Escape Route: Antigua
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Escape Route: Antigua
There is no road to paradise. Pave the way to Antigua’s loveliest beach, for example, and that superlative will no longer apply. The challenge of arriving at the remote strand redoubles the bliss. First I was supposed to reach Rendezvous Bay on horseback, riding down through the scrub. We were going to leave at dawn and swim the horses in the surf. But Springhill Stables was booked solid the week I was there.
Then I was supposed to sail there on a wooden sloop, itself built right on the beach down in the Grenadines. On a beautiful day — blue skies and 18 knots of wind, enough to blow us up the coast in traditional West Indies style, sweeping across the whitecaps to the shore — we emerged through the mouth of English Harbour. As the canvas sails filled, the telephone-pole mast snapped clean in half with a mighty crack. A chunk of wood hit me in the head, a reminder that finding heaven on Earth is no walk in the city park. Clearly I had to take matters — and a paddle — into my own hands.
On a stand-up board, I paddled out of the same harbor and turned right along the coast — downwind, thank God. Rolling waves knocked me into the sea again and again. Every time, I flopped like a walrus back onto the board, stood up anew and resumed paddling, humbled but not daunted. If getting there was half the fun, I was having a lot of half-fun now.
But the breeze at my back finally delivered me like a waterlogged letter to the distant cove. A row of palm trees lined one end, morning silver replaced with afternoon gold. The blond arc of sand, the low hills and the mountains of Antigua beyond, it was layers of beauty I approached, everything I would have missed by any other route. My legs shook with fatigue, but I felt like I had arrived somewhere new, untrammeled if not untouched. I paddled into the shore break, rode an easy wave to the beach and stepped onto the sand.
