Splendid Place To Loaf -- On Tortola, In The British Virgin Islands, Engaging In Useful Or Energetic Activities Seems Out Of Place

Tortola is one of those Caribbean islands where there's almost nothing to do, and many seductive places not to do it in.

True, most people are drawn by the yachting. Because the islands are so close together and pleasing to see, the British Virgins, with Tortola as their center, are second only to the Grenadines as a sailor's dream in this part of the world.

Compared to most other islands in the Caribbean, they're unspoiled.

Citified and heavily populated U.S. Virgin St. Thomas, for instance, just a few miles west of Tortola, has become a busy sun-drenched shopping mall with cruise ships attached to it like great white lamprey eels.

By comparison, a visit to Tortola and the rest of the British Virgins, with a total population of under 15,000, is like a visit to the country. Yachtsmen love cruising the Drake Channel, named for the world-traveling Elizabethan sailor-pirate. Sportfishing, snorkeling and scuba diving are also big draws.

But there are those of us who aspire to the alligator state, some reptilian dream of doing nothing in the sun, nothing useful or overly energetic at any rate. And Tortola comes through - even if you're a yachtless wretch.

Take Bomba's Shack, for instance, which is the first place I went after I got off the plane - on the advice of friends who'd been there.

Shack is an understatement. Bomba's is on a north-shore beach called Apple Bay, the preferred surfing spot on the island. It looks less like a popular place to boogie at night than the a pile of driftwood hit by a hurricane. It has beach sand for a floor and an open crazy-quilt construction.

Bomba's throbs with reggae tapes when the live bands aren't playing. It's a great place to leave regular cares behind and get with some reggae and secret punch - overproof rum and fruit juice with a dash of exotic spices - while a nearly full moon makes soft progress across a sky smeared with stars.

Bomba's Shack is in Tortola's West End, which is more laid-back and down-home than either Road Town in the middle or the East End, where the tonier resorts and Tortola's best beach are.

Tortola is so mountainous and stringy - 40 miles long, perhaps 10 wide - that it breaks naturally into three communities.

A drive around the island reveals that Tortola is dry with little rainfall, mostly scrub and acacia and cactus, with only a small patch of cloud forest on one mountaintop.

There's little agriculture except family plots clinging to steep hillsides, and few other ways to make a living beyond running small grocery stores, vending coconuts and sugar cane to ferry travelers, fishing, and finding jobs in the relatively small tourist trade. Which is why the local population, most descended from slaves brought to the Caribbean early in the last century, isn't any bigger. Tortola can't support many more people - at least until the cruise ships and major resorts come sniffing around in earnest, which eventually they will.

Road Town is the center of the action, such as it is. It's a community of only a few thousand, with traditional wooden West Indian buildings painted gleaming white or in bright tropical shades, interspersed with newer basic concrete buildings. There are no high rises or "international style" hotels - no casinos or fast-food franchises either.

Several yacht clubs and bar/restaurants line the harbor. A rum-cup souvenir

The main tourist attraction is Pusser's, a company that was the official supplier of rum to the British Navy before the practice was discontinued. It's now a combination pub/one-room British-style department store that looks like a collision of Brooks Brothers and Cheers. The tin rum cup that comes with one of Pusser's famous "Painkillers" is a favorite souvenir.

About the only other thing to do in Road Town is to check out the shops along the narrow old main street, but which takes an hour tops even for the most resolute shopper. There's also a modest botanical garden on the edge of town.

I liked the West End best. I found a guesthouse overlooking the Long Beach Bay resort, one of the pricier (and better) on Tortola, with individual villas built among palm trees on a nearly mile-long beach that ends at a cute green little sugarloaf mountain.

To enjoy the beach, you don't have to spend the up-to-$425 a night for Long Beach Bay Resort. You can pay even more. Sunset House, for instance, on Long Bay, tops out at $8,400 a week in the winter, but that's for five bedrooms and your own chef among other amenities.

But there are guesthouses on the beach in this Apple Bay/Long Bay area ranging from deluxe at around $1,000 a week down to my speed: places and prices in Leftover Hippie Class at well under $100 a night.

The beaches and the sea belong to everybody. You do not have to be staying at Long Beach Bay Resort to walk its classic beach at sunset or drink at its bar. Day trips by ferry

One of Tortola's lazy pleasures for the yachtless is day-tripping to nearby islands on public ferries. True, some of them are more like getting there on a loud, third-class Mexican bus than sliding silently on the wind on some snazzy yacht, sipping champagne.

The ferry for Jost van Dyke leaves from the West End's Soper's Harbour and takes about half an hour. The captain/owner, Winston, greets everyone with a big smile. His squat, beat-up, blue 40-foot ferry is named WHEN, which sounded like truth in advertising to me, and is devoted more to carrying cargo than passengers. This morning there are only four or five people other than me.

