CARIBBEAN

It’s a brilliant morning, the sea lapping below, the hillside still twittering with the calls of crickets and tree frogs, only a tent between me and the sky. I have three days ahead of me on a very nice, very slow, very small island. The only cloud on my horizon is the knowledge that once I stand up, it’s 137 steps to the nearest toilet and shower. And the shower will be cold.

But that’s what a traveler gets for trying to pinch pennies and save the Earth when the dirt in question is in high demand. The bigger picture here is that St. John is a fine patch of greenery and volcanic rock, taking up a mere 20 square miles of the bright blue Caribbean Sea.

The island, which sits about 60 miles east of Puerto Rico, has been a U.S. territory since 1917, when we bought it--along with its larger and noisier neighbors, St. Thomas and St. Croix--from Denmark. It is a lazy place largely free of the jewelry-peddling, T-shirt-hawking hucksterism that pervades St. Thomas and many Caribbean islands on the cruise ship circuit. There’s no Senor Frog’s here, no Hard Rock Cafe, no McDonald’s.

Not that the island hangs in suspended animation. St. John has grown and bestirred itself a bit since I first visited more than 20 years ago, and--judging from the notices on the community bulletin board at the Starfish Market--controversy simmers over efforts to develop it further. But St. John has built-in protections that most islands don’t.

There’s no airport. The only way onto St. John is by boat, usually the ferry from St. Thomas. About two-thirds of the island is protected as Virgin Islands National Park, leaving the land dominated by tropical forest and beaches of fine white sand. Greenery creeps over the sugar plantation ruins, while iguanas and mongooses creep across the few roads. In the placid bays, you find warm water, coral reefs, excellent snorkeling and urchins the size of basketballs.

In 2000, the park service counted a little more than 1 million visitors, many of them day-trippers from St. Thomas, to Virgin Islands National Park. The island’s year-round population has grown to about 4,000, along with a few thousand more who spend their winters here in vacation homes perched implausibly on the slopes.

Though more cruise ships have been bringing passengers to St. John in recent years, it still gets a mere trickle compared with the torrents of shore excursionists who regularly wash over St. Thomas (which handled more than 1.7 million cruise passengers last year).

But what about those 137 steps to the bathroom?

This was my introduction to Maho Bay Camps, one of the most widely praised eco-lodgings in the world. Eco-tourism pioneer Stanley Selengut has built and expanded Maho Bay Camps gradually over more than two decades, adding three other eco-lodgings on the island. Each is a showcase for recycled building materials (plastic framing instead of lumber; rugs that once were rubber tires) and alternative energy, including solar and wind power.

Arriving just before 11 p.m. and picking my way along the campground’s raised wooden walkways with a flashlight, I didn’t at first take in the full sweep of the place or the implications of my tent-cottage’s location. In the morning, reality snapped into focus. But instead of seeking reassignment to another tent, I decided that the long walk to the bathroom would build character.

Maho Bay includes more than 100 tent-cottages tucked in amid the hillside greenery, barely noticeable from a distance. The common area includes a dining pavilion (breakfast and dinner), a front desk, a “cyber-hut” (holding two computers with Internet access) and an activities desk where arrangements can be made for sailing, snorkeling, hiking and other adventures.

The screened-in tent-cottages are roomy, with firm beds, and each is outfitted with dishes and a propane stove. But there’s no running water, something that plenty of travelers might expect at rates of up to $115 per night. (Selengut’s other island lodgings do include private bathsrooms.) To cook (or just brush your teeth) in your tent, you fetch your potable water from a pair of central spigots and store it in a jug. To wash dishes, you slosh biodegradable cleanser in a pan. This, too, might build character--but I couldn’t say for sure. I elected to eat all my meals out.

Downtown Cruz Bay, the island’s commercial center, is home to about a dozen restaurants, along with a growing number of shops and lodgings. But the total number of hotel rooms, rental homes and condos is still down in the neighborhood of 1,000. During my visit early this month, it was easy enough to be seduced by all that remains small and slow about the place.

South of the dock at Cruz Bay, you find a smattering of waterfront restaurants and shops. For lunch I had a good salad of baby greens, pear, Gorgonzola and walnuts at Panini Beach Trattoria and, later, a good crab cake appetizer at nearby Stone Terrace, which has won polls as the locals’ favorite gourmet restaurant on the island.

Ahead from the dock, you see the small public plaza, with its benches and a dramatic sculpture of a heroic islander blowing into a conch shells.

The park service’s visitor center stands a few blocks north of the dock past another smattering of shops and restaurants, including the handsome, upscale Mongoose Junction mall. My favorite meal while I was on the island--wild mushroom ravioli with apple sausage--was here, at the Paradiso restaurant.

