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A trip in a light Caribbean plane can turn a traveller into the plaything of some cruel Caribbean God. You buzz along, but around clouds and large island landmasses, it feels as though you are being dangled on a piece of string, jerked by an unseen, teasing hand on the updraughts and winds.

Dominica Canefield is a ‘sporting’ airstrip as they go, and consequently closed from time to time. Not quite closed, though, on the day I arrived. We bounced and slid around in the turbulence, close enough to a hillside to reach out and pluck grass it seemed. I wanted to shout: ‘But hold on a minute, the airstrip’s over there’, as the pilot came in at 30 degrees to the runway, riding the side-winds. I suppose it’s all part of the fun for pilots. Wobbly, I made it into Roseau, the capital town.

Roseau keeps a traditional air which most Caribbean towns have lost, somewhat soothing thankfully, and it still echoes to an earlier colonial age. There are whole streets of charming ‘shirt and skirt’ buildings - their ground storeys built of stone with tall, shuttered doors, and their upper floors in wood, where outside balconies supported on hefty stilts stretch out above the pavement.

Other islands have gone for (and can afford) air-conditioned supermarkets full of imported goods, but in Roseau the marketeers hawk their goods in the market and streets and vans cruise the country roads, selling. Dominica is the least developed of the Windward Islands and for the visitor this is a good part of its charm. Beach pursuits are not the order of the holiday in the island. There are not many beaches and they mostly have dark sand anyway.

Instead it is the raw natural life that the island is known for. Just 30 miles long, Dominica is massive. Its slopes soar directly from the coastline to thousands of feet and they might look alpine if they weren’t smothered in tropical growth. It’s a curious notion, but in Dominica botanical gardens actually look less fertile than the land that surrounds them.

Leaving the town I made my way up into the Roseau Valley, a huge and fertile cleft in the mountains. D’Auchamps Gardens, a private garden opened not long ago, displays some of the variety of Dominica’s flora. On a walk through the forest you see fruit trees and herbs, edible tubers with leaves like lustrous green elephant ears, spice trees and bushes, vines gleaned for weaving and anonymous bushes used in traditional island medicine.

At the head of the Roseau Valley, 2500 feet up, a number of rainforest trails set off into the jungle. If anything, the growth there is more frantic. Roots grapple like an infestation across the forest floor. Ferns, with silvery undersides, explode from tree limbs and from the earth, banana leaves ruffle like cardboard on the breeze.

The fertility is almost visible, constant genesis and degeneration. Shoots open up and stretch ever higher towards the sun, mosses are on the march and creepers are crawling, using the trees as a climbing frame. Meanwhile leaves drop, matting the ground in various stages of decomposition: some green and fleshy, others just a filament skeleton, munched down by specialist bacteria.

And water is constantly on the move up here. Rain-laden winds with snatches of cloud roll towards the hillside, swirling through the stunted trees of the gothic-looking dwarf forest. From misty suspension in the air the water condensed onto the leaves and then dripped, trickled, tumbled and crashed, heading inevitably downhill.

So high, there was barely a human mark visible besides the path itself. Somewhere though, there was a bird. A solitaire, which whistled periodically in the windy silence, like an un-oiled door.

The other thing for which Dominica has recently gained a reputation is scuba diving. The island is as fertile below the water’s surface as above it. I found myself teamed up with an American guy: “Hi, my name’s Jesse.”

Perhaps there was something about me. He continued, slowly and emphatically: “I take my diving very seriously.” Not a trace of irony.

We cruised to the southern tip of the island, skirting beneath the vastness of the mountains. Just as we pulled up we saw a yacht throwing an anchor over into a protected area, so the dive master rode over to tell them to head further north.

Jesse was a bit quiet during the pre-dive banter, deep-breathing studiedly and presumably running through his mental checks. The dive master cottoned on. As we were about to go in, he ran through his own more fanciful checklist: “you gotcha weight-belt, air turned on, have you the urge to submerge, I say, the drive to dive?”

It’s difficult to see a po-face when a person has a regulator stuffed in their mouth. Jesse just tipped himself backwards into the water, neatly. The smile was probably visible in my eyes as I followed him in.

Even with a ‘buddy’ at your side, scuba diving is one of those intimate experiences. Partly because of the enclosed environment, I suppose, but also because of the difficulty of communicating. A single incident can make a magic moment. It was to be a roller-coaster ride, this one.

We edged around the bend of the huge bay, towards the place where the offending anchor had been dropped. There was a gouge three foot across where the anchor had been winched up, ripping corals out with it. The bubbles were still rising out of an upturned elkhorn which had rolled down the slope. I was scandalised. The dive master scratched furiously on his underwater board: ‘1000 years of coral growth destroyed in seconds’. Poor old Jesse. All I could see was a furrowed brow and wide eyes. I was worried he might start to hyper-ventilate.

Things lightened up after that. Later I came over a coral head and found the dive instructor stretched out on his back on a patch of sand. Split second concern... but he was sitting as though in an armchair enjoying a smoke. I had to smile. He was blowing air rings. As he barked skywards, silvery quoits rose, spinning madly within themselves.

If the Caribbean Gods can seem cruel at times, putting air passengers through an impromptu big dipper ride, they can be correspondingly generous. Next I had one of the finest moments in eight years of diving. A patrol of squid appeared, six of them in a line and the rear man guarding the tail. They hovered like spaceships waiting to dock, riffling their silky fins, circling us, and then they gradually cruised away.

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