A week in Tobago: what to do, day by day

Tobago is the quiet half of Trinidad and Tobago, greener, gentler and far less travelled than the big Caribbean names. A week is enough to know it properly, and a Premura week gives it a gentle shape: a different thread of the island each day, with nothing to research or arrange. Here is how that week unfolds.

A good week has a shape to it, a different thread of the island each day, and plenty of time to do nothing at all.

You are met at the airport and brought to the bay, and the pace drops the moment you arrive. The first evening is a welcome dinner and a naturalist welcome, an islander who sets the scene for the week, with nothing else scheduled. If you only do one thing, watch the light go over the bay.

Sundown over Bacolet Bay from the Blue Haven terrace.

Inland rises the Main Ridge Forest Reserve, the oldest legally protected rainforest in the western hemisphere, set aside in 1776. A morning walk here with a naturalist guide is cool, green and full of birdsong, and ends with hummingbirds hand-fed so close they hover at your fingers. It is the antidote to the beach, and the gentlest possible start to the week.

Main Ridge, the antidote to the beach.

The morning belongs to the Tobago Cocoa Estate, a working plantation in the hills where you tour the groves and taste chocolate and rum made from the bean. Then down to the Store Bay food huts for lunch, where Miss Jean's and Miss Trim serve the island's home cooking: curry crab and dumpling, callaloo, a full plate eaten a few steps from the sand.

Store Bay, where the island's best-known food huts are.

Trinidad and Tobago gave the world the steel pan, and late afternoon you learn to play it yourself in a sunset class, sticks in hand, until a tune actually appears. The evening is given over to dancers and live music hosted at the hotel, the island's heritage lived rather than watched.

Steel pan and dancers, the island's culture up close.

The catamaran day, and the heart of the week. One private boat carries the whole group under sail to a secluded bay reachable only from the water, and to the Nylon Pool, a shallow, waist-deep stretch of startlingly clear turquoise water in the middle of the sea where you simply step out and float. There is snorkelling, swimming and kayaking, and a Creole lunch with drinks served aboard.

The Nylon Pool, turquoise shallows in the middle of the sea.

A gentle guided hike in the morning brings you to Argyle Waterfall, which tumbles in three tiers through the forest near Roxborough, with pools you can swim in beneath the cascade. The afternoon is free: the beach, the spa, the courts, whatever the day asks for. On a dark-moon night there is an optional after-dark treat, a bioluminescence kayak where the water lights up around the paddle.

The drive up the leeward coast is the most beautiful on the island. Castara is a working fishing village, and if the timing is right you can watch the seine fishermen haul in the catch. Englishman's Bay is a perfect, near-empty crescent of forest-backed sand, and lunch is at a local restaurant on the coast rather than anywhere built for visitors.

Tobago's wild, emptying north coast.

A last swim, a slow breakfast, and the journey home. You will have seen rainforest, sea, waterfall and coast, eaten the real island, learned to play a little steel pan, and barely looked at a map.