Nov 3rd – Shell Beach St Barts

St Barts is one of the most expensive places in the Caribbean, so there's not many activities here that don't cost you any money here – the beach is one of them. So, today I coaxed Tracy onto the nearest beach to Gustavia – Shell Beach, just a 15 minute walk or so from where the tender drops you off.

As you might be able to tell from its name, Shell Beach is made up of little shells rather than the powdery white sand of St Barts' other, more famous beaches, but as the taxi drivers were quoting €30 for the 5-10 minute trip over the hill to St Jean beach, we decided that shells were much better than sand.

Given Tracy's tanophobia, we were grateful that it had clouded over, but we still covered ourselves in high factor suncream and UV swimwear that left just a 6 inch gap of pale leg uncovered, before we ventured into the milky turquoise waters. It was lovely just to float in the warm sea and be buffeted by the gentle waves.

Whether you're a billionaire or a pauper in exclusive St Barts, the sea's the same for everyone.

November 2nd – Sugar-Coated St Kitts

Today I took a fascinating tour "Off the Beaten Path", to explore the legacy of the sugar trade on St Kitts – a trade that's left an indelible imprint on the architecture, the economy, and the social and ethnic make up of the island.

Back in the 17th and 18th century, the sugar plantations of St Kitts were generating enormous wealth for their owners, making the island one of the most important British colonial possessions. As Europe rapidly developed a sweet tooth, Caribbean sugar fetched huge prices – according to our guide, at its peak, a ton of sugar would have fetched over $1,000 (an enormous sum back then), while on today's market it doesn't fetch more than $150.

Sadly for St Kitts, this worldwide collapse in sugar prices has meant that its sugar cane industry has been steadily priced out of the market, and it finally collapsed altogether in 2005, leaving large parts of what's a very fertile island, now left uncultivated. St Kitts had a large number of grand plantation houses and old mills, many of which still dot the countryside in varying states of disrepair – a forlorn reminder of the island's glory days. Obviously, these "glory days" were only enjoyed by the small white elite who became fabulously rich, on the hard work of the poor slaves who were often worked to death.

Our 4x4 adventure first took us to Fairview House, a once-grand Plantation House just outside the capital Basseterre. The slightly eerie House has been abandoned since 2003, its garden overgrown and its interior stripped of fixtures and fittings. It wasn't even locked – an old cannon ball was just rolled in front of the door to keep it shut. The house acted as a melancholy tribute to a by-gone age, haunted by the ghosts of a past which holds little interest to the majority of today's Kittitians.

We passed by the old cane fields now overgrown with grasses and weeds, and up into the rainforest where skittish vervet monkeys introduced by the French jump around the trees and venture into the farms to raid crops. We visited an old abandoned sugar mill, and tried to imagine the gangs of slaves carrying the cut cane into the mill to be crushed, and its juices taken to the boiling house to be turned into sugar and molasses.

Our excellent guide really made the plantation system come alive for us, from the cruelty of the slave system, to the fabulous wealth it once generated, to the sad collapse of the industry and the country's inability to find something to replace it adequately.

After the tour, Tracy and I braved the local bus system to try to get to Brimstone Hill Fortress. Catching the bus in St Kitts is always an adventure - the buses blast out aggressive reggae from their powerful sound systems and the drivers career recklessly at breakneck speed around the narrow roads of the island, while you pray to be delivered safely to your destination.

With our brains befuddled by our near-death experience and our ears ringing with reggae, we got out at the bottom of the hill and looked up at the fortress we were aiming for – it was miles away up an incredibly steep road. As we paid him, we asked the bus driver how long it would take to get there on foot – about 10 minutes he said. He must have been chuckling away to himself at these stupid tourists – it would have taken 10 minutes to drive up there.

