Dreaming of the tropics

There are no cars, no roads, no villages, and no rush. A horseshoe-shaped island, Matangi is ringed by several beautiful white sand beaches, and wraps around a lagoon of pure aquamarine.

Description of the Matangi Island Resort in the remote Fiji Islands of the South Pacific.

When I was a kid in New Orleans, I dreamed of faraway places, exotic locales that were light years apart from the life I lived at the time. I think we all do this to one degree or another. It’s escapism. The longing for adventure and new places.

New Orleans is like the tropics in summer. Surrounded on all sides by lakes, marshes, swamps and other bodies of water too numerous to mention, the hot July air smacks you good and hard each time you step outside the mercifully air-conditioned rooms we hated to leave during those relentlessly hot months.

So, I’d be in my cool room with my stamp collection, poring over miniaturre scenes of islands in the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean: St. Lucia, Dominica, St. Kitts, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Fiji, Samoa, the Solomon Islands. The list goes on. I was entranced. I dreamed of the white-sand beaches and palm trees, crystal-clear blue water, and the tropical rainforests and waterfalls I saw in books and magazines.

Now each month or so, I can put aside the heavy weight of the world’s awful problems for a little while and flip thorugh the pages of Islands Magazine or Caribbean Travel and Leisure. Rather silly escapism, I know. And will I ever get to any of these islands? I never could in years past because of my poverty, but I have saved up a bit of money and could do it. Who knows?

When I was 17, I wrote an article on Grenada (the Spice Island of the Caribbean), talking about the island and it’s natural beauty, and it was published in a nationally distributed philatelic magazine (for stamp collectors). I learned a lot about those places from collecting the stamps of the islands, and from reading books and magzines including the National Geographic Special Publication, Isles of the Caribbees, which I recently discovered in the used books place I frequent. It was published in 1966. I’ve just been thumbing through a copy of it, reliving some memories of that long ago time of wanderlust. The article on Grenada was my first published piece of writing and I was beside myself. What a flush of excitement to see your byline in print for the first time. I went on to have stamp-related articles published on Gibraltar, St. Lucia, and the Cayman islands.

Yes, my neighborhood and immediate surroundings are where I find the richest treasures of Nature, as you who have read my diary know, but every now and then, it’s fun to armchair travel to exotic tropical islands and imagine sitting on a deck overlooking mountains and beaches with a nice cool drink in one hand and a good book in another. Ah!!!

Matangi Island

Dominica

Seychelles

Mauritius

St. Lucia

Grenada