Consequently, a solitary backpacker seemed an usual sight in Spanish Town, the main settlement on Virgin Gorda. I declined taxi offers in favor of a 15-minute walk to Fischer’s Cove Beach Hotel, where blossoms were tucked in conch shells and towels in my tidy and spacious room ($175 a night). Only when I stepped onto the flamingo-pink patio and looked up did I realize there used to be a second story above, where rebar now pierced the blue sky. The Flax family, owners of the hotel, are gradually rebuilding after the hurricanes.
Tropical foliage has sprung back on much of the mountainous island, home to a series of national parks, including Gorda Peak National Park, with its panoramic trail to 1,370 feet elevation. Staying overnight on Virgin Gorda offers a rare opportunity to visit its best-loved beauty spot — the Baths National Park, protecting a dramatic stretch of shore where massive granite boulders as big as 40 feet in diameter cluster in the shallows — before the cruise ship crowds arrive.
At 7 a.m. when the first blush of light began pinking the clouds, I started down the park path past cactuses and the occasional orchid to Devil’s Bay where a septuagenarian foursome was quietly skinny dipping. I waited out a 10-minute rain shower in a shorefront cave weathered by the action of the waves. The path continued over and between the Baths’ boulders, sometimes with the assistance of steps or rope holds bolted into the rocks, walling off calm, shallow, swim-inviting pools.
I saw evidence of other early birds at the Baths — “M + M 2020” seemed freshly written in the sand — but I never saw them until I completed the roughly mile-long circuit and returned to the entrance at 8:30 a.m. where a line was already forming.
Lobster, yachts and empty beaches
“Tortola is the big city to us,” Dawn Flax, one of the family members who runs Fischer’s Cove, told me when I checked in. “We go there when we need to go to the bank or the lawyer.”
A day later, I ran into her at the ferry terminal on Tortola, returning home after a banking run. It was an unintended stop, but when the Wednesday departure from Virgin Gorda to Anegada was canceled, I was forced to the B.V.I.’s hub to catch Road Town Fast Ferry’s 300-passenger Lady Caroline from Tortola to Anegada ($50 round trip).
Of the six of us scattered among 30 seats on the outside upper deck, five were returning islanders, quizzing two with roll-aboard luggage about their vacation abroad. Children scrambled up and down the stairs for vending machine snacks and teenage couples leaned into each other, sharing earbuds. But the high seas soon quelled conversation, abandoned to the rush of the wind, the rhythmic rise and fall of passing boats under sail and the shifting view of outlying islands.