What We Love Most in Caribbean Travel

St. Kitts picnic by Jon Whittle

This is the editor’s letter from the “Best of the Caribbean” November 2009 issue of ISLANDS magazine (you can read the entire issue right now), on sale starting Oct. 6, 2009, at newsstands everywhere.

The Best Part
Mango and papaya for breakfast. drip-drying in the sun on a beach towel. Moonlit strolls on a secluded shoreline. Skinny-dipping. These are a few of my favorite reasons to visit the Caribbean. I mention them because, for the past year, we at islands have been collecting yours. In our Best of the Caribbean guide, you’ll find reader-submitted Caribbean favorites as insightful, layered and surprising as the region itself. Still, it’s tempting to seek out one singular moment that encapsulates why the Caribbean keeps us all coming back.

For me, that quintessential moment may be an odd ­silence I encountered on Cozumel, sitting alongside a Mexican family during a loud, four-hour-long dinner. The gathering was a typical night for the family, their cousins, uncles and aunts. But no matter how noisy the table’s banter, it drew silent if the grandmother spoke or so much as asked for a spoon.

Perhaps the Caribbean’s allure lies in the proud fisherman who rescued me in the dark off the coast of Aruba one night. I had broken my windsurfer a half-mile offshore sailing late into the afternoon. The fisherman heard my cries for help and, later, back on the beach, refused to accept my thank-you gift of $50 cash. That is, unless I accepted the two 20-pound wahoo he thrust into my chest, insisting that I take them.

But while I treasure these experiences, they can’t top the feeling I get every time I leave Miami on a Caribbean-bound plane. It’s the ­anticipation, that night-before-Christmas, wink-from-my-wife-across-a-candlelit-table giddiness that occurs just before the good stuff. That’s what grabs me. It sets its hook just after takeoff, with my first sight of the Bahamas. Swaths of blue, empty beaches, countless atolls — they tell me this is the moment I love the Caribbean most. For it’s then that I’m certain everything pressing in my life will take a back seat to enjoying it. For me, that’s the best part.

— Eddy Patricelli, editor, editor@islands.com

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