I would rather die of passion than of boredom.
                                                                                                                       Van Gogh

The Caribbean did a voodoo on me. Until I finally broke the spell, it held me in an iron grip – I had to include a trip to this part of the world in my repertoire at least once a year. My excuse to myself for spending so much money and time on going somewhere familiar while so much of the world lay unexplored was the plethora of different islands I could visit. But in reality, I was simply addicted to it.

I believe that every trip we make – even short and seemingly inconsequential ones – changes who we are, but the Caribbean can give anyone an acute existential crisis. My advice: don’t go there with your loved one. Either you, or they, or both might get distracted – any human with blood in their veins would be. But if you happen to be decidedly single, then this is the place to let your hair down in a major fashion. Some parts of the world can be difficult or lonely for a girl flying solo… not here.

You might think the Caribbean is sterile and ultra-touristy, and you’d be both exactly right and completely wrong. Come on a cruise liner as most tourists do, and it’s hard to see much past Margaritaville cocktails and Diamond International shopfronts. Abandon ship, and things will start happening.

The islands are a celebration of all things beautiful – beaches, landscapes, people. Once I got my first eyeful of it, it got me re-thinking a few things. What have I been doing with my life so far? Why have I been wearing suits and glasses since I was eighteen? All my intellectual pursuits were suddenly rendered irrelevant in the face of beauty in its purest form; nothing I’ve read, watched, or heard has prepared me for it.

Beauty is addictive. Beauty is Love. Love for the flawless coconut palms, the evergreen hills, the milky water. For the thin waists and smooth faces, delicious accents, full lips and confident strides, perfect children and dignified elders.

I’ve let myself stay long enough to start forgetting my pre-Caribbean self. I was turning into one of these people who love life and know how to enjoy it to the last grain of sand and ray of sunshine. Being me back home suddenly seemed as exciting as being a washing machine or a coffee-maker; my degrees, resumes, and career goals now a boxful of useless tinsel. Here, I was fast becoming an exotic dancer, Jezebel, Cleopatra, and my skin was turning golden (well, piglet-pink but it felt golden) as I strolled down perfect strips of sands and danced the nights away. Fading with every step and hip-shake were stripy suits and meetings, strata fees and water rates, desks and mouse-pads, and all the other things which Nature has not designed me for. 

I did eventually force myself to leave, but I came back, and came back, and lived to go back. Year after year, I couchsurfed up a storm around the islands, meeting every type of atypical Caribbean, letting the islands show their many faces and provide some answers to the question which disturbed my peace for years: If I love it so much, why don’t I move to live here?

On Saint Thomas, I stayed with Jimmy, who made six hundred dollars a day carting cruise passengers around. I bobbed around in his brightly-painted truck, picking up and dropping off clients, listening to the same middle-aged-couple squabbles, wondering how Jimmy’s clientele came to be so cashed-up, on holidays, and intensely unhappy all at the same time. Jimmy himself drifted through life without the burden of consciousness, eating nothing but buffalo wings for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Unlike the cruise crowd, he was young but firmly on track towards every type of lifestyle disease available. I did what I could to introduce him to plant-based food before hopping over to the next island, but he smiled at me vaguely: “Vegetables? Nah, I’m a man!”

In Guadeloupe, I landed in the middle of country-wide protests: multi-kilometre lines at petrol stations and traffic at a walking pace. My host was a gorgeous two-meter-tall actress and lawyer, Miriam. She was busy organising a protest against the protesters and had pulled over a thousand people together in her Facebook group. The day after I left Guadeloupe, the demonstrators shut down the airport, so Miriam’s anti-protester protesters still had a lot of work to do.

Bequia, the first in the chain of Grenadine islands, plunged me into a quintessential West Indies lull. There were no Couchsurfers here, but I befriended an ex-Caribbean-Idol winner who regularly broke into a song as we wandered between idyllic bays and explored one of the Caribbean’s greatest idiosyncrasies: an abandoned luxury resort bigger than the island’s main town. Something happened to the Mafiosi who owned it, and now birds made homes in its Italianesque fountains, the gardens lied in stasis beneath mosquito-infested jungle, and moaning couples colonised the dark recess of the building.

Crystal and her family hosted me on my first visit to Antigua. Young Crystal was an Olympic athlete, a keen finance student, and a professional dancer. Her weekly schedule was regimented to a minute, and her support team (a very serious and dedicated Mum) made sure it all ran smoothly. They were so well-mannered, educated, and proper, their English so aristocratic, that at dinner time I lapsed into thinking I was back in the Cotswolds.

