ON THE WINGS OF THE CARIBBEAN’S BUTTERFLY
In search of the perfect beach location amid the breathtaking islands of Guadeloupe
When my husband and I came to Guadeloupe, we wanted a place where we planned to sunbathe and relax, and if we were looking for anything more, it was for the best off-the-beaten-path, not-in-the-guidebooks spot that could feel like ours and ours alone.
We figured we wanted to seek out a beach that would be soft, sandy and lined with palm trees, with a vendor selling rum punch nearby. But we found a lot of other things we weren’t expecting — some perfect, some less so — but ultimately came away with something meaningful.
Guadeloupe is made up of two main islands. They’re connected by a land bridge and form the shape of a butterfly: Grand-Terre, the flat island with white, sandy beaches, is the right wing; Basse-Terre, the mountainous, volcanic rainforest island, is the left. The island, originally called Karukera (“Island of Beautiful Waters”) by the Caribs, was renamed by Christopher Columbus.
It came under French rule in the 1600s, when colonists brought slaves to establish sugar plantations. As a present-day overseas department of France (and thus, on the euro), it has its own Afro-Caribbean culture with a hint of Europe — such as the pain au chocolat you’ll find in its bakeries. The flight is not much longer than those to well-trod Caribbean destinations including the Virgin Islands and St. John, but North American tourists were rare during our stay. It might be due to access: There are multiple daily direct flights to and from Paris. You need to know a bit of French to get around, too. You’ll also need to rent a car — and most of the available rentals have a stick shift.
We flew to Pointe-a-Pitre as the sun was setting. We set off for the first stop on our list of the island’s most beautiful spots: the tiny harbour town of Deshaies, at the top of the left wing. We later learned it was one of the most remote parts of the island, connected by road about 50 years ago. We drove there in the dark.
The view the next morning at the beach of Fort Royal, just outside of town, would be a surprise. Picture turquoise water lapping at the sand, bookended by cliffs that dropped into the ocean. Another wind-whipped beach on the other side of the resort was empty of people, and we could see the island of Montserrat in the distance. It was pristine — a textbook-perfect beach. Imagine starting your trip here, knowing that there are somehow even better beaches out there.
That first day, and every day after, we’d roll down the windows and blast Bel’Radio, a local station that plays zouk — a Caribbean music genre — and drive to another beach in search of our perfect spot. First, it was Plage de la Grande Anse, a bustling beach shaded with palm trees serviced by several beachside shack restaurants and food trucks. Then, we came upon Plage de la Perle, which was more quiet and secluded.
At nearly every Guadeloupe beach, you’ll find stands selling bokit, a sandwich that is the island specialty. If some entrepreneurial North American food-truck owner took them on as a concept, they’d have an instant hit. Take a piece of fried dough about the shape and size of a pita and stuff it full of meat or fish, vegetables, a peppery sauce and maybe an egg, and you have a bokit. Morue crudités, or spicy salted cod with vegetables, was our favourite lunch.
For dinner, restaurants offered more elaborate dinners of langouste (spiny lobster) and lambi (conch), and fish topped with sauce chien — literally, “dog sauce” — a blend of onions, garlic, lime and hot peppers that some say gets its name from its spicy bite.
And everywhere we went had locally made rum. We cooled the fire of our sauce chien with the island’s traditional drink, ti punch — short for “petit punch” — a cocktail made by pouring seemingly any amount of white rhum agricole into a cup and muddling in some cane sugar and lime.
The highest point on Basse-Terre is a volcano called La Grande Soufriere, and another day, we drove to see what the island looked like from its peak. The best way to get to La Grande Soufriere is to put “Les Bains Jaunes” into your GPS. instead. Also known as the yellow baths, they are natural hot springs that welcome you to a well-maintained trail, with railings and stone steps in a few particularly tricky parts. It will take you above the tree line, past canyons covered in yellow moss, then above the clouds to the peak of the volcano, which has the sulphurous smell of rotten eggs.
Back at the trail base, other hikers had stripped down to their swimsuits and were contentedly soaking in the bathwater-temperature Bains Jaunes. It had all the makings of a perfect spot — the smell of rainforest, the sound of birds, the comfort of a warm dip exactly at the time we needed it. That is, until we read a nearby sign, in French: “Attention aux amibes” it said, warning of the chance of brain-eating amoebas in the water, and advising guests not to put their heads underwater. We didn’t go in any more than ankle-deep.
There were postcard-perfect, sandy white beaches on Grand-Terre, the other half of the island. So we drove southeast across the butterfly’s wings to a city called Sainte-Anne, leaving behind the solitude of Basse-Terre for an Airbnb on the edge of town, within walking distance of beaches brimming with French tourists and numerous restaurants. It was even easier to bop around from beach to beach there, where destinations are a little closer together. There was a morning spent on the city beach, where there are boats for rent and the Floup tropical fruit ice pops we came to love. There was another day at the Plage de la Caravelle, the peninsula-shaped beach of Club Med, with shallow turquoise water and views of La Soufriere in the distance. And there were the few magical hours we spent at the Plage de Bois Jolan, a beach that had no bokit vendors, no ti punch and — miraculously — no other people.
But as nice as it was to lie on that beach and listen to the waves, it wasn’t a feeling we could take with us. We went to Plage des Raisins Clairs — the beach of light grapes, inscrutably — because we’d heard that it had good food trucks. The beach was striking: On the other side of the road were the blackand-white-tiled mausoleums of a beautiful old Catholic cemetery. A sign described an old cemetery from the 1800s that was unearthed by beach erosion in the 1980s. With my basic-level French, I puzzled out the phrase, “Ne pas collector ni extraire des ossements.” Or, “Do not collect or extract the bones.” Bones? We looked at each other, and then down. A short distance ahead, there was a bone lying in the sand.
We walked farther out onto the beach and saw a barricaded sand dune that contained an active archeological site. Up close, you could see ribs sticking out. Farther down, some tiny bones that may have been fingers. Part of an uncovered pelvis. The undeniable ball-shaped cap to a femur. “Dormez tranquille!” — “Sleep well!” — an older French man joked to me, seeing my reaction, a mix of morbid fascination and alarm. On our last day, we got in the car and headed to another beach — all the way to the edge of the butterfly ’s lower right wing, a spit of land called Pointe des Chateaux (Tip of Castles).
This turned out to be a place where we watched clouds roll in over the nearby island of La Desirade and felt the wind whip through towering rocks. Six-metre waves crashed over the rugged shore and sent salt spray toward us as we climbed stone steps toward a small peak with a cross on top. Where we stood, we could see half the island behind us, and in front of us, what looked like a kind of painting made when the world had not yet fully been explored, depicting an ocean that inspires fear and awe in equal measure.
We thought about how we had seen a lot of beaches that week, but never one that made us feel anything meaningful like this.