Barbados

We landed in the afternoon and stayed on the south coast. The first morning we drove into Bridgetown, the capital: an old colonial port with a Gothic church, Independence Square and the Careenage, the inner harbour where fishing boats and yachts tie up by the bridges, and busy shopping streets full of market stalls.

In the afternoon we moved to the beach at Carlisle Bay, just south of the town, where the water is clear and calm enough for the smallest swimmers.

On Friday evening we joined the fish fry at Oistins, the island’s big weekly party of grilled fish, music and long tables by the sea. The next day was a lazy beach day in St Lawrence Gap, digging in the sand and jumping in the waves.

For two days we explored the interior with a hire car. Narrow roads wind through the hills to tropical gardens hidden in old limestone gullies, full of palms, ferns and flowers, and to St Nicholas Abbey, a seventeenth-century plantation house with its own rum distillery, near the viewpoint of Cherry Tree Hill.

The next day we walked through Welchman Hall Gully, a strip of rainforest with caves and birds, and drove over to Bathsheba on the Atlantic side, where the waves break around huge rocks on a wild and almost empty beach.

The last base was Holetown on the west coast, where the Caribbean is calm and turquoise. From there we drove to the northern tip of the island and climbed down into the Animal Flower Cave, a sea cave whose openings frame the Atlantic, and spent another afternoon swimming at Carlisle Bay.

After a few more slow days by the sea we flew home.