Double threat to idyllic island

Montserrat: Active volcano versus Covid pandemic

very day at noon, a melodic chime reverberates across the Caribbean island of Montserrat. For nearly two months, Krystal Bajkor, a visitor from North Carolina, assumed it was a clock marking time.

“I thought it was just an adorable feature of the small island,” said Bajkor, a former financial analyst who is currently writing a children’s book.

Then in June, her husband, a management consultant, learned that the pleasantsounding “clock” was, in fact, a daily test of the volcano warning system.

The Soufriere Hills volcano, which buried large swaths of the island in rocks and ash in the late 1990s, continues to be active, producing a cloud of hot gas, which appears to hover over its crater.

The meaning of the chime is one of those things that Bajkor might have missed had she been a typical tourist.

Before the pandemic, most visitors to Montserrat floated in for maybe a day, anchoring their sailboats in the port or scurrying off the ferry for a hike before returning to nearby AnIn tigua for the night.

Now in order for a tourist to even set foot on Montserrat’s black sand beaches, they must pass a rigorous background check and make at least $70 000 a year (about R1 million).

Until recently, they also had to commit to sticking around for at least two months.

exchange, visitors get almost exclusive access not only to beaches, but also an alternate reality, roughly the size of Manhattan, where the coronavirus does not seem to exist.

Soon after the British territory detected its first few coronavirus cases in March 2020, it closed its borders to tourists.

In April 2021, it cautiously reopened with the remote worker programme, requiring both vaccinated and unvaccinated visitors to quarantine for two weeks and then take a coronavirus test before exploring the island.

So far, 21 travellers from seven families have participated.

The island is certainly not alone in devising creative ways to lure visitors during the pandemic.

Countries around the world have crafted and recrafted a vast array of systems to try to keep the money flowing in without endangering the local population’s health.

Malta bans unvaccinated tourists from more than 30 countries, but provides hotel vouchers to visitors deemed safe. As of 19 September, Israel began allowing tourists in, but only if they are vaccinated and traveling in groups of more than five people.

Numerous Caribbean islands have tried to lure remote workers with “digital nomad visas” that allow a visitor to stay a year or even longer.

But Montserrat’s programme stands out even in a sea of unconventional experiments because the island chose to flip the standard term of a visa on its head, requiring instead a minimum visit.

It’s also unusual because while other islands have emphasised how easy they want to make it for remote workers to visit, Montserrat has seemed proud of making it hard to join its roughly 5 000-person bubble, where few wear masks or lock their doors.

“They’re very selective in who they let in,” said David Cort, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who spent three months working from Montserrat with his wife, a travel risk analyst, and their daughter.

“I was told that they actually turned people down.”

The primary driver of the economy is exporting volcanic sand, not tourism.

Before the pandemic, local businesses counted on 18 000 to 21 000 tourists a year, according to the tourism authority.

But more pressing is, of course, the virus. As of 15 September, 33 people had tested positive in the previous 18 months, according to the ministry of health.

Given that only around 23% of the population has been fully vaccinated, there’s an understanding that if the virus ricocheted across the island, the medical system could not handle it.

Should that happen, it could set Montserrat back by years.

The volcanic eruption drove two-thirds of the population off the island. It has been recovering, but slowly.

“We cannot afford to have the pandemic overtake our situation,” Willock said.