Tortola Travel Guide

Tortola is the largest island in the British Virgin Islands and contains the capital city of Roadtown.  The island is fringed by many long, underpopulated, gorgeous beaches.    Tortola is one of those gems of an island that instantly makes you feel a million miles away from long commutes and obscene work weeks--and starts you trying to figure out how you might be able to make a living as a professional beachcomber.

As with most Caribbean destinations, you undergo serious temporal distortion for your first day or so.  While on Tortola, you are most definitely on Island Standard Time--and nothing you can do will change that.  It may take 45 minutes to get your lunch order--but who cares when you have an unobstructed view of miles of torquoise water, a gentle offshore breeze on your face, and an endless supply of excellent cheap rum and tropical fruit juices.  So don't snap at the customs officers, whine to the young lady at the front desk, or stiff the bellhop--just open the relief valve on your pressure-cooker brain and RELAX  Tortola will infect you very quickly with tranquility if you just let it.

When we last visited Tortola, we arrived from Washington, DC, in March.  One hint for people who care about saving money--and that wouldbe 99.9% of us, I assume.  It is genrally rather expensive to fly into the BVI and flights are limited and sell out quickly.  There are two commercial airfields, one on Beef Island (attached to Tortola by bridge) and one on Virgin Gorda, the third biggest island.  It is often a lot easier (more frequent flights) and cheaper (many good deals) to fly into Saint Thomas in teh American Virgin Islands and hop the ferry to Tortola.  There are a handful of ferry companies and they run frequently between the AVI and the BVI.  You can get ferries to either Roadtown or West End in Tortola--where you're staying will determine which is the better choice for arrival.  The ferries are about $25 each way, so the break-even point on airfare when comparing Beef Island and St Thomas is about $100 ($50 for the round-trip ferry and $50 for the small amount of additional hassle).  Our experience is that you will easily find airfare differentials of $200 or $250 if you look hard enough and book early enough.  One thing you will surely notice is the difference in cars, commercialization, and general frenzy between St Thomas an Tortola--you'll be glad you choce the BVI if you're looking for a really relaxing and peaceful vacation.

Last trip, we stayed at Long Bay on the west end of Tortola.  This is a great beach, protected by a reef and with great views of Jost Van Dyke.  There is one big all-inclusive (or a la carte, if you prefer) resort there, the Long Bay Beach Resort.  (There are also lots of private homes that rent out by the week or fortnight as well--Google Long Bay Beach.)  Terrific place to stay (more below) but not much on bargain prices.  Ask about any special rates you might be eligible for, however.  I'm a retired Air Force officer and we got a beachfront room for the price of a hillside room as a special military deal for present or past members of U.S., Canadian, or British forces.  Very sweet deal.

Our room was first floor of a two-story, four-room building with a king size bed, marble floors (which with the breeze negated any need for air conditioning for all seven days we were there), and a big bathroom.  It was cleaned every day and was nicely furnished with beach-appropriate furniture and fixtures.  The best feature was the triple panel, extra-wide sliding glass doors on the seaward side of the room.  These were actually pocket doors, so they slid into the wall--and you could slide out triple screen panels.  We did this upon arrival and never closed the glass again.  (There is really not much crime on the BVI--unlike the AVI--and there was a small in-room safe where we kept wallets and my wife's jewelry all week anyway.) 

Now get this.  Right in front of our room was a double palm tree on the edge of the sand and then one mile of sugar-white sand beach.   My wife and I moved two of  the excellent, heavy-duty chaise lounges provided by the resort under the palm trees and left them there all week.  These were our seats and no one ever felt the need to steal them.  We spent the week reading, swimming, snoozing, reading, walking, snoozing, eating, snoozing, etc from those two chaises.   I once paced off the distance from the edge of our bed to the water line--it was 18 yards.  My wife and I walked the beach back and forth three or four times every morning and evening, saying  hello to everyone along the way.  The most people I counted at one time on Long Bay Beach was about 50, including us.  That's one person for every 100 feet of beach.  (Compare and discuss--Cancun v. Tortola.)  We slept every night with the sound of the waves breaking right next to our bed and beautiful cool breezes wafting through the windows.  Absolute paradise! 

