Everyone knows the Caribbean is paradise, but beach getaways are not all created equal. We asked some of our saltiest, most sunbaked writers to pick their ultimate island escapes. Welcome to the great Caribbean island-off!
An island for the intrepid
By Bob Friel
Chris A Crumley/Alamy
Three hours into a trek to Boiling Lake—rubber-legged, lead-footed, and well past sweat-saturated, but not yet to the halfway point—my local guide and I descend into the Valley of Desolation, a stunning place that will never show up on any “fun in the sun” billboard. A hellscape of howling fumaroles and flatulent mud pots that emit a sulfurous mist, it could be Beelzebub’s backyard. I crumple to a rest at an overlook, and after a minute, the cloud below stretches away, exposing the underbelly of Morne Trois Pitons National Park: the roiling white water of the world’s second-largest boiling lake.
Dominica has nine active volcanoes. Aside from supplying features like Champagne—an offshore dive amid streams of hot bubbles—the volcanic action created the island’s snaggletooth topography, including five peaks over 4,000 feet. This was the last Caribbean island to be colonized by Europeans and the last stand of the Kalinago tribe, who still live here today. The island’s sharp peaks and billowing rainforest were tough to attack and easy to defend; a troop of Cub Scouts with slingshots, let alone the Kalinago with their poison-tipped arrows, could hold out here indefinitely.
That same violent landscape—heavy on drama, light on white-sand beaches—also protects Dominica from the onslaught of Sunday circular tourism. Within the next two years, a resort or two will be built on the beaches in the north, the dry side of this nearly 290-square-mile island, parts of which often see more than an inch of rain a day. For now, however, Dominica is still all about adventure. More than 300 miles of trails probe the montane and elfin forests that coat the island in every possible shade of green. A number of the 300-plus rivers run hot, creating natural Jacuzzis—though I find that mid-hike soaks can go ruinously beyond relaxing into jellifying.
Dominica’s bounty extends underwater, and the dives I make inside the volcanic rim of Soufriere Bay are aswirl with the rich mixing of Caribbean and Atlantic waters, plus more marquee species—frogfish, seahorses, flying gurnards—than I’ve seen anywhere on this side of the world. There’s even a resident population of female sperm whales and their calves that hunt squid in the abyss offshore; big males roar in during winter to battle for breeding rights.
But there’s another reason to love this island. Dominica—after the feel-good flagellation of maxing out on a hike, after the thrill-filled diving, after saluting the warriors who defied the world’s greatest powers—is the one Caribbean island where I really feel I’ve earned those rum and Cokes.
ACCESS
Fly to Puerto Rico for American Eagle’s (aa.com) daily to Dominica’s Melville Hall Airport, or head to St. Maarten for Winair’s (www.fly-winair.com) three-times-weekly flights to the smaller Canefield Airport.
LODGING
Jungle Bay Resort & Spa offers spa treatments, gourmet food, and a world-class yoga center. And the rooms aren’t bad either. From $185 per cottage per night; junglebaydominica.com
SUSTENANCE
Fortify yourself for adventure with bowls of callaloo soup, spicy accras (fritters), and fried “lobster balls” from La Robe Creole. larobecreole.com
ATTRACTIONS
Anchorage Hotel & Dive Center is the local whale-watching and scuba-diving authority. anchoragehotel.dm
A private take on paradise
By Ken Mcalpine
Photo by Jen Judge
Here are the facts: acres on the island (northeast of Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands), 850; guest maximum at Guana Island Resort, 32; number of guests inclined to hike to Chicken Rock and plunge into God’s own swimming hole at the Chicken’s backside, decidedly fewer than 32. With a beachfront spa and sautéed snapper at lunch, Guana’s guests aren’t prone to overexertion. “Everything must be done by 10:30 a.m.,” a guest informed me. Fine. Ten-thirty is when I sneak off.
