How strange to be in this vast, opulent villa in St Lucia by myself. I wander through the seven double bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. White walls,cheap jordans, high ceilings, dark-wood floors, big airy rooms with ocean views – where in this wilderness of elegance shall I sleep? I settle on an upstairs room with a four-poster bed and a balcony the size of a cricket pitch. I hang my four shirts and one spare pair of trousers in the walk-in wardrobe,cheap jordans for sale, where they're surrounded by yards of empty space.


Read our expert guide to St Lucia


Where shall I drink alone? Between the balcony, the veranda, the deck and the gazebo by the swimming pool, there are at least a dozen prime drinking chairs, and every time I sit down with my glass of rum, I feel like sitting somewhere else. The sun is setting over the Caribbean; the landscaped gardens are full of flowers; mangos and limes hang ripe on the trees – and yet I feel oddly restless and ill-at-ease. Instead of basking in my good fortune at being here,jordans for cheap, I find myself pining for human company.


In the normal course of my life, I spend a lot of time on my own, travelling by myself and writing books in remote cabins, and normally I relax immediately into solitude. The difference here, I think, is the enormous size of the villa – all those big empty rooms and unoccupied chairs – and its gorgeousness, which cries out to be shared. I call my girlfriend in New York and the phone goes to voicemail. I check my email instead of admiring the sunset. When Francis, the caretaker, comes over to say hello, I fall on him like a long-lost friend, and 20 minutes later we're driving away together to the nearest town, with music and revelry in mind.


First we make a winding descent through a hillside estate of luxury villas overlooking a golf course. Most of them are shuttered and empty. It's early July, a month into the rainy season, which is also hurricane season in the Caribbean.


Today has been hot and sunny, and tomorrow will be the same, but at this time of year there's always a good chance of heavy downpours, and an outside possibility of a full-blown hurricane, with power cuts, flooding and road closures. To visit the Caribbean between June and November is essentially a gamble with the weather,Kicksokok.com,http://mylovesong.me/user/blogs/view/name_shoesking/id_209461/title_cheap-jordans-free-shipping-Online-Store/cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, and a bargain because of it. The villa where I'm staying costs nearly ?4,000 a week in the peak winter season; right now,cheap air jordans, it's going for ?2,000 a week – an amazing rate when you consider that it's designed to sleep 15 people.


We pass the club house of the golf course,http://www.lbeyzy.com/guestbook.aspcheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, and soon emerge into a scruffier, livelier, more colourful St Lucia. It's Friday night and the weekly street party is under way in the town of Gros Islet. Vendors are barbecuing chicken and fish, and selling cold beers and shots of rum from makeshift bars. DJs are playing soca and reggae through big, booming speaker stacks. People are laughing, joking, arguing, knuckle-bumping, dancing a supple-hipped dance,cheap retro jordans, and who in the world, I wonder, can throw a better street party than Caribbean people?


St Lucians, or "Looshans", have a reputation for being the nicest, warmest, friendliest people in the Caribbean, but this is not to say that the island is without its hustlers, thieves and troublemakers. Tourists are welcome and familiar at the street party, but it gets a little sketchy late at night, and I wouldn't come here with a lot of cash in my pocket, or follow one of the weed dealers down a dark alley.


Francis is an ideal companion, hailed with smiles and loud greetings every time we turn a corner. A former house painter in his fifties,cheap real jordans, he is better known to everyone by his nickname of Savoury. He and his friends talk to each other in French patois (the island changed hands 14 times between the French and English before ending up in the Commonwealth), and then switch to English for my benefit.


When Francis offers to spend a day showing me around the island, I cancel my busy schedule of sunbathing and snorkelling, and then make the mistake of offering to pay him. "Hold your money," he says, looking insulted. "I invite you as my guest."


We drive up into the mountainous interior of the island, thickly jungled with rainforest and flashing with tropical birds,cheap wholesale jordans,http://siemprelucenacf.es/index.php/component/user/?option=com_content&view=article&id=115cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, and refresh ourselves with a coconut bought from a roadside Rasta with a pet boa constrictor. Then we descend to the picturesque harbour town of Soufrière, where I float on my back in the perfect swimming waters of the bay, and gaze up at the Pitons, twin spears of volcanic rock that form St Lucia's most famous landmark.


