Things to Do in Jost Van Dyke

Jost Van Dyke is the kind of island where your only real decision is which beach bar to visit first - and that is exactly the point. Most visitors arrive by ferry from West End, Tortola (about 25 minutes) and land at Great Harbour, a single-street village of colorful buildings hugging the waterfront. Walk the length of it in five minutes, stopping at Foxy's Tamarind Bar, the legendary open-air establishment that Foxy Callwood built from the ground up in the late 1960s and has been personally greeting guests at ever since. Foxy still plays guitar most evenings, and the walls are papered with business cards and flags left by decades of sailing crews.

From Great Harbour, take the short dirt path over the rocky headland to White Bay, consistently ranked among the top beaches in the Caribbean and home to the Soggy Dollar Bar, where the Painkiller cocktail was invented. The drink - Pusser's rum, cream of coconut, orange juice, and pineapple juice, topped with fresh nutmeg - is dangerously smooth, and the bar got its name because the only way to reach it was by swimming ashore from your anchored boat, arriving with wet money. Today you can walk in from the beach road, but the tradition of swimming over persists among the sailing crowd. The sand at White Bay is powder-fine and the water is calm enough for young children.

For something more active, hike the trail to Bubbly Pool on the island's east end, where Atlantic swells push through a gap in the rocks to create a natural jacuzzi effect among volcanic boulders - it works best when there is moderate surf, typically between December and March. The hike takes about 30 minutes each way from the east end road and is not well marked, so ask a local for directions. Little Harbour, on the south side, feels like a place that time skipped entirely: a handful of restaurants sit on stilts over the water, and the vibe is pure off-grid Caribbean. Rent a dinghy from Great Harbour and motor over to Sandy Spit, an impossibly photogenic speck of sand just offshore that is barely bigger than a tennis court.

Bring snorkel gear - the reef around Sandy Spit is healthy and teeming with parrotfish and blue tang. For a longer hike, the trail to Majohnny Hill, the island's highest point at 1,054 feet, rewards with 360-degree views of Tortola, St. Thomas, and the scattered cays of the BVI. There are no marked trailheads or visitor centers here - that is the charm of Jost Van Dyke.