A Caribbean holiday marks an inevitable change; that mid-life slide towards all that we once raged against. It represents a rite of passage, the transition from the age of despising those who choose resort life to the age of aspiring to be beside them on the safely groomed sands of homogenised international hotel standards. And as we lose our rougher edges, and incline towards spa-and-bar life, so too does the Caribbean. The era of the wild islands of Voodoo and the Montego Bay mafia has been replaced by the Club Med Chanel-dental-floss-up-the-bum culture.  Like us the edges of the Caribbean have got softer, rounder, and fuller in every way.

Except on Dominica where the wild child is still on the loose.

The Ras Tafari was long and carved, lion’s mane, Zion man, he waded out into the sea to his old fishing boat with it’s outsized outboard, a thing like a Harley in a skate board park. His dog waited on the shoreline, part Doberman, part wolf. The man hopped up into his boat and looked around for his audience. Then he called his dog and flexed as he pulled it up into the boat, all shiny lupine and canine. I made the mistake of taking a picture, thinking that the show was a public one and that the showman would not mind. No. He screamed at me with all the restless anger of the Ras Tafari before hooning off into the bay, a wild boy doing wheelies in his water park. It did not feel so far away from the grey parking lots of Kilburn where angry boys smash their bikes into the walls, over and over, restlessness under dank skies, restlessness under blue ones too.

This makes Dominica still real. Plus the fact that there are no beaches, or, to be more precise, no beaches in the long white strip sense that make such sense to Club Med and the charter flights. Beyond the boys who hoon around the yet to be badly polluted waters there are hiker heaven rain forests, volcanic craters, waterfalls and birdlife high among the hills, and possibly the best diving to be had in the Caribbean, and certainly the best in the Windward Isles.

The capital of the island is Roseau, a town of bright painted shutters and Creole cafés where the dreadlocks swing among the sick-sweet smell of Marijuana, and fine large ladies in Sunday best hats chatter over their coconut cod and provisions, laughing like avalanches. Later in the day people sit along the sea wall to watch the green flash, that tiny moment of colour as the top of the sun falls down behind the horizon. Then the reggae cranks up and the best rum punch on the island is to be found on the balcony of Callaloo  while street life just passes by down below. The ladies in hats go back to their stools outside the supermarkets to sell their piles of ginger, cinnamon, and small green mangoes, and children sit on stoops and dare each other to go and sit on the huge black bonnet of the Big Rasta’s big black jeep.

There are no big fancy hotels on the island, yet. The tourists are predominantly divers and those now labelled eco-travellers, in short people who still haven’t reached the age of resorting to being among the resortees. A couple of times a week the streets of Roseau spill over with pale bemused-looking resort wannabes as a cruise ship docks for a few hours and the cafés and shops go into overdrive, especially the cuckoo tax free stores where serried ranks of flashy watches and body-part-shaped bottles of scent incongruously stare out at the big ladies in hats beside their cinnamon and ginger piles. Then a siren wails from the vast floating mobile home, the cruisers scuttle away and the streets slow down. Sitting on the balcony at The Cornerhouse with a coffee and chunk of banana cake just watching the difference between the crab-scurry of the cruisers and the big-hipped sway of the ladies in hats is one of those wonderful Caribbean spectator sport. And The Cornerhouse has a night-time sister a few miles down the coast called The Green Flash Grill, both places having possibly the best food on the island beyond Callaloo, spiced up by the mainland-American escapee owners. Note to self and readers, never kid yourself that you are going to the Caribbean for the food, hence finding places that are halfway good seems like manna from Jamie Oliver, as against chewing your way through provisions, the high end art of bland.

I was screamed at by the Ras Tafari in his hoon boat on the balcony of our room at The Anchorage Hotel and Dive Centre, just outside Roseau in Castle Comfort. I circle back here for two reasons, firstly to just have a little reality check on the warriors of Zion. Yes, this import from Jamaica is a vivid cultural fusion of Marcus Garvey’s early 20th century ‘back-to-Africa’ philosophy and the wholly understandable anger of a subjugated class of people, but the Rastas have smudged the edges of their dreadlocked glamour by using the public wariness of this religious group to sidestep into the drug trade, and varying degrees of petty and not so petty crime. The man they are named after, Ras Tafari Makonnen, later crowned as The Emperor Haile Selassie, King of Ethiopia, politely begged them not to ‘return’ to Ethiopia when he visited Jamaica in 1966. This is a magnetic sub-culture has disenfranchised itself from the mainstream and, on a island of the size and pacing of Dominica, their barking at establishment and order, their racial resentment, have an out-of-control quality that takes you right back to the boys of bikes and skateboards in the grey Kilburn car park.

The second loop back is to the image of this island as being a place without beaches, a fact that can turn away even the hardest core eco-hiker. Each morning at The Anchorage I just crawled out of bed, down the steps, along the jetty, keeping a sidelong check that hoon boy wasn’t up yet, and into the blue blue sea I dived.

Factfile

Getting there: From US American Airlines flies to Barbados and Antigua and then connect on to Dominica with their partners American Eagle and American Connection (www.AA.com  tel: in US 1-800 882 8880) and there are  also connecting flights to Dominica with LIAT (www.liatairline.com) or Caribbean Star (www.flycaribbeanstar.com). From UK Virgin flies to Barbados, St Lucia and Antigua all of which connect on to Dominica (www.virgin-atlantic.com tel: 08705 747 747 as does British Airways (www.britishairways.com tel: 0870 8509850) and BWIA (www.bwee.com tel: 0870 499 2942) probably offers the most competitive fares from London.

Accommodation :The Anchorage Hotel and Dive Centre ,  Castle Comfort (www.anchoragedive@cwdom.dm tel: + 767 448 2639

Eating

Callaloo : named after a high point of Caribbean fare – Callaloo soup made from the tender inner leaves of the taro plant, 66 King George V Street, Roseau tel: (767) 448 3386

Cornerhouse Café : at the bottom corner of King George V Street (www.avirtualdominica.com/cornerhouse tel: (767) 449 9000 and The Green Flash Grill on the road half way between Castle Comfort and Loubiere, only open Wednesday to Sunday evenings.

For more general information on Dominica have a look at the official website www.dominica.dm

Originally published in the Financial Times, March 27, 2004