A couple of years later, I came back to Antigua and this time stayed with Baba – a Rastafarian with knee-long dreads and a respectable beer belly – in his little bush cabin. This cabin was the ultimate nirvana for weakened adventure seekers like me, a perfect antidote for my usual manic schedule. My insatiable thirst for activity quickly wilted in the midday heat, and I felt free, even from myself and my plans. More than once I dozed off in a hammock and woke up on the ground – another reason for Baba to break into a giggle. On a rare occasion, Rasta left the cabin to spend hours saying hello to people in Saint John’s, Antigua’s bright and mellow capital. He’d get his beard tidied up, and the day was gone.

Sint Maarten, a tiny half-Dutch, half-French island, is its own special gem, its famous Maho Beach one of the best places in the world to watch airplanes come in from the water and land just across the street. Here I was on some faraway cloud, trying to get a good shot of the planes carting in pale North Americans from frozen metropolises, when a human mass knocked me down and fell on top. A Boeing-787 blasting off just metres away turned us into a sandy mound. I was so stumped, I didn’t even ask the name of whoever saved me from Serious body harm and even death promised on the beachside signs. The incident deserved a number of cocktails, and the next thing I remember, I was in a car packed with new friends, speeding off to an afterparty on the other side of the island at four o’clock in the morning.

For all the glamour of Sint Maarten, the diversity of Antigua, and the lost-paradise feel of the Grenadines, my favourite island in the Antilles must be Barbados. The birthplace of rum and some of the world’s friendliest people has just the right mix of chill vibes and a carnival atmosphere to be simultaneously trouble-free, exciting, and mellow. Barbados also happens to be home to the silliest romantic interlude in the history of human kind. Or one of the top five at least – you be the judge.

One gorgeous February day I’m on the island’s famous Enterprise Beach taking a photo – trying, for the umpteenth time, to solidify a memory of beauty. A military car rolls past, back-pedals, and a striking creature sticks his head from the window. In a Queen Bee voice, he gives me the world’s most pathetic pick-up line: “Do you want to take a picture of me?”

“Yeah… why not!” Of course, I do, gorgeous man in uniform and beret.

I’ll take it, and I’ll take it for just long enough for you to ask me out, cause “no girl should be alone on Valentine’s Day.” You’ve said it, Mr. Hot, not me. As with most Caribbean men, there’s not much to talk about, but I don’t want to talk. I don’t even want to touch. I just want to admire the object of my fascination like one would a statue from the Metropolitan. Where does a soldier take his date on a special occasion? The shooting range, of course. Paragon Army Base. Ask me if I’ve had a more memorable Valentine’s.

I hop over to some other island the next day, but for the rest of the year, Jefferson keeps asking me to come back to Barbados. The idea seems treacherously counterintuitive, but Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke also spent less than twenty-four hours together in Before the Sunrise and then managed to pick up right where they left off. Logic, what logic? One heavy argument for comes from a little-known Russian poet, Alexander Makarov-Korotkov, who mused: Life lasts as long as a kiss, everything else is memoirs. Let’s go back to Barbados to make some memories, shall we?

And so when I happen to still be single the February after, I turn up once again on my favourite island. It starts off a bit like the summer in Saint Petersburg – nine months of expectations, three months of disappointment. Except here I had twelve months of expectations, a week of… no, wait, not true. It’s only weird for the first couple of days when Jefferson keeps disappearing under all sorts of excuses and I become an Ice Princess, cause after all I’m only here for that crazy smile of his.

But then he starts taking me out dancing, little trips around the island, beaches, parties, and eventually I melt like an icicle in spring. The rest of the week is nothing short of spectacular, except we never talk about what this means. Then, at the airport:

I: “That was amazing, we have to do this again!”

He: “Yes, minus the alcohol and the cigarette smoke.”

I: “I’ve travelled so much but have never met anyone like you.”

He: “Thanks.”

And so it goes, this pathetic torture, and by the time I fly, I know we won’t be meeting again. I release my Caribbean Adonis into the wild and decide I’ll never believe a word he says. If I have learned one thing, words depreciate in value in proportion to the beauty of the mouth they are coming from. As my plane busts its way through the fluff in the sky, I feel the islands loosening their grip.

I’m still glad Barbados happened. Because even if Jefferson can’t for whatever reason admit it, what we had was a mind-blowing-better-than-any-movie kind of week. We lived true to the commandments of Van Gogh and Alexander Makarov-Korotkov. In the moment.

Years later, when my Barbados friend still never forgets my birthday and wants to say hello a lot more often than I care to hear it, the glaringly obvious truth descends on my credulous consciousness: “You had a girlfriend when I came, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I had. I’m sorry.”

Don’t be. I’m not sad or angry. It was a long time ago. It wasn’t deep, and I got over it fast. Thanks for letting me partake in your beautiful island life, even if for a week, Mr. Gorgeous Wrong.

– Janie Borisov