But we weren't to be deterred, so as we started to trudge up there we decided to flag down any passing car to get a lift to the top. After 5 minutes a car eventually came and very kindly gave us a lift up a hill so steep that Edmund Hillary wouldn't have taken it on. But, the trip is well worth it, because the enormous fortress with its formidable stone bastions and lines of cannons gives excellent views over the countryside and coast below it. The sheer size of the imposing fortress and the huge amount of work taken in constructing it up there, shows the massive importance of St Kitts and its sugar trade to the British Empire in the 18th century.

St Kitts is an island with a fascinating past and a challenging future. It appears that the island's hope now lies mainly in developing its tourist industry – whether this can be done sustainably, without profits leaking out to companies from other countries, and without changing the nature of the island remains to be seen.

November 1st – Dominica’s Rainforest

Another day spent exploring Dominica's remarkable rainforest – a place where the air's so fresh and moist, the vegetation so thick, and the environment so pure, that you could imagine that you've ended up in the Garden of Eden.

Our driver was a self-appointed PHD (Pot Hole Dodger), and we bumped along Dominica's fairly dodgy roads up into the mountains, and arrived at the Hibiscus Falls, another picture-perfect cascade of clear water emerging out of the forest and crashing into a cool pool at the bottom – like something out of the film, The Blue Lagoon.

After driving round the island, we returned to Roseau and visited the Botanical Gardens, which the British had set up at the start of the 20th century, as an extension of Kew Gardens. When you saw the range of exotic trees and flowers on show, you got the impression that pretty much anything can grow here in Dominica.

At the gardens we saw a horribly crushed schoolbus which had been obliterated by a huge boabab tree felled in the devastating hurricane of 1979 - a stark reminder of the power of nature here in Dominica.

October 31st – Pampered in Bequia

Today I did the "Best of Bequia" tour, which showed us the best that this tiny little island has to offer. Bequia's assets are its unspoilt vistas, friendly people, and gorgeous beaches, and we got to experience all of this and more.

Our minivan took us up to the remains of Fort Hamilton on a hill overlooking Admiralty Bay below, where our ship was at anchor – the rusting old British and French cannons a reminder of the island's 18th century history, when ownership of the Grenadines see-sawed between Britain and France.

Then we went to the Old Hegg Turtle Sanctuary, where sterling conservation work is done to protect the island's turtle population, which is hunted (entirely legally) by fishermen for their meat. Different tanks held hundreds of turtles at various stages of their development – from loads of tiny little baby turtles flapping around the water drunkenly, to enormous adults straining to climb out of the tanks to say hello – how anyone can eat these beautiful creatures I don't know.

Our final stop was at the Bequia Beach Hotel, a new luxury development being put together by a Swedish owner, who's struggling to get Bequia on the tourist map. It's all been very tastefully put together, so I hope that he can get it to pay its way, although I'm not sure that the island's attracting enough high-end visitors yet.

We were greeted by a glass of champagne, and then shown down to the beach – a gorgeous stretch of white sand with no-one on it apart from the 8 of us on the tour. I had a swim in the warm sea, while others took it in turns to have a soothing massage by the beach – it doesn't get much more decadent than this, having a massage with just the sounds of the waves as a background theme tune. It would have sent me comatose, had the masseur not decided to attack the many knots in my back which virtually had me yelping like a girl with the pain.

Finally, we had a lobster lunch – the locally-caught lobster is slightly drier than Maine lobster, but delicious nonetheless – and then time for another swim before we were due to go back.

It was the kind of day that I'd imagine a pampered Hollywood star would have most days of life – I could get used to this. A truly lovely day in a picture-perfect environment.

Oct 30th – Watery Bridgetown

So, as one lovely cruise ends, another begins, as we turnaround in Barbados and head up to Fort Lauderdale.

We'd arranged to meet up with friends who were here on a different cruise ship, so we walked from the terminal along the coast with them into Bridgetown for a drink. Unfortunately we'd forgotten that it was a Sunday, which means that pretty much everything was shut for the day, which meant that getting that drink was much harder than we'd expected.

