Liming in the Windies

You know you are going to have a good time somewhere, when, you not only find yourself on a deserted Caribbean beach at 10am on a Sunday morning, but when you find the only other person around, who happens to be selling drinks and ask her  for a bottle of water, she fixes you with a blank look and says; "Tis Sunday, people only be drinking beer." Beer it is. And that pretty much sets the tone of our week in St Vincent and the Grenadines. 

A small cluster if islands in the Caribbean sea, the SVGs are about an hour's flight from Barbados on the tiniest plane imaginable. We were pratically sitting in the cockpit and had to be weighed before boarding.

The islands include Bequia (where we're staying), Mustique, Canouan, Union, and St Vincent. Bequia (pronounced 'bek-way') is a tiny island community of just 7 square miles. Like all the Grenadine islands it is hilly, lush and green, much more like a south-east Asian island than the super-flat Bahamas. It doesn't long for us to be peppered by mossie bites.

From the airport we're driven by pick-up truck to the villa where we have rented a small studio overlooking Princess Margaret Beach. The beach was originally named after some guy called Tony until Princess Margaret visited Bequia on her honeymoon and fell in love with the beach. So the people of Bequia decided to name it after her instead. I expect Tony was gutted because it is a beautiful beach indeed - a crescent of soft golden sand fringed by frangipani trees and leading down to sparkling clear turqoise sea. If it was good enough for Margs, it certainly suits us.

The snorkelling off the reef near the beach is great, we spot a couple of octopi, Moray eels, lots of brightly-coloured fish and large staghorn corals. The visibility is amazing.

Bequia is very pretty island - pastel-coloured houses and shacks dot the hillside and there are lots of catarmarans and yachts bobbing anchored off the shore. Most people actually sail to Bequia rather than fly. Turns out it's a popular destination where yachtie-types come to relax after exhausting sailing regattas and general stresses of floating around the Caribbean for weeks on end. Walking around the little main town of Port Elizabeth it's easy to spot the yachties, they all have fantastic suntans and can be overheard saying things like: "We've just anchored in the SVGs from the BVIs and the USVIs". 

All the locals are very friendly. We quickly discover that the favourite pastime is 'liming'. To 'lime' basically means just hanging out doing nothing, maybe with your mates or on your own, usually in the shade of a tree, for hours on end, maybe drinking beer, maybe not. Just chilling out. So we start our week making like a local and liming on the beach as much as we can.

It turns out we have arrived in low-season so many of the restaurants and shops are closed much of the time. More time to lime then.

Eating out is pretty rustic, you eat what they catch that morning so restaurant menus consist of three choices - fish (usually tuna or Mahi-Mahi), chicken and of course, conch. Everything is jerk-spiced and served with rice and some kind of 'hard food' like plantain or fried bananas. We quickly learn that the fish is the best bet, there's only so much conch you can eat. 

Bequia is a fantastic place to relax, but we've also chosen to stay there for a very specific resason, it is relatively close to the Tobago Cays. The Tobago Cays are a group of five uninhabited islands that are now nature reserve, protected for their natural beauty, pristine reefs and wildlife. We had hoped to visit them on a lovely peaceful sailing boat but then we discover that the boat is being repaired that week. There is only one option, being that we don't have a yacht to get there ourselves, to go by speedboat. It is apparently the worst way to get to the Tobago Cays - the crossing takes and hour and a half and can get very choppy indeedy . But we are undeterred. Heck, I was vomiting for most of the Inca Trail I'm sure I can handle a bumpy speedbaot ride. 

Captain Nolan's boat can be heard before it arrives at the jetty to pick us up - it is gleaming white, blaring reggae at an ear-bleeding level with three huge speedboat motors on the back. Captain Nolan is wearing a lot of gold jewellery and he tells us he has made his own special rum punch for us. I'm not sure how that will go down with the seasickness tablets we've just taken but we climb aboard anyway.

As soon as we are out in the open water Captain Nolan cranks the speed up. We seem to by flying across the sea and it would feel very cool indeed if we were not getting soaked by sizeable waves crashing over the boat. The boat seems to jump into the air and smack back down again with every wave. It is a wild ride but our captain seems unpeturbed, cranks up the sound system and away we go. We sail by Union and Canouan. It's easy to spot Mustique as we hoon past - a private island, the hilltops are peppered with gleaming mansions owned by Mick Jagger, Bryan Adams and the bloke who owns Nike. Lavish indeed.

An hour and a half later we arrived, intact, at the Tobago Cays. They look exacly like the idyllic desert islands that are in all the pictures. Blinding white sand surrounding tiny islands that are topped with a few artfully placed palm trees at the centre. The water is a brilliant aqua-marine and so clear you can see straight to the bottom. The reefs around the islands are all protected so the snorkelling is amazing - big brain corals and a myriad of rainbow-coloured fish. One areas is a turtle sanctuary for Leatherback turtles. It doesn't take long to spot the Leatherbacks, gracefully cruising along the bottom or popping their heads up out of the water, they are massive. We spot one that is probably about the size of a pub-garden table. We follow them together for ages and count six in all - a very special moment indeed. Before we go we decide to swim out to one of the desert islands for a true shipwrecked moment. Then it's back on board to sample some of Captain Nolan's homemade rum punch, which, after a morning snorkelling on the cays, tasted amazing.

Next and final stop, Tobago, as in Trinidad and Tobago, nothing to do with the Tobago Cays, confusing.

Lots of love

Beth xxx