I'm not going to tell you how it happened, but later that day we got into a car accident. The rental car collided with a minibus full of starchy ladies dressed in their Sunday church clothes. While Francis argued away with them in patois, I brooded darkly on the credit-card deposit I'd left with the rental agency, and the vagueness of the insurance arrangements. The rental car had a caved-in front bumper and missing scrapes of paint. The minibus had a dented panel. Francis kept insisting there was no need for stress or worry. His friend James had a body shop and would make all the damage go away for a very cheap price.




The church ladies fought hard for cash, but eventually agreed to this solution, and no one even suggested calling the police or an insurance company. We went to meet James the next morning. His garage consisted of one wall, a leaky corrugated tin roof, a hollowed out VW van, a few tools and piles of nameless junk. James sat there slumped in a hangover and showed no interest in our dented rental car. A shirtless man called Earl wandered in with a bottle of rum and inspected the damage.


"James is number one man, boss and king," he said. "Hold your stress, man, he organise all dis ting." An hour passed in conversation, James drank some rum, and then bestirred himself to remove the front wheel and fire up his blowtorch. He applied some heat to the inside of the plastic bumper, and then moulded it back into shape with his hand and a wet cloth. He went off to buy some matching paint.


Men kept dropping by to drink rum and swap stories and welcome me to St Lucia. Most of them were poor and underemployed. They chipped in their dollars to buy more rum and chicken for a barbecue, and waved away my proffered banknotes, saying I was a guest. James returned and sanded down the paintwork.


A makeshift "coalpot", or barbecue, was rigged up from a car wheel and a piece of mesh, and spices rubbed into the chicken pieces. They grilled it low and slow over charcoal, and when the chicken was done, they found me a chair.


None of them would eat until they were double-sure I had eaten my fill. By late afternoon, the chicken and rum was all gone, the rental car was immaculately repaired, and I had five new friends. They kept insisting that we were all brothers, and skin colour was meaningless, and we raised our glasses to the car accident that had brought us together. Then, to cap it all, they refused to let me pay for the repair, or the subsequent repair to the church minivan.


I've travelled in more than 40 countries and nowhere else have I met such warm and generous hospitality. That night, I lay in my four-poster bed, alone and reflective in the villa. They had so little, and they took such pride in sharing it. They kept saying that I would do the same for a stranger in my country, and I wished that to be true.








Pompeii is unforgettable. It is the only place in the world where you can begin to understand, face to face, how the Romans of the first century AD lived: from the brothels and lavatories to the posh dining rooms and lavish bathing establishments (the modern spa, health club and gym rolled into one).


I have been studying the place for more than 30 years and the magic works every time. I slip down a deserted side street (and the site is big enough that there still are deserted side streets), and without having to use much imagination I have travelled back 2,000 years – walking along the high pavements, hopping across the road on the stepping stones, peering at the ruts made by generations of Roman carts, or at the election slogans painted on the walls by hopeful Roman candidates for office.





Not that Pompeii is a city "frozen in time". The eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed the town in AD 79 wasn't quite as devastating as it is sometimes cracked up to be. This wasn't an ordinary little town going about its everyday business as usual – when suddenly, with no warning at all, it was covered in debris from the volcano and preserved as if in aspic. Vesuvius had been rumbling for days, if not weeks.


Most of the population, perhaps more than 17,000 out of an original 20,000 or so, managed to escape – taking their prized possessions with them. If Pompeian houses today look under-furnished, that's partly because the owners had loaded their best furniture on a cart and scarpered.


They weren't all so lucky. The old, the ill and the hopelessly optimistic (or stupid) seem to have sat it out – and died. The skeletons of one family have been found, crouched together in a back room of a large house. One of the group was in her late teens and almost nine months pregnant. That presumably explains why they stayed put. Others may simply have decided to get on with their jobs and ignore the warnings.


One team of painters was working on some expensive new wall decoration in another large property until the very last minute. They certainly left in a hurry, knocking over their ladder and bucket of cement in the process – to be found by archaeologists almost two millennia later. They may have been very lucky in their escape and got away.


More likely they have ended up as some of the dead "bodies" you can still see on the site, crouching in corners, head in hands, or clinging to each other as the debris fell – the shape of their clothing, even their facial expressions as they died, preserved.


