Cane Garden Bay
"The Callwood distillery has been making rum since 1750 and I cannot argue with a single decision they've made."
Cane Garden Bay comes over the hill from Road Town as a reward. The road climbs steeply from the capital through the interior of Tortola, through banana groves and hillside gardens where goats pick their way along stone walls, and then crests the ridge and drops you down a winding descent to a beach that opens below like the answer to a question you didn’t know you were asking. The bay is a long crescent, bordered by palms, with the hills rising green and steep directly behind and the water going from brown sand to turquoise to deep blue in the space of twenty meters. I parked the jeep, took my shoes off, and spent about an hour not deciding whether to swim.
The Callwood Rum Distillery sits at the northern end of the bay in a low stone building that has been there since the eighteenth century. I don’t use the word “ancient” lightly when describing Caribbean rum operations, but Callwood has been distilling on this same site since roughly 1750 using a copper pot still that has been repaired so many times it is more repair than original equipment. The rum they make is sold in a storefront that is barely larger than a walk-in closet. You taste from plastic cups. Nobody is trying to impress you. The rum tastes of sugarcane and oak and something I’d describe as patience. I bought two bottles and didn’t regret the luggage weight.
By late afternoon the beach bars along the bay front warm up. Quito’s — a bar and restaurant run by local musician Quito Rymer — turns from a lunch spot into a live music venue as the light drops, the sound carrying out across the water to the boats anchored in the bay. Myett’s, next door, has a beach patio where the grilled fish comes out exactly right and the rum punch is served in a size that requires a decision about your evening before you commit. Cane Garden Bay doesn’t try to be pristine — it’s a lived-in, communal beach with fishing boats pulled up between the tourist dinghies and local kids jumping from the dock — and that’s precisely why I liked it more than anywhere more polished I visited.
When to go: December through April for the best weather. The bay can get a northerly swell in winter that makes anchoring rough for a day or two; check the forecast before committing to an anchorage if you’re on a boat. The music at Quito’s typically starts on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings and runs late.