Mustique

Monday 2nd February 2009, day 198. 12° 52’.81 N, 061° 11’.41 W. Britannia Bay, Mustique

This comes to you from a mooring just off Basil’s Bar, where the last days of Mustique’s annual blues festival are playing out. The music is drifting across the water to us, competing with the shrilling of cicadas and tree frogs. One of the regular showers has just sent us back below briefly, but at least it has rinsed today’s salt out of the bathing costumes.

We approached Mustique with some trepidation, given its reputation for being the haunt of beautiful and rich people, neither of which we are. We found a lovely island, manicured of course, but built up in a very restrained way, and whose denizens may well be better off than us, but are certainly no slimmer or more gorgeous (rather the reverse, says Anthony loyally).

One change is that the size of our neighbours has shot up. Tomia has got used to being outclassed by 100’ boats, with “garages” in the back that contain jet skis or lasers – in Mustique we are cosying up to something that carries a power boat and a full-sized yacht side by side on its aft deck. And by full-sized I mean a yacht whose mast needs four spreaders – we are not talking 25’ here. At the stern, where we have a bathing ladder and newer boats have a bathing platform, she has a lido, complete with sun loungers and two beach umbrellas. How the other 0.001% live!

The island is tiny; even in the midday sun we can cross it in half an hour, and that includes climbing up to its 400’ peak. It boasts two lagoons, a month’s worth of white sandy beaches, an air strip for six seater planes, two nature trails, a riding stable and a tennis club, and a hundred or so discreetly opulent houses. The whole is very – and surprisingly – charming. All the houses are tucked away behind long twisting drives and thick hedges of bougainvillea, jasmine or a broad swathe of indigenous forest, so the visiting yachtie, the only person walking on the narrow concrete roads (locals move around in little golf carts, offering us lifts) is only really aware of the island’s natural beauty, the birds, flowers and butterflies, and the stunning beaches and turquoise sea.

Clearly a lot of work goes into keeping the whole place neat and tidy. We pass people strimming grassed areas, blowing leaves off drives and raking beaches. Hedges are trimmed, rubbish is cleared, lawns are mowed. It’s slightly disconcerting to find a beach where the waves are too strong to be able to swim – everything else on the island is so perfectly tuned to the guests’ enjoyment.

We find little picnic tables shaded with grass-umbrellas on the beaches and at viewpoints, placed by the island’s management company. Perspex sleeves carry signs indicating if the table has been booked by a particular villa. At a table further down the beach, staff are unloading and serving a picnic (well more a déjeuner sous l’herbe) to a party of ten, the grass umbrella wreathed with bunches of fresh flowers, which will only last an hour or so in this heat. We open our rucksacks and pull out a tupperware box of sandwiches, a bottle of water and two apples, and are quite content.

It may appear wilfully naïve, but part of the pleasure of the island is that it doesn’t seem commercialised. Of course this is nonsense in one way: the whole place is about, and is funded by money, great wodges of it. But apart from the few shops, the fish market and the vegetable stall in the tiny village, the island is apparently unspoilt. No street lighting, no telephone cables, no garish beach-side developments.

There are such contrasts: each house is a pocket of ultra built up-ness (and we can only guess at the private cinemas, marble baths, air conditioning and vast stainless steel kitchens) but all we are aware of are these lovely stretches of wildness, the beaches, the rocky headlands, the mangrove swamps and the forests behind them. Up on the north east corner, we walked in rocky scrub without seeing a soul; with the windswept views out to the Atlantic, and the harsh landscape it might have been the Outer Hebrides (if it wasn’t for the cacti – and the fact that we were probably picked up on someone’s infra-red security system).