St George's is the most beautiful harbour in the Caribbean - best approached from the launch of an expensive cruise liner. But I'm in an eight-seater mini-van. Currently seating nine. The buses on the island of Grenada are all driver-owned, and that means there's always room for one more inside. Tight Clothes, my driver, has a sunstrip declaring 'I, Tight Clothes' and tinted windows, but today it's overcast. "I got a 5% limo tint" he says, "so people can't see in". That also means that Tight can't see out. On a bend known locally as Hit Me Easy, we miss Ooh La La and Ruff Me coming in the opposite direction. This is, apparently, No Problem.

Opening the window, I can see St George's rising in tiers - from the natural horseshoe-shaped harbour to the colour-washed warehouses of the commercial district. It's a mess of architectural styles. There's the fish-scale roofs of the early Georgian townhouses, and the ornate lattice work of the Creole pensions. Breezeblock is becoming increasingly popular, but then St George's isn't pretentious. From the Nutmeg, a wonderful roti house with eight-foot windows opening on to the harbour, you can see the mangoes heading north to St. Vincent, and an impossibly small car sailing south to Tobago. Above all else, this is a working harbour.

With police in white gloves directing traffic and red telephone boxes (the island became a British Associated State in 1967), St George's is a quaint place. Unless it's market day - Grenada's population of 93,000 all stump up for market day. The women take care of business. The children race around, fuelled by impossibly blue drinks that laugh in the face of e-number legislation. And the men take it easy. With unemployment running at over 50%, they don't always have a choice. During the week they drink coconut water - an island cure for everything from club foot to flatulence. On Saturdays they switch to Jack Iron. It's 180-degree proof - a rum so strong that ice sinks in it.

Tonight the island is eager for the Royal Grenadan Police Force calypso finals (now incorporating the Miss Police Week pageant). And everyone around St George's is involved. La Qua Funeral Parlours are providing the stacking chairs. Solid - an irrefutably well-built man - is running the non-profit bar. And Caribbean Agro-Industries are sponsoring the costumes. It's a good-mannered knees-up. Just as well. The winning song is an up-tempo warning to villains everywhere - 'Cut Crime With Persistence'. And WPC Jemma Antoine is voted Miss Police Week. She achieves maximum points for her knowledge of traffic regulations.

On scrubland outside, in the red light of the island's new Pizza Hut, children wait for their parents and throw rocks at land crabs. Egrets stand and wait, hoping to pick over cracked shells. Tethered cows do their best to sleep through an encore of 'Oh no! Calypso!'. You wouldn't know it, but this is the middle of Grenada's tourist district - a strip of land along the Grand Anse beach that separates a bank of self-catering apartments from a handful of low-rise hotels. Grenadian law dictates that hotels can't be taller than the tallest palm trees on the island, but money talks. It won't always be like this. Natural charm doesn't often survive once the developers move in.

Only eight miles away, the coast road rises up to meet the magnificent Grand Etang rainforest. The tarmac disappears into the clouds. Here, the wet trade winds deposit more than 150 inches of rain fall every year as they blow across the high mountains of the interior. The elephant grass and Grand Etang fern just keep on growing. Which is why the footpaths are inaccessible without a guide (Telfor on 442 6200) and a machete. It's here that Grenada's 133 sq. miles reaches heights of over 2,750 feet. Mount St. Catherine dominates the rich green landscape, slipping away to the dry forests of the lowlands and the mangroves of the coast.

Legend has it that Lake Etang is bottomless. When a swimmer drowned there, they say his body was sucked down and washed up on St Lucia. The humourless Grenadian government recently declared, after extensive research, that the lake was not, in fact, bottomless. It was 12 feet deep. Such are the joys of scientific socialism. At the Annandale Falls, a secluded Eden in the west of the rainforest, there is picnicking and swimming. Marquis Falls, reached only by hiking through cocoa and nutmeg fields, isn't as high - but it's wider. In the wet season (from June to December) locals ride down on leaves. At least that's what Pappy tells me.

The only time tourists stop at Pappy's Products (his bizarre general store near Mount Moritz) is when they want to use his washroom. He doesn't care. Pappy will still have them tasting his latest batch of home brew before they leave. He grows the ingredients in tyres in his garden. Hibiscus is good for the asthma. Marigold is good for the heart. And bois bande, well, that's an aphrodisiac made from tree bark. "People send for it from America" says Pappy. I laugh loudly. I throw my head back. My girlfriend buys two bottles and goes to sit in the car. "Mix it with sea moss [another reputed aphrodisiac made from seaweed] "I call that Double Trouble." My girlfriend has taken my wallet. Lucky for her.

