Still Lazy After All These Years

Grenada has long remained off the tourist grid, a blissful old-school Caribbean outpost with uncrowded shores, a pristine rain forest, and a British-, French-, and African influenced culture all its own. New hotels are poised to bring more visitors—who will discover a slow, easy pace, welcoming locals, and an offbeat vibe that just isn’t like the other islands.

- Tony Perrottet

THIS IS YOUR FIRST TIME in Grenada?” the airport official asked me, with open suspicion. “You have never been before?” I fidgeted nervously as he analysed the stamps in my passport. His stern British demeanour, like his starched colonial-style uniform, seemed plucked from The Bridge on the River Kwai. Was there some problem? Did I need some obscure island visa? But then the officer broke into an ear-to-ear smile. “Well then, sir, you are most welcome! We are very pleased to have you!”

It was my first taste of the preternatural friendliness of Grenadians, which for someone from New York City can be shocking, even downright unnerving. Over the next week, I would be startled by strangers who said hello to me randomly in the street and taxi drivers who wanted to banter about the latest cricket matches. Driving the labyrinthine rural back roads, I would pause to ask directions from the most piratical-looking characters—farmers carrying machetes they actually called “cutlasses”—who would lean into the car with boyish grins to pore over my map, and discuss the best routes and attractions.

There’s a decidedly retro vibe on Grenada, which drifts along in the casual style often referred to as the Old Caribbean—the mythic world of empty beaches and free-flowing rum brilliantly captured in the 1957 Harry Belafonte movie Island in the Sun, which was largely shot on Grenada. The unhurried sense of “island time” is almost an article of faith here. St. George’s, the capital, is less a city than a drowsy seaside village spilling down a mountainside. The languor is even more pronounced on Grenada’s smaller sister islands, Carriacou and Petite Martinique.