Having wandered through the deserted streets of the centre of town, scarcely passing a person, never mind an open cafe or bar, we headed for the beach on Carlisle Bay where there was bound to be something open. We found a beach club, where we had to buy a day pass (we managed to convince them that we were ship's crew, so we got in half price), which entitled us to all day access to their lovely sandy beach and a rum punch. Seeing as it was 9.30 in the morning, the rum punch was postponed for as long as possible, and we hadn't brought any swimwear with us, so we were essentially paying for the privilege of having a seat that wasn't a park bench.

Anyway, time flew by as we caught up on old news, and it was soon rum punch-o'clock, and then sadly time to say goodbye till we meet up in another random port somewhere else in the world.

It had been incredibly hot and humid throughout the morning, and as we explored Bridgetown's interesting mix of historic colonial buildings, old churches, scruffy 1930s buildings, and modern architecture, the heavens opened, and we sheltered under various verandas around town. The deluge stopped briefly just long enough for us to get back to port, and then it absolutely hammered it down almost as soon as we got to the terminal.

We come back here in a couple of weeks, when everything should be open, and hopefully we won't be washed away in another flood.

Oct 29th – Beautiful Bequia

Where? I hear you ask.

Bequia (pronounced Beck-way) is the largest of the Grenadine Islands, in the tiny country of St Vincent and the Grenadines. It's incredibly beautiful and still undeveloped – lines of gorgeous soft sand beaches lapped by warm turquoise waters. This is a close to paradise as we've been so far.

I went on a Catamaran and Snorkelling tour, which took us around the island to find some good snorkelling on a reef of tropical fish, and then to the idyllic Princess Margaret Beach for some floating in the bath-like sea. As the last stop on this cruise, the passengers couldn't have a more relaxed end to their holidays.

After the tour, Tracy and I explored the island's capital, Port Elizabeth – there's not much to it, so it didn't take long. It's an unsophisticated place where everyone says hello to you, with just a few stalls selling touristy stuff and a few bars pumping out reggae. As such, the place has the distinction as the first Caribbean island to register on Tracy's "I could live here" ranking.

I guess that if you lived here as an ex-pat, you'd need to be writing a book, recovering from a stressful life, or want to achieve very little other than to relax – but, I can't think of many better places to relax in the world than beautiful Bequia!

Oct 28th – Wonderfully Unspoilt Dominica

Dominica is one of the least developed of all the former British West Indies – something that I see as a major plus. As an impediment to tourism it has no international airport, hardly any of those typically pretty Caribbean sandy beaches, and hardly any tourist developments (less than 1,000 hotel beds on the island).

In its favour it has hugely impressive natural scenery, amazingly fertile rainforests, and a genuine Caribbean atmosphere out on its busy, if a little scruffy, streets. Today I went on a tour into Dominica's main attraction, its steamy rainforest, thick with vegetation and dripping with fertility. The bumpy roads wind around the incredibly steep hills behind the capital Roseau, and you're transported into another world of tall trees, hanging vines and thundering waterfalls.

Our first stop was at the impressive Trafalgar Waterfalls, where we trekked into the thick forest, passing huge ferns (like something out of Jurassic Park) and mossy rocks, and emerged to see twin waterfalls, over 100 feet high, their waters crashing down into unseen rivers below. You expected to hear Tarzan's cry echo across the valley ahead of us.

Next, we headed to the Emerald Pool, an idyllically situated green pool at the base of a 30 feet high waterfall, where you could jump in to cool off, and then stand under the thumping waters of the waterfall. It was exhilarating, cleansing and energising all at the same time – fantastic to experience such unspoilt nature.

Once we were back in Roseau, we explored it's charmingly dilapidated streets – busier than usual because of a music festival that was starting that evening, and lots of people were in their traditional Creole clothing. As the temperature went up to baking, we retreated to an excellent bar, where the locals were getting in the party spirit for the evening – drinking rum or beer and gyrating to the loud Creole music. It was a shame we had to leave at 5pm, because the cold beers were flowing nicely and the atmosphere was really hotting up.

My favourite stop of the cruise so far.