If the echoes did not strike us immediately at our first home away from home, the Sunswept Beach Hotel, right on the water in Holetown, I blame the two-inch-long cockroach on the landing ("the famous, and rare, Bajan brown beetle," I reassure my frozen daughters) and those surfboards lining the corridor in their special surfboard body bags—you don't see those in Piccadilly. But we awaken to familiar sounds. For on the small and rather intimate patio the first morning, we meet our neighbors. And they're all Brits: Paul and Nicky from Birmingham in room 3, Malcom and Viv from Kingston-upon-Thames in room 4, John and Jann from Liverpool in room 5.

These neighbors certainly do embody British virtues of an earlier time: They're helpful and tolerant (we are the only ones with children, and there is a pool). And they enjoy the good old vices—they tan hard, they smoke a lot, they sip freely. One couple has been returning for fifteen years, another for a mere nine, to the same friendly but unremarkable hotel, even to the same room at the same friendly but unremarkable hotel, some for as long as six weeks at a time. According to the Caribbean Tourism Organization, Barbados is the most revisited island in the West Indies: forty percent of those who come shall return. But I doubt even many of the diehards stay as long as our friends in rooms 3, 4, and 5: not only recidivists but, as we affectionately come to think of them, indentured tourists.

One test of the true character of any nation is the manners of its motorists. Here again Barbadians, or Bajans, score high. They are proactively helpful, driving ten miles out of their way to guide us or pulling over when they spy us frowning at a map. I learn, in a pinch, to rely on the bus stop signs, which all say either to city (that is, Bridgetown) or out of city.

Lost again, presently in the parish of St. Michael, we wish we'd taken one of those jolly yellow buses with their booming reggae music. But this time there are not even bus stops. The children are whining, night is closing in.

Desperate, I explain that in fact we are not lost. We are merely touring the birthplace of Rihanna, the Bajan pop star who, I happened to read, hails from the parish of St. Michael. It begins to rain. "See?" I say, "that song about the umbrella? This was her inspiration." "Shut up and drive," my twelve-year-old replies, which takes me aback until I learn that she is quoting from a different Rihanna hit. And then, finally, we see the most beautiful sign: to city.

But it's good to get lost. Eventually you find a coastal road (unless, like your reporter, you are doomed to go around and around the cane fields, burning your own carbon-monoxide crop circle). There is certainly no easier way to meet people. And everyone we meet offers us food—okra, gumbo, rice with pigeon peas; grapefruit (or Citrus paradisi, a cross between an orange and a shaddock that originated on Barbados), the sublime "golden apple," which in fact tastes like a hybrid of mango, pear, and kiwi. Later on, thanks to our lovely Guyanese landlady at Glenville Cottages, we're privileged to taste the homemade sweet-tart and slimy delight that is soursop stewed in evaporated milk, along with some sticky-delicious casareep—a molasses-like reduction from cassava. Eating is a pretty business on Barbados, even among the beasts: I won't forget the baby green monkeys, hunched like little old ladies and daintily scooping out banana from neatly cut bunches.