Lee Abbamonte
Try to become the youngest person to travel to every country in the world
Club Med Turkoise
By Lee | 
5 Comments » 
So for my last country in the Caribbean I decided to check out my first Club Med. The Club Med Turkoise had been highly recommended by several friends. In fact, I have two friends that actually met their future wives there. I certainly was not looking for wedded bliss or anything of the sort but I was really interested to see how the infamous Club Med would be on the gorgeous island of Providenciales, Turks and Caicos.
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La Republica Dominicana
By Lee | 7 Comments » 
The island of Hispaniola is the second largest island in the Caribbean behind only Cuba. The island is one of only two islands in the Caribbean broken up into different countries or administrative regions-the other is St. Martin/St. Maarten. Hispaniola is of course made up of Haiti and its much larger neighbor, the Dominican Republic. I entered the DR overland on a bus from Port-au-Prince, Haiti bound for the capital Santo Domingo. Among other good things about the DR, I was happy to switch from French and Creole in Haiti to Spanish as my Spanish is much better.
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24 Hours in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti
By Lee | 9 Comments » 
After a warm up night of Creole food and voodoo in the French Quarter of New Orleans because of a forced layover we made our way down to Port-Au-Prince (PAP), Haiti after an American Airlines connection in Miami. At the International airport in PAP, we were greeted by the usual Caribbean steel drum band except they were dressed in Western Union shirts which I found funny. Customs were a mere formality and we met our guide right outside of baggage claim.
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Grand Cayman
By Lee | 3 Comments » 
Life on Grand Cayman is pretty good. It’s a gorgeous place with fantastic beaches, duty free shopping and is a playground for the rich and also for those laundering money in their offshore accounts. My favorite thing about that is that they advertise specializing in distressed funds on the billboards at the airport when you land. Aside from offshore banking and duty free shopping, the Caymans also offer great restaurants, hotels and decent nightlife-especially for the Caribbean. But the highlight of the island for sure is the Seven Mile Beach.
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Lift the Travel Ban to Cuba
By Lee | 6 Comments » 
With the dawn of a new administration in the United States, the time to lift the travel ban to Cuba has come. The nearly 50 year trade embargo’s time has past and the United States Government needs to ease the restrictions on Americans who wish or do travel to the island nation only 90 miles from Florida. The passing of the failed Bush Administration and the impending closing of the utterly ridiculous Guantanamo Bay prison camp is a start but we need more. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, both illegally and legally travel to the island every year. They risk civil penalties and fines upon return to the United States if they sneak into the country illegally and if they seek permission from the US Government then they risk being told no. This to me is ridiculous. It is ridiculous that you may face fines if we, as American citizens-the freedom capital of the world travel to a place that’s 90 miles from the United States. It is unfair, un-American and the threat from Cuba is not what it used to be. The Bay of Pigs was nearly 50 years ago and the Soviet Union is no longer together. The time has come for President Obama to allow Americans to travel freely to this island that time forgot.
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St. Martin and Anguilla
By Lee | 5 Comments » The island of St. Martin is divided between two nations, Dutch (St. Maarten) and French (St. Martin). The French side is where I stayed in a place called Grand Case Beach at a hotel called L’esplanade which was very good and the people were very helpful and friendly. The French side is way more islandy feeling and looking. It also has a much quieter and more relaxed vibe to it-it’s the kind of place where you can just walk around barefoot all day if you wanted. From the shores of beautiful Grand Case Beach you can walk up and down the beach behind restaurant row and eat and drink your way down the beach. That’s pretty much what I did.
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The Scoop on Guadeloupe
By Lee | 6 Comments » Guadeloupe is an overseas French territory much like it’s sister island Martinique. However, Guadeloupe is clearly the ugly twin and cannot be held in the same breath as the much nicer, classier and safer Martinique. Guadeloupe is not without some virtues of course but I have to admit after being in Martinique and having a blast, I was hoping for a little more of the same in Guadeloupe but that was not to be. It’s no wonder why Guadeloupe is the forgotten Caribbean island, often skipped by cruises and only visited by off the beaten track tourists and of course the French.
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Magnifique Martinique
By Lee | 2 Comments » I first heard about Martinique when I was a kid from that old Beach Boys song, Kokomo, and I thought it sounded so exotic and cool and I knew I always wanted to go there. It didn’t disappoint. Martinique is really everything you would want in an affluent island as you cannot compare it to other places in the Caribbean except for perhaps Bermuda from the places I’ve been so far. It is gorgeous, pleasant, no hassles from people, has great architecture, great beaches, golf course, great food, a bustling little capital city of Fort-de-France and even shockingly nice French people. Martinique has a really cool feeling of you don’t know where you are because it feels like the south of France; you could be in Nice or Cannes or even St. Tropez. But you’re in the Caribbean and Martinique is the quintessential way to see how the French do the Caribbean.
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St. Vincent and Bequia
By Lee | 7 Comments » After leaving Grenada for that early morning flight up to St. Vincent, the plane flew straight over the gorgeous and untouched Grenadine Island chain. It is a chain of mostly forgotten islands and their slogan is “the Caribbean the way it used to be”. The view from the small prop plane made me excited to get out to Bequia. But not until enjoying a liberating nap in St. Vincent at one of the worst hotels I’ve ever stayed at, the Tropic Breeze-more about that later.
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The Long Short Journey to Grenada
By Lee | 3 Comments » I had heard previously about airlines in the Caribbean making many and inexplicable stops in their flight itineraries. Meaning, they would say for instance, they were flying from Curacao to Grenada but failing to mention there would be three stopovers in between. I never really thought much about it, figuring people just didn’t plan properly or something like that. However that exact thing happened to me the other day on that exact journey from Curacao to Grenada.
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