Afterward, I walked back to the Stonefield resort, where I was staying for the night. The road wound up the side of a steep hill. At every turn, I was rewarded with a fresh perspective on the Pitons, St. Lucia's most famous landmark, a pair of conical hills that seem surreal, implausible, thrust suddenly up out of the ground, right by the water. It was hot, but a breeze came up from over the sea, a breeze redolent of bay spices, salt water, and pirates. Everybody—tourists, locals—who passed me was panting but seemed happy to be out in the open air, under the blue sky. The St. Lucians must be a very fit people.

There was a hammock swaying next to my own private swimming pool. I opened some wine, carried it and a glass to the pool, from where I had a clear line of sight to the sunset. When it was finished, I had another glass in the hammock. Dinner was waiting, and there were large banana flowers hanging from the broad-leaved trees all around, and the soft evening air was filled with birdsong. The world was a clement place.

The festival in downtown Kingstown, the capital of St. Vincent, was sponsored by Hairoun Beer, and it seemed as if the entire island was in attendance. Calypso-influenced hip-hop was playing on giant speakers, and there were massive crates of Hairoun ("Our Island Our Beer") to slake the revelers' thirst. Each island in the eastern Caribbean is marked by its particular brand of beer and its particular cell phone service; all the outdoor ads seem to be about beer and cell phones. (Dominica has Carib beer, and St. Lucia has Piton.) These would seem, if you were to look at the advertising billboards, to be the major local industries. I tarried awhile, enjoying the crush of people getting progressively drunker and the sea breeze cooling the boogying bodies. Families thronged the ice-cream stands, and the young blades promenaded up and down the avenue, looking sideways at the young beauties of the island.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines, as the country is officially named, contains the exclusive island of Mustique, playground of billionaires. Although the rest of the country is nowhere near as rich, it holds the same attraction for tourists as Mustique does: water. Blue water. So in the morning, I went snorkeling in the calm bay by the resort of Petit Byahaut. The water was clear, and fish darted in and out among the rocks—surgeon fish, and something that looked like a swatch of carpet. I was on the lookout for the Portuguese man-of-war that had recently stung one of the managers. It had incapacitated her for two weeks, she told me. But I saw none of the wispy white balloons, and I lazed contentedly for hours, facedown in the water, until the sun set and it got too dark to see.

The next day, I went for a hike on the Vermont Nature Trail, which goes up into the hills of the St. Vincent Parrot Reserve and is a good place to see the St. Vincent parrot, of which only about six hundred are left in the wild. The Vinci parrots, as they're called, sport the colors of the country's flag: blue, yellow, and green. Thirty percent of St. Vincent is covered in forest, and five percent is rain forest. The reserve, which consists of 10,800 acres, has opossums, armadillos, iguanas, and agoutis. "Armadillos?" I asked my guide. A pair was let loose in the 1960s, and now they've spread throughout the island. They root under big trees, threatening the rain forest. There are also more than a hundred kinds of mango trees, originally imported from my birthplace, India.