Rendezvous Bay

We came by boat, rounding the northern headland at low tide when the water ran so clear you could count the rocks fifteen feet below. The bay announced itself as the boat slowed — a curve of bright white sand between two forested points, the kind of beach that looks composed, like someone arranged it specifically for the moment of arrival. On most Caribbean islands this would be full. Here there was one other boat anchored offshore and nobody on the sand at all. I sat in the bow and felt something I can only describe as luck.

Rendezvous Bay is the only white sand beach on Montserrat. The island’s other beaches are dark — black and grey volcanic sand, beautiful in their own way, brooding and particular, but unmistakably volcanic. Rendezvous Bay exists because of a different geological circumstance in the extreme north of the island, a deposit of coral-derived sand that washed into a protected cove over centuries and stayed. It is accessible by water or by a hiking trail through the forest that descends from the north — perhaps forty-five minutes of walking through mahogany and tree ferns with no signage to confirm you are going the right way. The trail is genuinely unsigned, and the people who know it either live here or came with someone who did.

The swimming is extraordinary. The water is warm and unhurried, the visibility the kind that makes you stop swimming for a moment just to look — the sand bright below you, small parrotfish and sergeant-majors going about their business, a single barracuda hovering in the middle distance with the specific nonchalance of a creature that has nothing to worry about. There is a reef on the south side of the bay where the coral, though not unmarked by warm-water events, still holds colour and life — brain corals, sea fans, the occasional turtle that comes up for air and regards you with the faintly bored expression that turtles seem to reserve for snorkellers.

We ate lunch on the beach — bread and cheese from the shop in Little Bay and fruit I had bought from a roadside stall that morning, mango so ripe it had to be eaten forward-bent to avoid your shirt. The salt on your hands from the swim makes everything taste better. The boat captain lit a cigarette and waded to his ankles and looked at the water and said nothing, which is the appropriate response to Rendezvous Bay in the middle of a Tuesday.

There are no facilities at Rendezvous Bay. No bar, no chairs, no vendor. You bring everything you need and take everything back with you, which means the sand stays exactly as you found it. This is not an oversight. It is the condition of the place and the reason it remains the way it is. An island with four thousand residents and no cruise ships does not have to fight very hard to keep a beach unspoilt — the numbers simply do not demand it. Rendezvous Bay is what happens when the pressure that ruins beaches is never applied.

When to go: Rendezvous Bay is at its calmest from December through April, when the sea is gentler and the trail drier underfoot. By boat from Little Bay takes twenty minutes; on foot, allow an hour and go with someone familiar with the trail. Bring food, water, and snorkelling gear — there is nothing to hire and nothing to buy once you are there.