Sunday morning walk in St John's, Antigua

A spectacular tropical downpour delayed the start of our walk from Dickenson's Bay, obscuring even the closest objects behind a flapping sheet of falling water, thrashing around in the ferocious wind. The storm finally sped off across the Caribbean towards Guadeloupe, stirring up the sea like a rampaging aerial monster. We ventured out, tentatively, as the ever-shifting sky looked as though it wasn't yet done with raining, but once we were committed to our Komoot-planned route down into St John's, and were beyond the point of dashing back to avoid a drenching, the sun appeared magically and pinned us to the ground with intense heat instead.

We followed the road around the northern end of the big salt lagoon called McKinnon's Pond, where hundreds of brown pelicans and terns dive constantly for fish, watched very closely by a circling squadron of frigate birds, intent on a spot of aerial piracy. The pelicans are a bit too big for them to attack directly, but one false move swallowing the catch and a solid, almost metallic, ultra-streamlined black shape drops from the sky in an instant to steal the prize. Around the edges of the lagoon, several different species of heron and egret stand in the shallows watching for their turn at the dinner table. Their anti-frigate strategy is to snatch their supper so fast that the human eye can hardly follow it, then retreat under the cover of the nearest mangrove before they can be spotted and ambushed. The smaller white egrets gather together in one place, where they cackle to each other in a tone which, from a distance, weirdly reproduces the exact sound of an old-fashioned transistor radio. Perhaps they're putting off the frigates by pretending to be 1970s humans gone fishin'.

Our route led us on to a back road, via what seemed to be the private gardens of a block of flats. The road was lined with villas bearing suitably tropical names: Sunset, Palm Trees, Bougainvillea and Hibiscus featured heavily. We emerged on to the busy Anchorage Road on the outskirts of St John's, where we had to teeter along narrow, wobbly kerbs to avoid the traffic, through an industrial area well served by fast food outlets and kerbside takeaways. Some of these were small buildings, some were a table, a sunshade/umbrella, some plastic containers and a couple of enormous cooking pots, watched over by the owner, usually a woman, enormously proud of producing "the best" mac n' cheese or jerk chicken on the island.

We eventually came into the centre of the town, which is dominated by the cruise port. While you can see the enormous ships from far off, working out how to get to the port itself is not straightforward. Every street which seems to be leading there suddenly heads off in another direction, while fleets of taxis speed past, carrying cruise ship passengers to enjoy promised land-based activities.

One road diverted us up to the cathedral, a crumbling pile of stone at the top of the only hill, with a view over the whole town, the salt lagoon and the ever present sea. It was Sunday morning and a service was in progress. The full congregation sat in the surprisingly modest, low-ceilinged, wooden nave, listening to a woman singing a lilting hymn in a clear and powerful voice, accompanied enchantingly by a man playing a single steel drum. In front of the altar, a young girl in a long, white robe walked up and down in time with the music, slowly swinging a fragrantly smoking censer. The effect in this most Caribbean of settings was moving. Even the dozens of garrulous cruise ship passengers, milling around outside in the company of various guides, snapping photos of themselves, paused as they ventured inside the cathedral door and stood in respectful silence to listen and watch.

We followed the "High Street" down towards where the cruise port seemed to be. Eventually, we found a an archway, leading through an incongruous shopping mall to the quayside. A giant floating city was one of two cruise ships in port that morning. It poured out an endless stream of mostly middle-aged, mostly super-tanned and scantily dressed people. There was a shape to many of them which suggested that they were not in immediate need of any further visits to the bottomless buffet. They ambled slowly along the quay, looking slightly lost on terra firma, and were funnelled down into the shopping mall. The narrowing path concentrated the throng into a small area, where they were easy pickings for a shoal of darting taxi drivers and tour operators, ready to pounce with wide smiles and clipboards displaying photos of the delights to be visited on the island. I couldn't help imagining David Attenborough's quiet, serious voice, commenting earnestly on Sunday evening footage of dolphins circling anchovies.

We backed away through the shopping mall, ducking and diving through taxi drivers, feeling slightly dazed. A municipal information board at the edge of the harbour, featuring a stick figure clambering up a mountain, urged us to "proceed to higher ground" in the event of a "strong earthquake" or other "tsunami warning". Sound advice, for sure, but not particularly easy to follow in an area which is literally as flat as a pancake and which would probably find itself very quickly swallowed up by the keel of a floating city if a tsunami were to happen. Luckily, today both earth and sea remained in their proper places.

The Komoot trail came to our rescue and led us out of the town, past the "Clouds of Glory" church (which looked very much in need of a heavenly refit), and on through a residential area. The houses here were modest, with numbers rather than names, and small front gardens, where bright, tropical lilies and bougainvillea jostled with crops of green beans and squashes. One house was painted brilliant orange and pink and its owner had managed to fill its front garden with agave-type succulents which exactly matched its tones.

People were about their usual Sunday morning jobs and leisure; weeding, painting front doors, washing cars. We came across a street market, where old ladies were selling vegetables from their gardens and a younger man chopped up slabs of meat for sale, with a practised, one-handed swish of a machete, while with his other hand he waved away the flies. Various church services were taking place in what appeared to be private houses, the congregations squeezed in with standing room only. One preacher giving a sermon in what appeared to be a garage was urgently entreating his followers to "Repent! AT LEAST seven times a day!".

In many of the Caribbean islands, a modest neighbourhood near a port in the capital would not be a place for a stranger, let alone a tourist, to linger. Here in St John's, however, there was no sense of danger, or even mild edginess. The people we encountered simply greeted us kindly.

We came eventually to the road leading back towards Dickenson's Bay. We followed it past some grander houses on the outskirts of St John's until we came to a sign pointing down a track to Saint James's Fort. There we came to a long, sandy beach, reaching away towards Runaway Bay to the north. Groups of tourists hung about the beach, waiting on the blistering sand for a chance to ride two very compliant horses bareback into the waves, while their owner took pictures of the rather wobbly operations. Hands clung frantically to manes and white legs swung helplessly as the horses gently adjusted their balance and tried their best to keep their giggling, swaying riders on board.

It started raining again as we reached the Mystic Bar, a popular - and today extremely crowded - bar at the northern end of Runaway Bay. We took shelter for a few minutes with a dog and her puppy, all four of us watching the shifting patterns of wind on McKinnon's Pond and waiting for them to signal the end of the rain shower.

We didn't have long to wait before the sun joined us again and we continued on our way along the edge of the lagoon, frigate birds, pelicans and egrets to-ing and fro-ing above our heads. We met several more strings of wobbly horse riders, one group led by a little boy, about ten years old, who had decided that today he would ride side saddle.

Back at Dickenson's Bay, we ended our walk on the lovely, horseshoe-shaped sandy beach. Sunday was in full swing. A large, extended local family had come along in force and brought their Sunday lunch with them, to cook on a full-size barbecue under a convenient coconut tree.

Towards the end of the afternoon we saw the giant ship we had seen up close earlier in the day, finally leaving port. It looked just as huge from this distance, as though part of St John's had broken loose and was sailing away to sea to become part of some other Caribbean capital.