' to Claudia. It's only now that I notice that the name of the bar we're at is Peeping Toms.

Skin Deep

The obvious acknowledgement of the beach's prurient interest now has me thinking that maybe Orient Bay is only another Americanized Caribbean beach resort that just happens to have naked Europeans wandering about. The Kon Tiki's open-air bar/restaurant, with its thatched roof and its picnic tables raised on wooden platforms set within a forest of sea grapes, certainly appears, at least on the surface, more typical Caribbean beach shack than it does snooty St. Tropez cafe. And when my ponytailed waitress — St. Martin, along with St. Barts, seems to be the high-water mark on this side of the Atlantic for attractive, waif-er-thin young French women who speak a charmingly accented English — carries over the big wooden menu board, I decide to order the closest thing they have to the laid-back beach-bar standards: a fish sandwich, conch fritters, maybe a burger and fries. But that's not to be.

St. Martin, as part of France and thus the EU, has recently seen an influx of young Europeans who've come to run boutiques, galleries, bars, gourmet markets and restaurants. A good number have been chefs. For a French chef, St. Martin and her sexy little sister St. Barts, are Valhalla: paradise as reward for fighting their way through the top kitchens of Paris and Provence. In turn, they reward the locals and visitors to St. Martin with a level of culinary excellence seldom seen outside the world's major cities.

So instead of a beach burger, my crab tartar arrives exquisitely presented with mango sauce drizzled in a precise pattern around the rim of a designer plate. I'm still in my bathing suit, barefoot on the beach. And this is Orient Beach's idea of a casual lunch at a tiki bar.

In Case of Fire

The sun goes down early on Orient Beach, disappearing quickly behind the hills. And on most nights, the action fades with the light. I head west, racing the sunset, on a 10-minute drive across the island to the delightful little seaside village of Grand Case. Cars are parked on both sides of the ambitiously named Boulevard de Grand Case, a street so narrow that it is only two-way when cars dive into driveways to allow others to pass. I squeeze my rental into a spot in front of a lolo — the local name for beachside barbecue shacks, where a plate heaped with chicken, ribs or fish, along with rice n' peas, goes for six bucks. I hustle out to the town's pier and catch the sun just as it goes to bed behind Anguilla, which stretches along the horizon just nine miles away.

Onshore, lights blink on all up and down the beach, each soft glow marking another fine restaurant. Grand Case is known as the culinary capital of the Caribbean, and there's no confusion with this title: It would take a month of dining at a different place each night just to get a taste of the gourmet possibilities that line both sides of this town's restaurant row.

Walking along Boulevard de Grand Case when you're hungry is a trial by cooking fire. I'm enveloped in one heady cloud of gourmet kitchen aroma after another — first garlicky Italian, then spicy Creole, then rich French, then sweet barbecue, French again and on and on until my taste buds threaten to throttle me if I don't stop perusing the street-side menus and pick a place already.

I choose Le Cottage, a cozy, candlelit French bistro with curved patio railings that give each outdoor table a romantic embrace. The house white, a 1999 Quincy les Victoires, is excellent, and the foie gras starter and monkfish entree are superb. Nothing I order comes from St. Martin; even the butter I spread on my sliced baguette is from County Kerry, Ireland. St. Martin couldn't cater a kindergarten class lunch with what's grown on the island, so it's incredible that its restaurants and supermarkets offer such a rich diversity of food.

''Everything is fresh,'' says Bruno Lenoine, owner of Le Cottage. ''We have the boats filled with wonderful fruits and vegetables coming from Dominica; the fishermen bring us lobster from the Saba Bank; we get beef from the U.S.; and then we have the planes...'' Every chef and restaurateur I meet on St. Martin rhapsodizes about the twice weekly pate planes from France as if they were Berliners talking about the airlift. ''My wife and I ordered mussels from France last week,'' sighs Lenoine. ''They came fresh the next day, kept moist. We ate them that night. Delicious.''

