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Photo by: Jad Davenport

Two dozen silver-winged angels from the Walk Holy troupe shuffle through the crowded clapboard neighborhoods of Bridgetown, Barbados, chanting prohibitions. Satan circles them like a blood-red shark, huffing on a cigar and splashing rum and leering. The angels look cross. Every year on the last Monday in August, a quarter-million Bajans (slang for locals, rhymes with Cajuns) celebrate the close of the five-week Crop Over Festival. The 18th-century Grand Kadooment is the wildest day of the year, a chance for islanders on an atoll 100 miles east of the rest of the Caribbean - one deeply rooted in nearly four centuries of British rule - to revel in their own culture and party like there's no tomorrow. So what's up with the angry, puritanical angels?

"It's traditional for the church to be the first band," a guy next to me laughs while pressing a slopping mug of rum into my hands.

"Don't worry," he says. "It gets dirtier."

Sure enough, the next troupe - the Dirty Martinis - arrives with a blast of calypso rap and several hundred dancers wearing little more than beaded headdresses and purple body glitter. And those are just the men.

The West Indian sun bakes the packed street as the Martinis gyrate in flashes of sweat-soaked flesh. Couples indulge in the casual "wuk up," a dance that looks as if it could result in pregnancy. Somewhere nearby, a man on a porch sprays us with a hose. The welcome mist sparkles in rainbowed halos.

Barbados Essentials: Where to stay and what to do...

I've fallen into this intoxicating melee on my first day in Barbados, intending to spend just the morning enjoying the carnival. But this is a full-blown Mardi Gras, New Year's Eve and Halloween rolled together in a Caribbean ménage à trois. The rest of Barbados can wait: Today I'm going with the flow of this happy human river dancing and singing and drinking its way to the sea. I'll have plenty of time over the next few days to recover on the beach while exploring the isle's subtler charms.

We were aboard the first ship of settlers in 1627," George Clarke says as we sit on a stone wall beside a garden at his home, Sweetfield Manor. George, a tall ivory-haired stockbroker, was born in New York in the 1940s, but Clarke blood runs from Kent, England, to the very beginning of this former colony. "My father was born here, and his father was born here," George says. "I've been coming down here since I was a child.

"George and his artist wife, Anni, settled here after Sept. 11. They restored the overgrown plantation, converting it into one of the island's most romantic bed-and-breakfasts. The big house has polished sleigh beds and mahogany antiques; the honey-colored floors smell of sailing ships and squeak softly under my bare feet. The former slave quarters, where I'm staying, have been reborn into cool, air-conditioned bedrooms with limestone walls and Dutch doors. Beyond a bright hedge of bougainvillea, I can see all the way down to Bridgetown and to the amber sands of the famed Platinum Coast. With my only visit to the beach so far a blurry Grand Kadooment memory, I ask George where he and Anni escape to from their hilltop retreat.

"We have a secret beach," he says, "where we can sit in the sand and eat almonds as they fall from the trees." I just happen to have a map with me, but George shakes his head. "That's why it's still secret," he says. Instead, he offers me another beautiful beach no one knows about. "It has tall sand dunes and big waves. There are even the ruins of a rum shop."

George runs his finger along the map, tracing back roads from Bridgetown to the far eastern shore. His route is punctuated with typically Bajan landmarks, including a can't-miss last turn. "When you see the black cow," he says, "take a left."I'm the only guest at the manor, so he volunteers to show me the way - after a detour through the forest highlands in the center of the island. There, in a hidden valley, an old friend has recreated an enchanting Eden...

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