Sugar-sweet Antigua

The extent to which the Antiguan lanes can feel like late-August Somerset is something I will never forget: here an occasional stucco cottage hidden in wisteria, there an old grey stone church with a graveyard bearing tombs from the 1850s for Beatrice, Ethel and Agatha, the in-leaning weeds, the slumberous light. But then you'll round a bend and find a gigantic aloe vera plant, or a flamboyant tree dotted with black hummingbirds, or someone selling spinach mashed with sour fish oil next to 5ft piles of miniature Antigua black pineapples - native and unique to the island and really the most delicious things, so sweet your head swims (yet try to smuggle one out of the country and they turn to dust and ashes in the suitcase every time).

A walk through the market in the town of St John's can be staggering. The roar of life! It's impossible, sometimes, to move for the boxes of mint bush and basil, the Antiguan mottled-green oranges, and avocados hefty as cannonballs. I've seen grannies with John Lennon caps tipped coolly to the side, their ears and arms dripping with gold, parading around using long umbrellas as walking sticks, bargaining loudly over strange brown roots.

Beside a vertiginous wall of pumpkins, a dreadlocked seller fries with a grizzled fork the snapper he bought from the fish market just over the way, from Stephanie who sloshes buckets of bloody water over bonefish all day long. Hand-painted signs are everywhere. 'Fry them crisp, ya teeth can't miss. Not even dog get the bone'. She knocks back Tong ginger beer, her hair immaculately woven into what looks like a thousand spiked and trembling horns. Hair is a big deal on Antigua: every second shop is a barbers or a braider. That morning, on the way into town, a woman got on the bus with a do that rose into a mist of little silver beads, as though its summit were occluded by low cloud. (Buses here don't look like buses, more a van you wave at in the hope it might pull over. When you want to get off, just yell 'bus stop!')

Ah, the beaches. The sand oyster-white, the water sweetly cool. All of them are public and so a nicely egalitarian feel prevails: it's far less 'them and us' than other Caribbean islands. Mooch along the coast and for all Antigua's 80,000 residents you'll still find an empty stretch.

Catch a boat off Harmony Hall to deserted Green Island and sit in the white-budded scrub waiting for the heat to pass - for some merciful chink in the hard blue sky - watching pelicans hulking over the sea, occasionally diving with swept-back wings for snook.

But Pigeon Point Beach in Falmouth Harbour is the most fun, with extended families lying in the surf, the café selling Piña Colada after Piña Colada, which slop out of the electric mixer in a coconutty eruption, the immaculate creaminess only stained with the blood-syrupy kirsch drooling from inside a fat morello cherry. Up and down the sand people loll and chat, combing the salt out of their hair, kids hawking ice for a dollar, groups sitting in the shade of sea-grape trees drinking fruit nectar out of cans.

Friday is payday on the island, and the night out. By lunchtime, roadside stalls are selling Mannish water - a treaty, rich goat soup - cornmeal and conch stew, ochre, red-bean rice and saltfish cakes, fried plantain, Antiguan yams that look like delicate new potatoes. The night draws in, and up cranks the music, people moving in a bouncing, milling stream, parties in houses, parties in restaurants, a party in De'Envy beauty salon or the curry house on Fort Road, the crowd getting larger and louder outside Higher Vibez One Stop Shop and Drinks Depot where, by a pyramid of cans of Vitamalt and mackerel in the back room I found an actual tomb from 1789 with the inscription: 'Here lies the body of Johnno who departed this life in July.' I've never been so startled in my life.

'This place is nuts!' cackles Rachel as we pile into the moonlit Rasta Shack in English Harbour at 11pm, 'It's completely cuckoo.' Here, rum punch and Dark and Stormys are poured like contraband from great plastic vats beneath the bar, the floor packed with faces shining with excitement.

Friday nights in Antigua always end the same way: waking the next morning in a creased shirt and sandcaked sandals, like Keats' Knight at Arms on the cold hillside, wondering how and why, yet again, you had been so easy to bewitch. But talking and dancing really are the only things to do on Antigua, if you're not passed out in the sun. Talking out in the road, talking in bars, talking in the interminable queue at the bank, where everything takes hours due to endless paperwork, the love of forms and duplicates, and the dogged cross-island rejection of computers, which means you have to apply for everything at least three times before it actually happens.