Lunch at Morne Fendue, an old plantation house near Sauteurs, is a must. The building has seen better days (intricate lattice work was touched up recently with Halfords spray-paint), but the staff are unrelentingly polite - ladies and gentlemen are directed straight to the washroom before luncheon. The tablecloths are lace, but carpet has been cut into squares for table mats. Soup is served in cups and saucers, before a buffet of sweet potato, yam, callalloo - and the occasional fruit fly. Rooms upstairs ($75USD) are ideal for a real Gone With The Wind experience, but only if you're not intimidated by a place where the Christmas cards stay up all year round.

In Gouyave, the gentle hills are variegated with orange orchards, and coppices of thick green shrubs. Two women wash their clothes in the river, and hang them out to dry on the plum trees. But Gouyave is a Rasta village. Here the municipal painting is sponsored by the 12 tribes of Israel - all red, gold and green. One dreadlocked bar-fly wants to tell me why he's so happy. It's in his genes. "If you had been a slave trader" he says, "French or English, you would have landed the aggressive slaves first in Haiti or Jamaica, then sailed south with the rest. So the further south you go in the Caribbean, the gentler the people. And you don't get no further south than Grenada."

It's certainly difficult to imagine how such a gentle place once summoned up the energy for revolution. But the people of Grenada were consumed with the notion of independence during the 1970s, and supported a coup led by Maurice Bishop's New Jewel Movement in 1979. Bishop began to construct a full-sized jet airport with the aid of the Cubans and the Soviets. It didn't take much imagination to visualize the new Grenada as an advance base supporting leftist movements in South America. And when Bishop was executed for not being radical enough, it was all the excuse the Americans needed.

On October 25, 1983, 400 Marines conducted a helicopter assault on Pearls Airport. For the first time since the Vietnam War, the United States committed regular forces to combat in full swing. Pearls is still there - these days teenagers have driving lessons on what's left of the runway. A small, junked-out Aeroflot biplane, with a Reagan 84 sticker on the fuselage, and a Cubana jet, with a cow tethered to what's left of its undercarriage, are remnants of the flirtation with Communism. America violated the international principles of self determination, but the Grenadians are undeniably grateful. That's why it's never called 'the invasion' - it's simply 'the intervention'.

Nowadays, flights depart from Point Sailines. We fly to Carriacou, Grenada's sister island, in a tiny plane that bounces off clouds and vibrates like a tuning fork. There are two seasons in the Caribbean - wet and dry - and the rains begin as we land on a short runway that crosses the High Street. Barclays is open, but chickens and goats are the only customers. The currents around the island look strong, but the nutrients they bring mean spectacular forests of soft corals - and wonderful diving. Especially around Sandy Island, an impossibly yellow outcrop where Bacardi and Coca Cola have shot advertising campaigns.

Carriacou is famous for its carnival. Every year, islanders attempt to recite Shakespeare flawlessly or get hit over the head with a breadfruit. This is what happens when people don't have television. The Church used to send whisky priests here when they started slurring the Sacrament. Unfortunately, everywhere on the island is "licensed to sell spiritous liquor". In the hardware shop, men come in for nails - but leave with a bellyful of rum. And with a litre of whisky costing considerably less than it does in Scotland (Carriacou is noted for smuggling) priests are now sent somewhere else to dry out.

The Caribbee Inn, an English country house in the tropics, lies at the end of a road fit only for a donkey. It's all mosquito nets and four-posters, with salt cellars shipped over from the Shropshire seat of the owner. The staff know him simply as Mr Robert. There's no air-conditioning - just ceiling fans, and jalousies that open past the banana fronds and make the most of the cooling trade winds. It's one of most relaxing places on earth. And within walking distance (left at the pile of conch shells, and right at the gnarled calabash tree) of Anse La Roche beach - a sheer joy, where the water is as clear as gin. Here you feel a traveller, not a tourist.

That's the joy of Grenada and Carriacou - the sense that you are discovering something new. There are no souvenirs, apart from spice baskets and shorts made from flour bags. No postcards, apart from social-realist photo montages of factories. And no Diet Coke. Which means the Americans can't have arrived yet. In Grenada a restaurant like Mamma's can still thrive. It used to serve monkey. Mamma herself would bring the creatures to your table, and introduce them to you by name. But tastes change, and now she serves armadillo and possum. Sure, the island is ringed with miles of picture-perfect sands, with a temperate climate all year round. But so does the rest of the Caribbean. The difference is that, for now at least, Grenada is for adventures.