Just a few roads trace their way toward the island’s other corners. Speed limits are 10 mph in the city and 20 in the country, for reasons that quickly become clear.

Those roads climb and corkscrew at angles that would make a Caltrans engineer’s heart fibrillate. The two most astonishing climbing hairpin turns are just beyond Cruz Bay. Moreover, for some reason everybody here drives on the left, even though Danes drive on the right and the cars have steering wheels on the left, American style. This means drivers are positioned next to the curb instead of in the middle of the road, as they would be in the U.S. or Britain. Taxis are popular.

Dozens of prime beaches encircle the island, and choosing among them is mostly a matter of taste. Trunk Bay, where the park service has placed 15 underwater explanatory plaques along a sort of snorkeler’s trail, is the most popular beach.

Other big draws include Coral Bay, an inlet village on the opposite end of the island from Cruz Bay; Annaberg Plantation, a ruin that dates to 1733; and the Reef Bay Trail, a 2.6-mile, two-hour downhill scramble to the sea from a trail head about 1,100 feet above sea level.

On Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays during the winter high season (dropping to Mondays and Thursdays in spring and summer), park rangers lead hikers on the route, a tour that is frequently booked up days in advance.

I reserved my spot by phone from Los Angeles and joined two dozen fellow hikers at 10 one sunny morning. From the trail head on Centerline Road, ranger Don Near showered us with history and botany facts as he led us down an uneven trail that was a main thoroughfare for people and donkeys in the years before the automobile.

Through much of the 18th and all of the 19th century, the Danes ran as many as 109 sugar and cotton plantations at one time on St. John, the crops terraced down the steep hillsides to the sea.

The plantations depended heavily on slave labor, mostly workers brought by the Danes from West Africa. After slavery was abolished in 1848, the sugar and cotton industries dwindled, as did the population.

Halfway down the Reef Bay Trail, we veered off the main path to inspect a fascinating set of pictographs, which researchers attribute to the Taino Indians who found their way to the island from South America more than a millennium before Columbus found his way to the Virgin Islands. (From the Taino and their successors the Caribs, Near noted, the English language has appropriated several words, including “canoe,” “barbecue” and “hurricane.”)

At the bottom of the trail there’s a plantation ruin to see (unless you’re a sugar scholar, there’s no need to explore this spot or the Annaberg site) and a boat to meet. The boat ride takes hikers around the island’s dramatic Maria Bluff, which is studded with fancy homes on precarious perches, to the park service headquarters in Cruz Bay. (The hike is free, but the boat ride costs $15.)

By the time Laurance Rockefeller came along in the 1950s, there hadn’t been a plantation open on St. John in 40 years, and the population had dipped beneath 1,000. But what he did changed the island forever.

Rockefeller and partners bought most of St. John, then donated the property to the U.S. government as a national park. But there was more to the deal: Rockefeller set aside 170 acres in the middle of the park for Caneel Bay, a luxury resort with seven private beaches. Thus the park service gained some prime territory, and Rockefeller (then in the early stages of building a luxury hotel chain that has since broken up) gained an unmatchable hotel location.

In all, the national park amounts to 9,500 acres of land, including about 20 miles of trails, and 5,650 acres of the surrounding sea, which were added in 1962. Apart from iguanas and mongooses, island fauna include bats (the only mammals native to St. John), several hundred wild donkeys (often seen dawdling by the roadside) and the ever-present bananaquit, a fist-size yellow bird that feeds on the nectar of flowers. (If a bananaquit spies your French toast on a table in the dining pavilion at Maho Bay, it may well swoop in to share your syrup.)

These days the upscale Rosewood hotel management group runs the 166-room Caneel Bay resort. On the afternoon I turned up, one staffer was busy chiseling an ice maiden to decorate the Sunday brunch buffet table. Others tended to the resort’s three restaurants (one of them open only to hotel guests) and the manicured grounds, which include 11 tennis courts and so much grass that I thought for a moment there was a golf course on site. (In fact, there’s no golf on the island, which is chronically short of fresh water.)

High-season winter rates at Caneel Bay begin at $400 a night, and management faces a delicate task in luring new and younger guests while reassuring old ones. For instance, after decades of relying on trade winds and ceiling fans, the hotel only last year installed air-conditioning in Caneel Bay’s guest rooms. (Many old-timers, said rooms manager James Dalmida, decline to use it.)

Caneel Bay is not the largest hotel on the island. That distinction belongs to Westin, a 282-room resort just outside Cruz Bay that dates to the ‘80s. The hotel’s guest rooms are arrayed around a huge swimming pool, and on the day I visited, the deck was full of happy families and thumping Caribbean pop music. The garish lobby, however, reminded me of an LAX hallway under brighter lights, the rooms seemed spacious but charmless, and the Westin’s winter rates were even higher than Caneel Bay’s.