One of the nicest things about Antigua is its zero tolerance of high culture. One year someone brought in the RSC to do Hamlet and all the great and the good turned up and snored through it. And if you're a resolute reader of prestigious literature, do bring a book else you'll be reading the Antiguan Mills & Boon, Island Matters ('Marlene could not believe it was his deep voice murmuring sweet things and trying to open the door…'), or the local paper, which is known as 'the one-minute silence'. And then back to talking again, the island tugging you down deep into what can feel like an irresistible hotbed of pirates and scoundrels, stories of businessmen who've pitched up and behaved with slippery villainy, cricket matches that triumphed and those that didn't because the grass in the new stadium came up in dehydrated tufts in the first over, and all the usual gossip about husbands and wives doing the dirty under the eternal Caribbean sun.

Even when you're really trying not to, it seems impossible to set off for the day and not run into the guy who once panned for diamonds in the Kalahari. Or meet up with Paulette at her stall selling boiled sweets and get drawn into conversations about how goats look mysteriously like sheep on Antigua (which they do: the spitting image), or happily submit to the retelling of favourite myths about a gangster called Spaghetti and his friend who lived in a shipping container, or hear how someone has just - right this minute - come from playing dominoes with cricket legend Viv Richards up at the golf club. The highest compliment an Antiguan can pay? 'He's a real karakter.'

Everyone living here firmly believes you can never fully leave, and why would you? 'There's only one person who hasn't ever come back,' Rachel claimed once. 'Heather Allstring.' Is this the Heather, I asked, who ran off with Piggy's best friend Dodgy Dave who eventually died of some sort of obscure poisoning? There are moments on Antigua when I feel like I'm in a Michael Dibdin thriller, and others when it is pure Nancy Mitford. 'Oh, so-and-so married a Harris,' I overheard someone say in the post office, as the teller slowly took rubber bands off one thick bundle of stamps and put them round another. 'After the tweed or the paint?' 'After the island.'

On Sunday I joined the congregation at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Swetes Village. Ah, sighs the priest, he hadn't thought of the challenges of priesthood at 20, when he was ordained, but now he does. Everyone laughs with sympathy. Sitting behind a steel band and wearing the glazed look of altar boys the world over, one catches my eye and smiles. The young boys on the island are infinitely sweet, far more approachable than the beautiful teenage girls with their hair pulled into ballerina buns, dressed in bright green school pinafores, undulating disdainfully along pavements.

'We pray that our bodies will not be contaminated with industrial waste,' goes an entirely incongruous bidding prayer, and we all nod solemnly, looking out of the thrown-open church windows towards the immaculate Caribbean sea, over fields of plump-yellow trumpet flowers. On the way home I stop at a junk shop off Fig Tree Drive and find a dried baby crocodile dressed for a Mayfair high tea and holding a paper parasol. At its feet, in a cardboard box, a book of commemorate stamps for Charles and Di's wedding and a defunct electrical hob with a sticker from a youth hostel in Grasmere. This is a mad place, completely cuckoo.

Later that day, in the rainforest beneath Signal Hill, I come across the remains of a red-bricked Victorian dam, its plant-curling ramparts staring Ozymandias-like towards Rendezvous Bay. Like the tumbledown 17th-century sugar mills that dot the island, it is a flash-vision of a whole history of strife, of a distraught and complicated hinterland. Afterwards, when I try to show someone precisely where it is, their map is different to mine and they merely shrug and conclude, with a swirl of the hand, 'Oh, it's all a bit mixed up.' On this other map, I see that Jolly Harbour is called Mosquito Cove and Coco Point is marked as a leper colony. Wadadli versus Antigua.

