Lazy Days in the Turks & Caicos

PROVIDENCIALES ISLAND, Turks and Caicos — It was on Valentine's Day 1990 when I learned about Philistina Butterfield's Hot Rhythm Pills. Also known as "Peanuts," Butterfield is a gregarious woman who emerged that day from her little blue shack on the waterfront of Cockburn Town with a steaming plateful of deliciously browned, deep fried conch fritters she called Hot Rhythm Pills. "Make you irresistible to men," she whispered conspiratorially.

What did I have to lose? I was traveling alone on one of the least known of all Caribbean islands, a seven-square-mile sandbar called Grand Turk, where donkeys still pull wooden carts along the single-lane main road. So when a handsome Parisian doctor materialized on a scooter later that day and invited me for Valentine's dinner at a beachfront cafe, who could say it wasn't due to the potent powers of Peanuts' cuisine?

Caribbean islands have a romantic quality that simply can't be matched by arid deserts or mountain landscapes. It has something to do with the sway of palm trees in a breeze, the candy-colored pastels of clapboard buildings, and how a walk on a beach is a gentle form of foot massage, so that suddenly any vacation takes on the rosy glow of a honeymoon.

When I first visited the Turks and Caicos Islands, it was their quirkiness, beauty and lack of commercialism that made me fall in love with them. Since then, the islands have gotten considerable press in diving magazines as a great hideaway, so last year my boyfriend, Philip, and I spent two weeks there during our Christmas vacation. More than most Caribbean islands, the Turks and Caicos have managed to remain a backwater. With a good map and a magnifying glass, they come into focus as a sprinkling of 40 low-lying islands 575 miles southeast of Miami, due north of the Dominican Republic. The Caicos group of islands is separated from the Turks Islands, to the east, by the 22-mile-wide Turks Island Passage, and we split our time between the two groups.

The Turks and Caicos are dry, flat and scrubby little isles bristling with cactuses, but their edges are trimmed with some of the world's most perfect beaches. Just offshore, where turquoise waters give way to cobalt depths, vast tracts of virgin reef make this a favorite domain of scuba divers and snorkelers. Ponce de Leon stopped here in 1512 during his search for the Fountain of Youth, and in the 1600s pirates plundered the region. After that the Turks and Caicos became the object of political pingpong: They were part of the Bahamas, then annexed by Jamaica; now they are a British colony.