Today's vital supplies to Jost van Dyke consist mostly of beer, stacked cases of Budweiser, Foster's Amstel and Heineken.

I found myself sitting next to three fat orange-net sacks full of lobsters, the property of Sydney, one of the other passengers. They were on their way to his waterside restaurant in Little Harbour - our first stop on the island. Sydney pointed out when I sat down next to his lobsters that they were still alive, and grinned as I did a little involuntary sideways hop away from the sacks.

Little Harbour is like some relic of the '60s. The name of Sydney's restaurant, the Peace & Love, is emblematic, as are all the T-shirts from everywhere and various graffitied underwear hanging stapled and nailed to the ceiling, like some unwashed hippie clothesline.

Not far from Sydney's is a beachside campground where you could probably stay all year grooving on the vibes for the price of one night at Long Beach Bay - if you wanted to spend it in a tent.

The WHEN chugged along just offshore from Little Harbour to Great Harbour a few miles west. Brown pelicans were flapping upward and hovering over the water, studying it, before dive-bombing like kamikazes.

Great Harbour, our next stop on JVD, looks like the Caribbean of the '50s or earlier. Its half-mile-wide horseshoe bay is lined with charming, traditional, pastel wooden West Indies buildings along with several inconspicuous bar/restaurants hidden among the beach palms. To Virgin Gorda

The ferry ride and day trip to Virgin Gorda are busier and more organized.

Two ferry companies, Speedy's and Smith's, leave from the same pier in Road Town. They are in what you'd have to call head-to-head competition. Both have ferries leaving at 9 a.m. for Virgin Gorda, and every day, they race.

A sucker for advertising, I picked Speedy's over Smith's. Wrong again. Speedy's was a standard passenger ferry with rows of Naugahyde benches and a center aisle that suggested a seagoing church. It was bigger - but slower - and Smith's buzzed by it about halfway and had unloaded by the time we reached the dock.

For an additional $2, Speedy's offered an open-air bus to The Baths, which are Virgin Gorda's main attraction. It's one of the most wonderfully weird geological formations on earth, with giant, curving, gray volcanic boulders strewn like God's marbles along the edge of the sea. They form a tide-pool labyrinth that provides easy, rewarding snorkeling.

There's a short but challenging seaside walk among the giant boulders from one beach to another.

The "trail" is barely marked. I took a wrong turn and ended up in shallow water out in no-man's boulders, barefoot among spiny sea urchins and slippery rocks - not quite lost but close. It was my own fault for violating my rule of doing nothing. "Nothing" at Smuggler's Cove

The next day I found the best place on Tortola to do that at Smuggler's Cove, also in the West End, and just around a point from Soper's Hole, where I'd caught the ferry for Jost van Dyke.

With a wide arcing beach and more of that perfect pellucid water, Smuggler's Cove served as the setting for a bad made-for-TV version of "The Old Man and the Sea" a while back. Its name also suggests Tortola's piratical past. Local legend has it that a small nearby island was the inspiration for "Treasure Island."

Smuggler's Cove is reached by land from the main road on a rocky, bumpy, unpaved track. There is a hotel - of sorts - rather grandly called the Smugglers Cove Beach Resort, a small complex of plain, unpainted, gray concrete buildings. At first glance it looks like it went out of business years ago.

Parked near the open-air beach bar where you might expect tables and chairs is a 1966 Lincoln Continental convertible, slowly melting to rust in the salt air. Hanging on a wall nearby is a faded color picture of the car in better days, with Queen Elizabeth riding in it.

As he poured a cold Red Stripe, Bob, the slight gray-bearded owner, explained that he'd bought the car nearly new in Florida and had it shipped here. When Queen Elizabeth came to visit Tortola in the '60s, it was apparently the snazziest vehicle on the island, so it was borrowed to chauffeur her about. And now for years it hasn't had to work, has been permanently relaxing by the bar.

There is a pleasing slow feeling of entropy at Smuggler's Cove, of the world peacefully rusting away in the sunshine. It's the most appropriate setting in which to do nothing on the whole island. I didn't have the nerve to check out the rooms, didn't want to spoil the fantasy of moving here to write my bad novel - or not write it.

I confess that I broke my rule and took a swim and did some snorkeling, but mainly I sat in the shade with a cold Red Stripe and my paperback mystery - in alligator heaven.

Copyright, 1993, David Standish. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.) David Standish is a freelance writer who lives in Chicago. ------------------------------------------------------------------- IF YOU GO

Tips on Tortola

For more information about Tortola, call the British Virgin Island's Tourist Board, 1-800-835-8530 or 1-800-232-7770.

Ask for a current copy of their Welcome tourist guide, which covers everything from hotels and restaurants to boardsailing and local electrical voltage.