Intimate Caribbean

I spend the rest of the afternoon camped out under some palm trees at the Frangipani Hotel, on Admiralty Bay. The Frangipani is owned by a former prime minister and has been in the same family for more than a hundred years. Talk at the bar is of the weather (hurricanes) and politics ("you know what that Bush mon need, mon ... he needs to smoke a big spliff!"). A water taxi named Phat Shag pulls up, and its driver orders a glass of chilled red wine. Dive boats are returning from their day-trips. A bikinied woman dives off the back of a catamaran. A heavyset woman walks by under an umbrella, its hot-pink nylon contrasting sharply with the sea.

At day's end, I go for a swim. Lying on the dock afterward, I roll over and see a turtle swimming toward me, its elongated neck protruding above the placid surface. I wonder if it too is returning from a day-trip, or whether it's just back from having seen something of the world.

The MV Barracuda was once the Grenadines' mail boat. Correspondence is delivered by air these days, but the Barracuda still works the islands, carrying passengers and small goods. My folding kayak has finally arrived, and in order to make up for lost time, I board the Barracuda for the three-and-a-half-hour trip south to Union Island.

Originally one giant cotton plantation, the island rises to two peaks: Mount Olympus and Mount Parnassus, whose audacious names belie their relatively modest size. I book a room on the far side of the island at the Big Sand Hotel, on Belmont Bay, a mile from the rustic main town of Clifton.

I quickly scout the island by pickup truck and on foot. From its shores, I can see several of the chain's other islands: Mayreau and Palm, Petit St. Vincent and the Tobago Cays. I make the executive decision, simple when traveling solo, to use Big Sand — with its large air-conditioned rooms (necessary in the late-summer heat) and excellent restaurant — as my base, paddling to a different island each day.

Christoper Wray-McCann / CondeNast Traveler Union Island, Richmond Bay. View from the balcony of room #7 of the Big Sand Hotel.

Finally, I'm ready to let the boat out of the bag. The folding Feathercraft K1 Expedition is brand-new, and assembling its aluminum frame and Duratek skin is a bit of a wrestling match. Even in the shade of the veranda outside my room, I'm sweating profusely as I struggle with the 17-foot vessel.

After 90 minutes, I carry the teal blue kayak down to the curve of beach for my first paddle — a circumnavigation of Union Island that should take about four hours. As I push off into the clear green Caribbean, I notice roiling whitecaps separating Union from nearby Mayreau. The winds typically hold off until after noon, but this morning they are up and blowing early.

The lure of kayaking is powerful, especially when traveling alone. You can go where you want, when you want. Of course, paddling solo also comes with risks: If you get into trouble, there's no one to help you. But for me the privilege of cruising along at sea level under my own steam makes it all worthwhile, especially when the occasional manta ray swims alongside as I stroke half a mile off Union's coast.

There is a long history of exploration by small boat in these islands. The Ciboney people were the first to journey from South America to St. Vincent, which they named Hairoun ("Land of the Blessed"). They would eventually continue on to Cuba and Haiti, leaving these islands to the agrarian Arawak, who had also arrived by small boat. (Columbus sailed by in 1492, although there is no record that he even saw the island, much less stopped.)

It grows windier as I slowly circle Union. Though I've been in the kayak less than an hour, my legs are cramped, so I come ashore on a deserted beach at Bloody Bay and swim in the shallow cove. Another hour's paddle along the western edge of the island brings me to the small village of Ashton, where I duck under a low bridge and follow a man-made channel to the main town of Clifton. A big thunderhead is growing to the north, toward Mayreau, and heading in my direction. Within half an hour, big drops are splattering off the sea, the kayak, and my head. When I finally return to the beach fronting Big Sand, the restaurant's boss, a slight man named Geoffrey, in pressed shirt and pants, is there to greet me with a cold beer as I step creakily out of my kayak.

These dichotomies define the Grenadines. Luxury resorts abut plywood beach bars. Sixteen-foot wooden water taxis zip among million-dollar yachts. The people on these islands seem genuinely happy, protected somehow from the inequities common to more touristed locales, the have-and-have-not nastiness that tends to muck up paradise.

The day after my circumnavigation of Union, I paddle to Mayreau, a privately owned islet of just one and a half square miles. I come ashore on a long beach called Saline and walk up the steep hill to the island's no-name village. Except for the reggae booming from one house and entertaining the whole valley, the hillside town is quiet. Modernity is a relative newcomer here. Until a few years ago, donkeys were used to carry supplies up from the bay, and a small power station brought round-the-clock electricity only in 2002. Tourists outnumber locals on most days; catamarans arrive daily from Bequia, water taxis run continuously from Union, and a Spanish cruise ship visits weekly — in anticipation of which the poisonous manchineel trees are marked with red flags, and Mayreau women sweep the beach.

From the village, a steep asphalt road wends past a handful of bars and a coral-and-stone Catholic church, to the far side of Mayreau and the sublime Saltwhistle Bay. Families pepper the beach of the protected cove, and a pair of souvenir hawkers have set up shop, offering shell necklaces and tie-dyed T-shirts. The only other presence is the elegant eight-room Saltwhistle Bay Resort, which, with its stone-and-wood bungalows scattered among neatly manicured palms, feels more like a residential enclave than a resort.

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