Anguilla isn’t just a Caribbean travel destination and the best of the islands in the British West Indies, it’s also a club.
Anguilla Club headquarters is this tiny, flat coral island named after an eel with a special sort of brown-sugar-like, white sand that sticks to your skin, and a club of regulars who return like sunburnt migratory birds every year for the festive, high season.
Conversation with the folks sitting at the table or in the beach chairs next to you will inevitably get to the question of how many times you’ve been here, if you remember a beach bar long since closed or evolved, and which of the beaches is your favourite (it’s Maunday’s Bay by the way).
The Anguilla Club welcomes new members annually and traffics in detailed secret menu items, locations to find diet soda or special spirits at a back road shop, the best sun shirt hiding in a hotel gift shop and, most importantly, the best place to get bar – bequed ribs. The answers to these questions change seasonally, sometimes weekly, as inventories are consumed.
Upon returning home with your Anguilla Club membership in hand (and maybe a fancy new Anguilla driver’s license on coloured paper), you now have to explain to friends and family: how to pronounce it (like vanilla), where it is (relative to St Bart’s) and that it is, in fact, not Angola.
Anguilla Club members learn that the mosquitoes are invisible and insatiable around twilight, that Junk’s Hole is a place not an insult and Johnny cakes are best served hot.
As you return to the island and get an upgrade to your Anguilla Club membership you learn how to reach Little Bay by rope and by water, that the Arch now has signs and only a carry-on luggage wardrobe is required at any location.
Some of the original Anguilla Club platinum members will muse nostalgically about when Shoal Bay East was the jam or even when Sandy Ground and the Pump House ruled the roost. The best part of the Anguilla Club? The Anguillans you develop an authentic friendship with, not just a transactional one: connecting in other locales, seeing children grow up, solving problems together.
This is a proud and brave island nation founded by heroes who stood up for their own independence and has no shortage of a sense of self and hard work. Our Anguilla Club is soon getting bigger: bigger planes, bigger runways, bigger hotels. This will see the economic opportunity grow for Islanders.
As our Anguilla Club prepares to sigh and worry, we should all remember what comes next: new members who are welcomed to our special club that is Anguilla.