The resort is an understated cloister of white stone cottages perched on a ridge so that, from your private terrace, you can watch the riffled explosions of panicked baitfish or the pregnant canvas of passing sailboats, savoring the fact that the hoi polloi cannot set foot beyond Guana’s high-tide line. On my visit, the island hosts 14 guests. Though most are on the far side of 50, they, too, are intoxicated by the Robinson Crusoe air. At dinner one night, a couple announces they’ve booked the Castaways picnic and massage the following day, a private pampering on one of the island’s seven sugar-sand beaches. Not until the couple leaves does Tom, a returning guest of 20 years, raise his eyebrows. “I didn’t want to say it,” Tom says, “but if the wind blows in the right direction, your skin peels off.”
Roughly 65 percent of the island lies untouched, and it is fat with fauna (including six-foot-long iguanas like living duffels) and decidedly pristine. Each year, scientists come here to conduct studies and, no doubt, cast a fly into waters choked with yellowtail, permit, and tarpon. I am not a fisherman, but I am in love with the sea, so one morning just before dawn, I paddle a kayak to Monkey Point, at Guana’s southern tip. Slipping into the shadowy waters, I wait. The tarpon come with the rising sun, muscled lords, glimmering silver.
And then there is that hike to Chicken Rock, where, in the shadow of a volcanic outcropping shaped exactly like a hunkered chicken, a swimming hole, open to the sea, Jell-O-jiggles with surge. I snap my goggles to my face and leap. Schools of baitfish scatter at my bubbly arrival, but when my fingers clasp the upper lip of an underwater cavern ten feet below the surface, allowing me to sway, upside down, to the pulse of the sea, the fish coalesce, like the return of a very old dream.
I leap and leap. The sun dips to the horizon. On the dining terrace, white linen waits. I leap again. No right-minded 12-year-old lets rack of lamb stand in his way.
ACCESS
Most visitors fly to San Juan, Puerto Rico, or St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, then connect to Beef Island. (Caribbean Travel Network often has good discounted fares; 800-327-5540.) The resort’s boatmen pick you up at the airport for the15-minute boat ride to Guana.
LODGING
The resort’s white stone cottages are encircled by foliage, with terraces overlooking the sea. For serious privacy, rent the North Beach cottage, a secluded hillside villa, or even the entire island. From $1,650; guana.com
ATTRACTIONS
The island has seven white-sand beaches and 12 miles of hiking trails. There’s a beachfront spa, kayaking, sailing, snorkeling, and bocce by the sea. If that’s not enough, charter a boat for fishing and exploring nearby islands.
On perpetual siesta
By Mike Grudowski
Mary Nichols/Four Seasons Resort Nevis
All of this gives the place a sort of wonderland, time-warp aura, one that appeals to travelers who could probably afford to go anywhere but keep coming back here—sometimes permanently. “I don’t think I’d ever leave,” Quentin Henderson says to me. He’s an English expat who washed ashore 20 years ago as a volunteer to help establish a beekeeping industry on the island, and he’s now known locally as the Bee Man. We are chatting in the palm-shaded courtyard of the Café des Arts, on the waterfront in Charlestown, the island’s compact Georgian capital. “It’s a very relaxed way of life.”
Next door to the café, just beyond a low stone wall, sits a museum built on the site of Alexander Hamilton’s birthplace; the founding-father-to-be lived on Nevis until age five. A few blocks away is a churchyard with gravestones dating to the 1600s. Once one of the British Empire’s richest sugar colonies, Nevis oozes history at every turn, but none of it is cordoned off. You can scamper to the top of a 1700s sugar-mill tower—or you can book a week in one that has been repurposed into a hillside suite. Wooden “chattel houses” that once harbored families of slaves have been converted into resort cottages. A onetime stone cistern at Golden Rock Plantation Inn is now a swimming pool.