These are now some of the biggest attractions of the ancient town: vivid, if ghoulish, reminders of the real people who lost their lives in the disastrous eruption. They are not literally "bodies" at all, of course. One ingenious 19th-century excavator had the bright idea of pouring plaster of Paris into the cavities left in the lava around skeletons, where flesh and clothing had decomposed – and, hey presto, the shape of a living human being was miraculously recovered.


Modern science has developed these techniques. We have recently discovered that you can pour plaster not only into the cavities left by corpses but into those left by the roots of plants as they decomposed under the volcanic debris. And so whole gardens have been reconstructed with their flowers, fruit trees and cuttings in pots. Microscopic analysis can tell you even more – about the pollen flying around in the air in AD 79 or occasionally, when you find a cesspit, about what went through the digestive tracts of the ancient inhabitants of the town.


Eggs, we have learnt, were among the staples of the Pompeian diet – and there were some nasty intestinal parasites around.


But the pleasure of Pompeii is that you don't actually need a microscope to make discoveries. You just need your eyes open. The fittings of lost doors and windows are there for all to see if they look hard enough. So too are the stairways in the private houses that led to upper storeys destroyed in the eruption (despite first appearances, the Pompeians did not live in bungalows – but what went on upstairs is hard to say).




One of the most curious new discoveries has come from a closer look at those cart ruts that scar the Pompeian streets.


Generations of visitors have wondered how two ancient carts could possibly have passed each other in the narrow streets of the town. The answer now seems to be that they didn't. Carefully examining the scrapes of cartwheels in the roadway and against the pavements, one team of archaeologists has worked out the direction of the traffic flow and claims to be able to plot the one-way street system operating in ancient Pompeii.

How to make the best of your visit


A visit to Pompeii hardly ever lets you down. But to have a really successful time there are two essentials apart from wide-open eyes: sensible shoes (the bumpy roads and pavements are hard on the ankles) and a water bottle (a small one is fine: there are lots of ancient street fountains where you can refill).





It is also a good idea to do a bit of planning. If you put yourself at the mercy of one of the guides who tout for business at the entrance, you will miss out on the fun of wandering as you please. It's far better to work out an agenda in advance and find your way around with a map.


There are two basic rules here. First, don't get too interested too early. Most people arrive by the little Circumvesuviana railway from Naples or Sorrento, and go in by the main entrance at the Porta Marina (the sea gate). From here you quickly come to the Forum, or the main piazza of the ancient town.


It's impressive enough in its way, and many new visitors spend ages there trying to work out what every building was. Don't. There are even more impressive things to come – brilliantly preserved bath buildings, a working-condition brothel and an amphitheatre, for example.


Second, take any opportunity offered. A lot of the best private houses of the town are locked for much of the time. But custodians do open them occasionally. If you spot an open door – go through it. All kinds of surprises might lie inside: little mosaic fountains, reconstructed gardens, the carefully crafted marble couches on which upmarket Romans dined.




Six essential sights


1. The House of the Tragic Poet (it has nothing actually to do with a tragic poet, but most houses got nicknames in the 19th century).


This is among the best-preserved private houses and features the famous "Beware of the Dog" mosaic at its entrance – and it was the one that Edward Bulwer-Lytton chose as the home of his hero Glaucus, in his engaging 1830s romp The Last Days of Pompeii.


2. The Temple of Isis


Bulwer-Lytton's villain in The Last Days was a priest of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and her temple is one of the most vividly preserved in the whole town. It was visited by the young Mozart in 1769, and gave him ideas for The Magic Flute.


3. The brothel


This is now the most-visited building on the site (more visited than in antiquity, no doubt) – and you may well have to queue to get in. It consists of five poky cubicles, with some explicit erotic paintings and a lot of graffiti from satisfied customers.


4. The Stabian Baths


These give you the best idea of what Roman bathing was like. There are richly decorated vaulted rooms for a good steam (the men's section considerably richer than the women's) – plus a swimming pool and exercise yard.


5. The Villa of the Mysteries


Just outside the city walls, this villa-cum-farm includes the most famous Pompeian wall-painting. A mysterious scene wrapping around the four walls of a large reception room, featuring flagellation, phalluses, a bride (?) and the god Dionysus.


6. The amphitheatre


One for the energetic (it's about as far from the entrance as it could possibly be), but worth the effort; 150 years older than the Colosseum, it's the earliest amphitheatre to survive anywhere in the world.