There is, however, nothing to mar the perfection of Anse de Grande Saline, the neighboring beach. The near-white sand is the kind you sink into like deep-pile carpet, there is a picturesque offshore islet, and the beach is backed by vegetated dunes, devoid of buildings. The entrance to the beach is via a steep-sided path cut through the dunes, and as I emerged from it, I found myself uttering a loud and involuntary "Wow!"
Thirty years ago, the glamorous name-dropping side of Caribbean tourism centered on the large and important islands of Jamaica and Trinidad and To bago, and not, as now, on such insignificant outposts as St. Barts, Anguilla, Mustique, and Barbuda.
In the 1960s, Tobago enjoyed a brief moment of high fashion when the legendary photographer Norman Parkinson built a house on the island and invited a flow of glitterati to his favorite beach, Englishman's Bay. John Lennon and Ringo Starr paid a visit, as did Princess Margaret and Tony Snowdon.
The glitterati, sadly, are no longer to be seen at Englishman's Bay, although it remains one of the Caribbean's loveliest beaches. It reminds me a little of Cape Tribulation in Queensland, Australia, where a similar thick canopy of rain forest makes an unbroken sweep from a high mountain ridge to the very edge of a perfect golden beach. For those who prefer their beaches to be of the more conventional white-sand-and-palm-tree variety, Tobago has an excellent example, Pigeon Point; but for me, the rain forest is the best place to be.
Jamaica, too, has never felt quite the same since its resident celebrities—Noël Coward, Errol Flynn, and Ian Fleming—departed for the Great Beach in the Sky, but their elegant heyday still has echoes. At Jamaica Inn, built in the mid fifties, guests continue the tradition of dressing for dinner, and its eminently civilized beach has silver-tray waiter service and a change of your towel after every swim.
Jamaica's other celebrity beach of the era, Frenchman's Cove, has been in a long period of decline but is about to attempt a comeback. Of all the beaches I saw in Jamaica—and I spent five days combing the coastline, from Negril in the west (now sadly overbuilt) to Boston Bay in the east (still suffering from hurricane damage)—Frenchman's Cove is the one that produced the biggest "Wow!" It is quite simply the prettiest beach I have ever seen.
Frenchman's Cove's hotel once had the sort of clientele that even the K Club would have killed for: Marlon Brando, Cecil B. deMille, Queen Elizabeth II, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Charlton Heston. The vogue, however, didn't last. The hotel fell into decline, and after hurricane damage in 1988, it didn't even reopen.
There is, however, no sign of damage to the wonderful beach. It is approached through landscaped parkland planted with tall specimen trees and narrowing to a richly vegetated, steep-sided cove. The cove contains a beach of the finest cappuccino-colored sand—not very long, but exceptionally deep and ringed by shady, broad-leafed trees. But the supreme touch comes from a river that meanders slowly through the parkland, then, gathering pace, cuts between sand and rock on the left-hand side of the cove. At the exact point where the bottle green river meets the turquoise-blue sea, a deep pool has formed, overhung by a Tarzan-like swing—an irresistible feature for every child, and every adult.
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