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I always enjoy arriving after dark at Caribbean hotels. Night comes early in the tropics, and as you walk through the garden a profusion of unfamiliar bushes and trees (their trunks sometimes painted white to eight feet) stand etched black in silhouette. In the warm breeze crickets make their scratchy ring and the tree frogs peep shrill and rhythmically.

Young Island, off the south coast of St Vincent, is a particularly spectacular place to arrive at night. As you putter across the 200 yard channel in the old diesel ferry, the lines of pinpoint lights become knee-high lamps lining the stone pathways. Hidden among the explosive greenery are waterfront and hillside cottages, and palm-thatch gazebos where guests are taking dinner. They are all connected by a network of meandering paths that are throttled by plants.

Lit from beneath, the plants give only a hint of their daytime colour and variety, but next morning you see they are heliconia and banana, fountains of golden palm and ferns, interlaced with flashes of tropical colour bougainvillaea, hibiscus and ginger lily. Palm trunks soar from among them, exploding above in an airburst of fronds.

Young Island captures the feel of an older, more elegant Caribbean; the bright and breezy rooms have no need of air-conditioning; wooden louvres channel the sea-breeze, which is then whipped up by ceiling fans. It is an ideal place to relax, as the Caribbean begins to work on you and to wind you down. Activity is to wade out to the offshore bar or to retire to the two person hammocks. And in the way of the Caribbean, you can be as private as you like, or you can fall in with the other guests, sharing dinner or a yachting trip with easy informality.

St Vincent, a vast volcanic lump mantled with rainforest, where rivers tumble and crash, and the Grenadines, a scattering of smaller, drier islands that stretch south over 60 miles, lie in the south eastern Caribbean. They are that bit more remote, an extra flight, and sometimes a boat trip, beyond the main Caribbean gateways. Perhaps as a consequence they attract a slightly different style of visitor. The Grenadines specialise in that brand of peace that so many Caribbean island claim to offer: as the flip Caribbean call goes, they are a great place for doing very little. They are easy-going and undeveloped for the Caribbean (though there are some good hotels) and most have a more natural West Indian air (less of the champagne playground of elsewhere). And all this in the strikingly beautiful setting of a gloriously blue Caribbean Sea.

I find myself recommending the Grenadines to people quite often. They stand within sight of one another, but they are surprisingly different and this makes them ideal for island-hopping. They include island resorts with just a few cottages scattered around carefully tended gardens; dozy, barely populated outcrops which have just received electricity; busy islands with picture-postcard prettiness, and in the middle of them the worldly sophistication of Mustique.

You can explore in five-star style, chartering little planes between the luxurious hotels, or you can travel on the MV Snapper, the mail boat, which serves the islands with provisions, and soft drinks, corrugated roofing tin, breeze blocks, and goats, and the mail of course, a couple of times a week. The Snapper is noisy and lively; a good part of island life.

My first port of call was Bequia, an hour's sail from the St Vincent mainland. From the moment you enter Admiralty Bay you can feel the charmed air of Bequia. Its pretty wooden waterfront buildings, just visible in a screen of palm trees, almost nestle. Life proceeds at a dozy Caribbean pace: an occasional dog, dozing, will cock an eyebrow as you go by, then let out a long breath and doze off again. In fact, there are 5000 islanders, somewhere.

I stayed at the Plantation House, where as the name suggests, the rooms also hark back to another age: gingerbread cottages with cane furniture and hanging mosquito nets and a large wooden veranda from which you can contemplate life. It is easy to settle in on Bequia, to feel the intimacy of the small island. The islanders come out at night and mix with the visitors and sailors in the many bars along the shoreline. Part of the fun is to wander along the stone walkway on the waterfront and choose one to stop in.

The Bequian fishermen spend about two weeks in the month over on the island of Mustique, another hour's sail, or more likely ten minutes' flying time, further south. Mustique is of course notorious (a champagne playground, certainly), though recently it seems to have become a little less frivolous and more businesslike. Strangely for an island that seems to owe so little to the West Indies, the island fits into a long-established Caribbean tradition of West Indian charters. Developers have taken leases on the Grenadines for centuries; it is just that they planted Mustique with luxurious villas rather than with the cotton or sugar of times past. The island is run as a company, into which investors buy by purchasing a plot of land (the going rate is around a million dollars), and then building their dream home. Not surprisingly, most of the villas are magnificent. They use West Indian climate to it best advantage; they are light, open to the breeze and they have superb views. About 45 of them are for hire.

The island is neat and well tended by a posse of gardeners - where Young Island is so profuse, Mustique is sparser and drier. The guests zip around in Jeeps and 'mules' (Japanese farm vehicles). There is plenty of 'space' in Mustique, both geographically and for those who wish to be alone, but for all its exclusiveness, Mustique is also thoroughly West Indian and so it is easy-going and by no means snobbish. People mix with customary Caribbean ease, whether at the weekly cocktail party for house-owners and guests or at Basil's, the only bar on the island, which holds a 'jump-up' (often riotous) each Wednesday.

Mustique has just one hotel, the Cotton House, which is set around an old cotton warehouse. This too has been restored to capture the elegance of the plantation age, with a huge veranda where you can while away dinner for hours. The rooms have been enlarged to accord with modern demands, but they have retained the inspiration of Oliver Messel, who designed so many of the early villas in Mustique and Barbados.

Canouan, about 12 miles further south, has just received electricity. Here, the arrival of the Snapper is one of the day's major events. There is 20 minutes of commotion and shouting as everyone turns out to get their parcels, greet travellers or just to watch. Ten minutes later the jetty is deserted and the island comatose again. But Canouan has recently lost its innocence with the arrival of Carenage Bay, a big hotel complex on the northern end of the island - villas, condominiums, restaurants, casino and a golf course.

Heading south from Canouan you pass Mayreau (population 180, still no mains power) and the uninhabited Tobago Cays, where the yacht masts stand thick in winter. The most southerly of the St Vincent Grenadines is the island-resort of Petit St Vincent, an outcrop which is measured in acres per cottage, and where life is so lazy and luxurious that you communicate by flag and room-service comes to your beach hammock. If the Caribbean promises the finest settings for studied inactivity, the Grenadines are hard to top. You can always watch the plants grow.

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