But that afternoon slips by just like all the others, and don't ask me what I actually did most of the time because I can't seem to remember, apart from there being big nights out and small nights out, and some short days and some long days in between. And on time rolled until the sun slanted low through the bougainvillaea and I realised it was 5pm again, and I was undergoing an important lesson taught by the unending summer warmth and sea winds: that tomorrow might look a little like today or last week and that it's wise to just go with the flow and never fight the passing of time.

Going for a wander, I come across some children fishing in a pond opposite the police station in Freetown and sit with them for a while. Rahim, Naeem and TJ dip their lines into the water and lift out small white fish as easily as though they were picking apples from a tree, out of water dotted with violet orchids. 'I skin them and I dig out their guts,' TJ says, showing me. His face wears the frown all 10-year-olds have. 'I dig out their lungs, see?' In his hand a little knife is lit with the golden rays of a now very low sun shafting around some clouds. Walking on further, my heads lolls with the fragrance from late-blossoming jasmine. A cloud of cabbage whites explode into the sky, as though I'd disturbed a hive.

GOOD-TIME GUIDE TO ANTIGUA

FUN & FUNKY HANGOUTS

CULTURE SHOP STALL, St Mary's

The legendary Elaine Francis sells the best homemade iced passion-fruit juice and guava jam from her Culture Shop stall half way along Fig Tree Drive, cutting up from the south coast through the island's jungly interior, just before the turn-off to the remains of a forgotten Victorian Wallings dam.

MOMZY BURGERS, English Harbour

Delicious late-night roadside BBQ opposite the Rasta Shack, run by Momzy, who uses a head-lollingly complex, home-made hot sauce you just might be able to convince her to sell you. Smuggle a jar through customs, and blow the brains of friends back home.

THE TAILOR'S DAUGHTER, St John's

This is the best place for local products (gooey island-vanilla cookies; bunches of wild lemongrass), unusual books, beads and gold, madras-lined burlap bags, plus plenty of town gossip.

PINK MONGOOSE, St John's

Where ladies buy their hats for church. Purchase all your Ascot needs here.

SMILING HARRY'S BEACH BAR, Half Moon Bay

A café-bar at the mouth of a gorgeous cove sheltering the Planet of the Apes-like remains of a once-grand hotel swept away by a hurricane. There's cold beer, jerk chicken and rice, hedges of orange blossom and deep green water. Clamber beyond the rocks to the secret mud baths.

CAFE NAPOLEON, St John's

Outdoor dining on Redcliffe Quay right in the centre of town. Mango Daiquiris, fried ochre, excellent bull-foot soup. Staff give great advice on what to get up to locally that night.

PAPA ZOUK RUM 'N' FISH, St John's

It burned to the ground last year but has risen from the ashes. Rhythm and reggae, best fresh snapper on the island, served with rum drinks.

THE CHEEKY MARLIN, English Harbour

Launching in November, from the women who started Jacqui O's Antigua. Smash a Dark and Stormy slushie, hang out with the local Liar's Club, try to snag an invite to their Secret Supper Club in the Million Dollar Mermaid Lounge.

C&C WINE BAR, St John's

Coconut shrimp, stunning homemade lasagne on Thursdays, great vibe but also a secluded courtyard for the more romantic. You are highly likely to meet Errol Flynn's son-in-law at the bar.

LIFE ON THE CORNER, English Harbour

Best value pub food in town; beautiful yacht girls and boys dancing to a great playlist.

DENNIS COCKTAIL BEACH BAR & RESTAURANT, St Mary's

Incredible views of the island, terrific shrimp and lobster and the best curried goat on the island: no question.

BUMPKINS, Pigeon Beach

Head here for the creamiest, fruitiest, booziest Piña Coladas around. It's lively, friendly and on a terrific beach.

DAN'S BAR, GRILL AND ICE-CREAM PARLOUR, St John's

Overlooking Body Pond, this has local beer specials through the night and, if you're lucky, an appearance from DJ 'Wooden Foot'.

