Road Town, Tortola

The ferry from St. Thomas takes forty minutes and deposits you at Road Town’s dock with the disorienting speed of a place that shouldn’t be this close to something this different. Road Town is not beautiful. It is useful, functional, occasionally frustrating, and alive in the way that working ports always are — not performing for anyone, not arranged for photographs, just getting on with things. The first thing I smelled stepping off the gangway was diesel and something frying in hot oil, and I followed the second smell until I found the roti shop with no visible sign and a short queue of people who clearly knew exactly where they were going.

The waterfront strip runs along Wickhams Cay, lined with chandleries selling rope and marine hardware, a few duty-free perfume shops that feel stranded here from a different kind of Caribbean, and the fish market where mornings are loud and serious and smelling of brine. I spent an hour watching the catch come in — mahi-mahi, wahoo, some parrotfish I couldn’t name — while the vendors argued price in a rapid creole that moved too fast for me to follow, and ignored me entirely, which suited me fine. The local market up on Main Street is calmer, selling produce, hot sauce in unmarked bottles, and dense little pastries I ate three of before I could identify what was inside them.

What Road Town does exceptionally well is roti. The style here is Trinidadian-influenced — dhal puri roti stuffed with curried chicken or goat, wrapped tight enough to eat standing up on a wall looking at the harbor water. The spot I found behind the ferry terminal, run by a woman who was unhurried and clearly indifferent to the concept of a lunch rush, made something that I’d put against anything I ate in the anchorages all week. The rest of Road Town rewards walking: the J.R. O’Neal Botanic Gardens hold four acres of quiet tropical density at the center of town, and the Old Government House Museum, up the hill, has a particular kind of faded colonial grandeur that’s more poignant than grand. Road Town is where you come before you sail out toward beauty. I found I didn’t mind coming here for its own sake.

When to go: Road Town is a year-round working port and doesn’t have a season the way the anchorages do. Provisioning days run better in the dry months (December through April) when the ferries are more predictable and the swells don’t roughen the St. Thomas crossing. Wednesday and Thursday mornings are the best times to hit the fish market before the week’s best catch disappears.