In French cafe custom, you are expected to linger over a good meal for as long as you desire. Eating is an event, and it's considered rude to rush a patron or bring the check before it's requested. This custom is faithfully followed in French St. Martin whether you're Princess Stephanie of Monaco or plumber Steve of Michigan. It's only after lingering over a glass of Le Cottage's homemade cane rum and a visit with Lenoine and his head chef, that I can rouse myself from a culinary-induced coma.

Boulevard de Grand Case is perfect for an apres dinner stroll. The hostesses and owners of the continuous line of restaurants stand outside their Creole-style buildings accented with gingerbread trim, chatting with passersby, and you never know who you're going to meet.

Up the street at the Rainbow restaurant, I run into the crew from E! Entertainment TV's popular show Wild On who are on St. Martin taping beach and nightlife segments for Wild On the West Indies. The Rainbow was one of the first restaurants on the Grand Case strip. Owner David Hendrich, who moved to St. Martin from Buffalo to open the eatery 25 years ago, recently created a second-floor lounge and terrace that is the best spot in the entire village for an after-dinner drink. Me and the Wild bunch that includes host/Playboy model/Got Milk spokesgal Brooke Burke, order desserts and head upstairs. The terrace has a stunning view over the sea toward Anguilla, which is now a twinkling galaxy against the backdrop of black ocean. Floodlights aimed at the beach below the Rainbow reflect off the water and play against the low clouds like cerulean searchlights. We share travel stories and champagne and dip strawberries in cream while Brooke shows us all the proper way to surreptitiously tongue the rim of a glass so as not to coat it with lipstick when taking a drink.

A Bientot

Sunday is my last day on St. Martin and the best day to be on Orient Beach. Locals from all over the French side of the island, as well as Dutch from across the invisible border, flock to Orient each Sunday and join the tourists for a day of sun, sport and partying. I walk from one end of the beach to the other and find that there is more of everything going on: more windsurfers, kite surfers, parasailers, jet skiers, topless sunbathers, a lot more topless sunbathers. I still can't figure out the protocol regarding nudity, so I'm careful not to stare at the girls as they walk by lest some jealous Frenchman beat the crepe out of me.

And as if there weren't already enough bouncing going on, a giant inflatable trampoline is moored off Bikini Beach. At the Bikini Beach bar, house music pounds from the speakers, rattling the thatch. It's an incongruous mix: heavy Euro-beat in the middle of the afternoon on a bright sunny beach, but the crowd is loving it. Things are even stranger down at the Kon Tiki, where they've put up plastic-coated temporary walls and are pumping the dance floor full of soap suds — a beachside foam party. Bubbly babes in bikinis and beach boys impersonating Mr. Clean come spilling out of the mosh and wash pit covered in suds. At Pedro's, perched on an overlook just this side of Club Orient's billboard o' butt, which warns beach walkers that beyond lies the land-of-the-let-it-all-hang-out, a crowd of curious American tourists drink, dawdle and ogle from the bar. The boldly voyeuristic periodically see their way past the sign and down the beach in front of the club, then come back to report on nudist activity. And in fair turnabout, a steady stream of people wearing nothing but, I hope, powerful sunscreen, wander up the beach to visit the bars and boutiques and then return to report on what the modestly overdressed are doing.

I sit back and watch this sexy circus of a beach carry on, all three rings going full bore. A naked nuclear family stands at the edge of the water watching a kite surfer go screaming by like he's lassoed a 727; a topless French girl with a rich, perfect tan and her sun-bleached beau wade hand in hand into the water, each using the other hand to smoke a thin cigarette; a group of young Americans hoot their way from one beach bar to the next.

Orient Bay is not the St. Tropez of the Caribbean; it's much better. St. Tropez has a thin, seaweedy beach backed by cafes staffed with snooty waiters who wouldn't speak English if they were on fire in the middle of London.

But Orient is not Daytona Beach South either. Orient Bay blends the West Indian bounty of beautiful beach, water and weather with a dressed-down French joie de vivre and flare for fine food minus the snoot factor. It then adds a giant helping of the American all-out sense of fun to create a vacation destination that could only exist in the Caribbean.

Posted online 07/20/01.