COOL & CLASSIC HIDEY-HOLES by Issy von Simson

SHEER ROCKS, St Mary's

Right next door to the Cocobay hotel, the daybeds here fill up excitedly for Sunday brunch, out come the magnums of Chateau Minuty and on goes the chilled Ibiza soundtrack. At nighttime it's a little more low key with twinkly fairy lights and tapas-fuelled suppers on the decks just above the crashing waves. www.sheer-rocks.com

CATHERINE'S CAFÉ PLAGE, Pigeon Point

The smartest beach club on the island with its pretty limewashed wood and rattan lights, this is where you come for lobster salad with your feet in the sand. The yachts of Falmouth harbour bob in the background and hammocks swing between the trees.

CECILIA'S HIGH POINT CAFÉ, St George

A classic hangout for European islanders craving duck-leg confit or veal Milanese whipped up by Swedish model owner Cecilia. Moments from the airport, this is a clever spot for a last-blast lunch before the flight home. www.highpointantigua.com

WHERE TO STAY IN ANTIGUA & BARBUDA

CURTAIN BLUFF

Roosting cosily on a rocky peninsula, the 72 rooms and suites of this long-established hotel are absorbed into a tropical grove with meandering pathways and what feels like whole walls of honeysuckle, dotted with tiny crested hummingbirds. To one side, a beach so calm it feels like walking into a just-run bath (overlooked by a couple of quiet restaurants, and an excellent spa) but to the other side, a much more dramatic stretch of sand, the Caribbean ever-pounding against it, a sound as energising as it is lulling. Several hammocks strung along the shore are invariably occupied by lone guests reading or staring out to sea at the occasional super-yacht lolling in the distance, or a passing fisherman in his skiff, somehow negotiating the restless, delphinium-blue waters. www.curtainbluff.com. Doubles from about £605

INN AT ENGLISH HARBOUR

Set on a high wooded headland, this landmark hotel unfurls down the hill towards an elegant beach like a Christmas stocking spilling treats. Just 28 rooms (and small spa) are dotted along the route down, all in colonial-wooden style with huge verandahs. Guests in a lively mood make the walk back up to the top to the candle-lit restaurant, while others call for assistance from the on-site driver. Four-poster beds, wafting muslin, polished copperwood floors and a beach, plus pontoon from which little boats come to pick up and drop off those wanting to visit the historic dockyard over the way. Approaching the hotel by water in the late evenings after a night out on the town is magical: weaving in a small craft between yachts moored and strung with lights, the sound of corks popping, voices, dancing. www.theinnantigua.com. Doubles from about £315

Turquoise Holidays (+44 1494 678400; www.turquoiseholidays.co.uk) offers seven nights at The Inn at English Harbour from £1,659 per person in a Junior Suite, half board, including flights and private transfers. Seven nights at Curtain Bluff cost from £2,495 per person in a Deluxe Room, all inclusive, including flights and private transfers.

JUMBY BAY ISLAND, ANTIGUA

In the highest of high season, Jumby Bay Island still doesn't seem crowded. The go-slow pace, the vast suites and villas with their own stretches of sand, the three swimming pools and the four-and-a-half miles of shoreline make it feel utterly hush-hush. There is a charming children's club in the centre of a pasture dotted with grazing black-headed sheep and bleating lambs, but actually the whole island is a playground: hundreds of acres without a single 'Do not walk on the grass' sign, uninterrupted looping pathways with mini bridges and good hills for bicycle races, a sandbank to walk out to, a pirates' lookout on top of the old sugar mill, and a stream of help-yourself treats at the beach shack: smoothies, fruit sticks, ice-cream sandwiches and frappuccinos.

Don't come expecting the exotic. It is comfortable to the core: no intrepid exploration, no culture shock, no educational day trips or challenging local food. Rooms are huge, with double-height ceilings, four-posters so high off the ground you need to take a running jump to get into them, outdoor bathtubs in fern-fronded courtyards and views through the trees to that flash of sea. There are no room keys. This is a proper barefoot break.

ITC Luxury Travel (+44 1244 355527; itcluxurytravel.co.uk) offers seven nights from £10,879, based on two adults and one child sharing, full board, including flights and transfers.

This feature first appeared in Condé Nast Traveller November 2015

Read about where to go on holiday in November

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