There was more to it than love at first sight, of course.

To be honest, when I first got out of the cab in downtown Kingstown, here in Saint Vincent, late on Saturday afternoon, I had to keep a firm grip on my positivity. The streets were littered with smashed glass, odd smells, feral-looking dogs that laid their ears back when I looked at them. It was the dirtiest town I'd seen since - I thought far back over the last few years - India, in July 2004.

It was also dead. I was hungry, and every storefront, it seemed, was closed or even boarded up. It was a long way from the tidy, tourist-hungry bustle of Bridgetown, back in Barbados. I was the only visitor in sight, and - something that generally makes me far more nervous than sticking out like a blonde, white-skinned thumb, which I don't really mind that much - also the only woman. On each corner small knots of local men sat drinking and watching me silently. A cab driver called out, "Need a taxi?" When I said no, he followed up with, "Need a bodyguard?" I laughed, taking it as a joke. He didn't laugh with me.

I passed a KFC and a sketchy-looking, empty Chinese place, and debated which one was more likely to make me sick. Finally I turned onto a street where the knots of men had clustered into something that almost resembled a street party. Reggae blasted, food carts had been set up. Forty or fifty people went silent and watched me walk up to one stand and order a twisted paper cone stuffed with Richie's Famous Hot Wings, and a beer.

I sat down on a broken concrete wall to eat my dinner. Wings aren't my favourite food to eat for an audience under the best of circumstances, and the awkward feeling of having walked into a party where I definitely didn't fit in, and possibly wasn't welcome, didn't help. I tried to act like this was the most natural meal in the world, though, swinging my legs on top of the wall, tearing into the wings and taking long swigs of Hairoun.

Finally a man walked up to me and offered a handful of napkins. I laughed, he laughed, and some of the tension of the scene was dissipated. I still made sure to be back in my hotel room before dark, though.

*

Maybe my first impressions of Kingstown help to explain my full-on swoon when I arrive in Bequia the next morning. Not that I've become any less enamoured of it since, but there's more to every place than just hymn-singing and pleasant breezes. When I first arrived, my head was full of the sorts of words and phrases that belong in airline magazines: pristine, unspoiled, serene. "Even the stray dogs here seem uniformly happy with life," I wrote, overwrought, in my journal. (They really do, though. I'm working on a collection of photos called "Dogs of Bequia." Strays aren't very cooperative about posing.)

On my first night in Bequia, I am joined on the hotel patio by a young, big-eyed charmer we'll call Ricky. After the usual unimaginative litany of questions - Do you have a boyfriend? Do you have a husband? So you're single, then? And, Are you partying tonight? (To which the answers are no, no, yes, and an emphatic no) - he catches me off guard with something new. "Do you think black and white people look at life the same way?"

Later, Ricky will tell me he used to work on Saint Vincent, selling pot.("Still have some... Do you like to smoke? Are you partying tonight?") Now he works on Bequia, and doesn't specify in what, exactly. Instead of asking my age, he asks, "Are you over 30?" and laughingly dismisses me as "too young" when I say no. Ricky is 22, and now I'm left wondering if he's traded in drug dealing for a more luxurious life as cougar bait. Then he tells me the old right-of-way over the headlad to Bequia's nicest beach has been closed off by a new hotel that moved in on the cliff, leaving tourists to jump in a water taxi and locals to hoof it the long way around, on the main road.

"Local people been using that road for what, a hundred years," he says. "It's fucked up."

*

The next day I take the road inland and up over the cliff, and down again to Princess Margaret Beach. When I'm about halfway there (it's a very short distance, but with some punishing ups and downs in the tropical sun) I pause and ask an old British woman if I'm headed the right way. She seems surprised that I'm walking to the beach. "Isn't the old right-of-way over the headland closed?" I ask. Yes, she agrees, it is. "But it's a very easy swim out and around the rocks at the point, so long as you don't mind carrying your belongings on your head."

I blink. The woman is easily 60. I make a note to myself: if at all possible, still be willing to swim in strange ocean currents with your beach bag on your head at 60. Heck, I'd be impressed with myself if I tried it now. I carry on walking.

*

That night, after a tasty dinner of curried conch with rice, I'll watch a local addict crash the restaurant where I'm eating, harassing the women inside and interrupting the island-mellow guitarist. The tourists on the patio will scatter and I'll find myself standing alone in the dark with my empty ginger beer bottle in hand, staring the man down like a strange dog. Then the restaurant owner will burst out with - is it? - a whip in hand and chase the man away, with an air of familiarity. This has happened before. "He's all fucked up," he'll say apologetically, for those of us who might never have been crack in action before.

A retired firefighter from Michigan will walk me safely along the dark stretch of beach back to my hotel. None of this will spoil my enjoyment of my time in Bequia, though. It will simply serve as a reminder, next time I'm tempted to describe even the most relaxed of tropical islands as an "unspoiled" paradise, that there is no such thing.