Travel Journal

There is an hour in Gustavia that belongs to nobody in particular. It starts a little after six, when the light comes over the hills and finds the harbor before anyone else does — the water flat as a table, the masts standing perfectly still, the red roofs going the colour of terracotta held up to a lamp. The boutiques are shuttered. The tenders are quiet. For a while, the most expensive small harbor in the Caribbean is just water, roofs and light, and anyone willing to be awake for it has the place largely to themselves.

Regulars walk the quay first, because it is never this calm again. Then coffee, standing up, and the short climb out of town toward Shell Beach — a cove of pale shell sand where the water is swimmable in every season and the only thing between you and it at this hour is the decision to get in.

Then the island opens up. Fourteen beaches within twenty minutes of each other, and at seven in the morning the good ones are empty: Saline over its dune, wild and roadless; Colombier at the end of its footpath, clear enough to count the fish. Both will have company by eleven. Neither will have any now.

What the quiet hour buys you is the rest of the day. By ten the harbor is tenders and shopping bags, lunch decisions start to committee, and the light goes flat and tropical. Come noon the ritual inverts — a long table at a beach club, rosé, a whole fish, feet in the sand — but the island you remember will be the one from before nine, when the masts hadn't moved and the water hadn't been touched.

If you take one thing from this week's destination, take the hour rather than the address. Every coastal town has one, at a slightly different time of day. In St. Barths it comes off the harbor before the island wakes. Find it, stand in it, and do not photograph very much of it.