There were two less pricey lodgings that I liked the looks of more. One was Gallows Point Resort, a 60-unit vacation condo complex at water’s edge, about five minutes’ walk from downtown Cruz Bay. The other was Estate Lindholm, which opened in February 1999 with 11 rooms, pool and lush landscaping on a roadside hilltop spot just outside town.

(In February, when travelers from the northeastern U.S. arrive in large numbers to escape winter, neither of those lodgings rents rooms for less than $270 nightly. But rates on St. John decline in spring. From April through June 15, Estate Lindholm’s rooms begin at $170. In April, Gallows Point’s rates fall as low as $205.)

If I were a little more fluent in mathematics, I’d come up with a formula for evaluating lodging rates against bathroom distances. As it is, the next time I head for St. John, I’ll either spend more time negotiating the location of my tent or spend more money on a hotel. And then I’ll slide on my snorkel and forget about it all.

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GUIDEBOOK

Island Basics of Laid-Back St. John

Getting there: To get to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, you must fly to the neighboring island of St. Thomas. From LAX to St. Thomas, there are connecting flights only on American, Delta and US Airways. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $709.

From the St. Thomas airport, take a 20-minute taxi ride (about $9) to the dock at Charlotte Amalie, then a 40-minute ferry ($7 a person) to St. John’s Cruz Bay. Or take a 40-minute taxi ride ($11) to the St. Thomas town of Red Hook and a 15-minute ferry ($3) to St. John.

Once on the island, you can rent a car (I paid $60 a day) or take taxis, which resemble open-air shuttle buses. For a couple heading out from Cruz Bay to virtually any roadside island destination, one-way fares max out at about $6.25 per person.

Where to sleep: The lowest nightly rates are typically offered in the summer, which is low season; higher rates are for high-demand winter months. (Prices exclude an 8% hotel tax.)

Maho Bay Camps, mailing address 17A E. 73rd St., New York, NY 10021; telephone (800) 392-9004 or (212) 472-9453 or (340) 776-6240 (on St. John), fax (340) 776-6504, Internet https://www.mahobay.com. There are 114 tent-cottages on 256-square-foot platforms (no private bathrooms), plus a beach, restaurant and water sports rentals. Rates: $75 to $115, double. The same company also runs three other lodgings that range from tent-cottages to studio apartments: Harmony Studios (just up the hill from the Maho Bay complex; 12 units with private baths, $110 to $200); Estate Concordia Studios (nine units with private baths, pool, $95 to $190); and Concordia Eco-Tents (11 units with private toilets and showers, $75 to $130). The Concordia lodgings stand on a remote hillside at the island’s east end.

Caneel Bay, P.O. Box 720, St. John, USVI 00831; tel. (888) 767-3966 or (340) 776-6111, fax (340) 693-8280, https://www.rosewoodhotels.com. A luxury resort with 166 rooms, three restaurants, seven private beaches and one small pool. Rates: $275 to $1,000.

Gallows Point Resort, P.O. Box 58, St. John, USVI 00831; tel. (800) 323-7229 or (340) 776-6434, fax (340) 776-6520, https://www.gallowspointresort.com. On the water’s edge near downtown Cruz Bay, it has 60 units with kitchens, a restaurant and a snack shop. Rates: $145 to $410.

Cinnamon Bay Campground, P.O. Box 720, Cruz Bay, St. John, USVI 00831; tel. (800) 539-9998 or (340) 776-6330, fax (340) 776-6458, https://www.cinnamonbay.com. Tent sites to cottages. Restaurant and a small grocery store. Rates: tents $58 to $80, cottages $90 to $135.

Where to eat: Paradiso, Mongoose Junction, Cruz Bay, local tel. 693-8899. Contemporary American cuisine, dinner only; open daily. Main dishes $19-$30. Stone Terrace, on Cruz Bay’s waterfront, tel. 693-9370, https://www.stoneterrace.com. International fare, dinner only; closed Mondays. Main dishes $18-$31. Panini Beach Trattoria, Wharfside Village, Cruz Bay; tel. 693-9119. Italian. Main dishes $16-$27. Dinner daily.

When to go: Temperatures are close to 80 degrees year-round. Summer is the rainy season, fall is hurricane season.

For more information: U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Tourism, 3460 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 412, Los Angeles, CA 90010; tel. (800) 372-8784 or (213) 739-0138, fax (213) 739-2005, https://www.usvi.net or https://www.stjohnisland.com. Virgin Islands National Park visitor center, tel. (340) 776-6201.