Long Bay Beach Resort also has a small but well-appointed and well-staffed spa.  What's a vacation without a spa day, after all?  My wife and I did a his-and-hers aromatic steamroom, followed by individual massages and (my wife talked me into this) facials.  (Note for men--facials are very, very, very relaxing... and great on the razor burn.  I am a convert.)  The spa also has a tiny--but adequate--work-out room with a cycle and a treadmill and some weights.  We went twice, then just figured the 4-6 miles we were walking on the beach was enough exercise.  During one viist, we were joined by a teenage boy who was just "pumping up the guns" before hitting the pool and the surrounding girls. 

The food--we did the all-inclusive plan--was good but not stellar.  Breakfast and lunch were served in the old sugar mill restaurant right on the beach.  They have a big wooden deck overlooking the water, which is where everyone sat.  There were only a handful of inside tables, usually occupied by those who overdid the sun on Day One and were nursing serious burns.  I ate a lot of rice and peas (actually little round red beans), which as a graduate of a New Orleans university I naturally loved.  The somewhat limited menu featured some fish, a few salads, some burgers--the usual stuff.  Breakfast was lots of fruit and English breakfast staples like bangers and broiled tomatoes and eggs.  At night, the second floor of the old sugar mill is a pasta restaurant--and having lived for  three years in Italy, we were not much impressed by the pasta. although it was edible--and there is also a more formal (but still fairly khakis-and-Top-Siders casual) restaurant open for dinner in the main reception building.  The food here is a bit more refined and carefully prepared--we had some excellent fish dishes and very fresh tropical salads.

Next to the main reception building, up the hillside a it from the beach, is a nice pool complex.  It's a standard grotto-waterfall sort of pool you se all over teh Craibbean, with the usual swim-up bar and grill with submeged bar stools.  My son and his friend--we got them a separate room as they were both 16 and we wanted some "mommy and daddy time" of our own--had lunch at the pool every day and enjoyed it.  This seemed to be the place where most of the older kids hung out most of the time.

We did just three half-day excursions during the week we were on Tortola--we just didn't want to leave those palm trees and chaises.  We ventured into Roadtown for a few hours.  This is not a very impressive town and is where the few cruise ships that visit Tortola dock.  There is the standard 'village' of small craft vendors--good place to by whole spices and tee shirts, but not much else.  We had lunch at Pusser's, which is the company that brewed the regulation Royal Navy rum ration for a couple of hundred years.  ("Pusser's" is a slurred version of "Pursar"--the guy who issued the rum rations to H.M.'s sailors.)  The lunch was standard pub fare but a fun place to visit.  All in all, Roadtown is not particualrly exciting to visit.  Doesn't look like there's much night life there either, although that's not what we were looking for anyway.

The much more memorable day trips we took were to the reefs for diving.  My son and I are both divers; his friend and my wife are not.  The two of us went out for a two-tank trip one morning--there are a handful of dive outfitters on Tortola, and they all looked to be very reputable with good gear and instructors/guides.  We used Dive Tortola, which had a satellite office at Long Bay Beach Resort and picked up right at the main building.  They had excellent, almost-new gear, nice boats, great dive masters, and a very relaxed company culture.  And the price was reasonable: $65-$80 for the trip and all equipment.   Our second trip was a one-tank afternoon trip--and my wife and our son's friend came along to snorkel--to a grouping of rocks and surrounding reefs and fishbowls off the north side of Tortola called The Indians.  The sea was calm, the wind light, and the visibility about a million miles.   We were only diving at about 25 feet, so we were down almost an hour on one tank.  And it was spectacular--every kind of coral, every kind of invetrebrate, every kind of fish.  We didn't know which way to look there was so much to see.  My son and I finally came up--after tapping our pressure gauges to see if we could discover some more air in our tanks--took our regualtors out of our mouths, and both went "Wowwwww..." simultaneously.  That was a moment you don't often get to share with a typically surly teenager.  Probably the best day of diving I've had in 28 years of scuba.

Tortola is truly a magical place--and one we will return to again and again.