But the best part of Nevis is its beautiful isolation. There was a moment on the first night my wife and I spent there that I hope I never forget, the kind of sensation that has become all too rare on the planet. It was long past sundown after dinner in a 1778 stone great house at another of those plantations turned resorts, a palm-fringed redoubt called Nisbet Plantation Beach Club. We strolled out to the sand as a breeze rustled the fronds. The only light came from flashes of foam from waves breaking on an offshore reef, and from stars against a black sky. We swayed on a rope hammock and tried halfheartedly to pick out constellations. It felt as if we were watching from a secure post, staring out at the void from the very edge of the universe.
ACCESS
Connect to Nevis on flights through San Juan, Puerto Rico, St. Maarten, or Antigua. Most carriers also fly direct to Nevis’s sister island, St. Kitts, where a quick ferry ride completes the trip.
LODGING
Establish base camp at Nisbet Plantation Beach Club (doubles from $395; nisbetplantation.com), a onetime sugar and coconut plantation with its own breezy beach. Thirty-six elegant cottages are scattered around the property, each a short stroll from the 1778 great house turned dining room and the new spa.
ATTRACTIONS
There’s no shortage of activities on Nevis, including beaches, rainforest and Nevis Peak hikes, snorkeling, mountain biking, and, occasionally, horse racing at the Indian Castle track.
The other Caribbean
By Bruce Barcott
Matthew Hranek/Art+Commerce
A few years ago, some smart compañeros at Mexico Tourism cooked up a plan to promote the towns south of Cancún. Spread the gringo wealth, as it were. They labeled the 75-mile stretch Riviera Maya, and folks flocked there. Playa del Carmen, 40 miles south of Cancún, exploded. Tulum, 35 miles south of Playa, became a word-of-mouth secret, the hush-hush next big place. Tulum is nobody’s secret anymore, but it hasn’t yet been spoiled by the eye-stink of T-shirt shops and all-night tequila bars. And it’s the jumping-off point to the true secrets farther south—the real magic starts just past Tulum, at the far edge of the Riviera brand.
Begin at Amansala. During one visit, I teamed up the resort’s adventure guide, Matt. We hopped on kayaks, paddled past the breakers, and pitched overboard. One of the world’s longest coral reefs lurks just off the coast. It’s murder on ships—wrecks pepper the seaboard—but makes for tasty snorkeling. Matt and I drifted over purple fan corals and schools of parrotfish. Later, after a visit to Tulum’s renowned Maya ruins, spectacular temples perched on headland cliffs, we hiked down an unmarked trail, iguanas scattering before us, to find a cenote of clear, deep water hidden amid the mangroves. We dove in; a warm layer of salt water floated above cool freshwater beneath: the classic Riviera Maya cocktail.
Now, push farther south into the 1.3-million-acre Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve. This is the Caribbean as you’ve never seen it—no steel drums, no beachside service, no rum drinks. Nothing but 62 miles of undeveloped coastline, mangrove swamps, and tropical forests, most of it wild enough to get lost in and die. The lagoons of Sian Ka’an are rich estuaries teeming with life, much of it amenable to a well-cast fly. Fishing nuts come here to ply the waters for bonefish, tarpon, barracuda, permit, jack crevalle, snapper, and snook. Reputations are made here. And there’s more than just fishing: A steady offshore breeze turns these waters into a kitesurfer’s paradise.
It’s time to expand the definition of Caribbean. It’s not just islands and reggae. It’s cenotes, surfing, and Mayan sunsets. Back in the day, the pirates of the Caribbean lurked in the bays of those warm-water islands, waiting to raid Spanish galleons loaded with gold, silver, and pearls. And where did all that treasure come from? That’s right: Mexico.
ACCESS
American Airlines flies daily from New York and other major U.S. cities to Cancún, with tickets starting around $400. It’s a 75-mile drive south to Tulum; Hertz (hertz.com) rents vehicles starting at $350 per week.
LODGING
In Tulum, eco-chic Amansala (doubles from $140; amansala.com) brings a design sensibility to a Lost setting. Boca Paila Lodge (weeklong fishing itineraries from $2,800, including all meals; bocapaila.com), in the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, is renowned among fishermen.
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