Anguilla: the A-list location for a Z-list budget
The Hollywood A-listers are an elusive bunch at the best of times. I've been on the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla for four days now and it seems that the elite have developed the same characteristics of the creature that the island is named after in Italian: like the eel, they're always just slipping out of my grasp. 'Honestly, David Letterman was in here just an hour or so ago,' beams the owner of Lloyd's Guest House. 'He was asking for directions to one of the beaches.' The previous day, I had been accosted by the manager of Santorini, a restaurant in a five-star resort where rooms go for more than a thousand dollars a night in peak season. 'Malkovich left only last week,' he told me over a shot of Pyrat, the lethal locally-brewed rum. 'This island took over from St Barts a long time ago as a place for the stars to relax in. They just don't get any bother here from anyone.'
Only 15 miles long, this British overseas territory regularly plays host to the likes of Robert de Niro, 50 Cent, Brad Pitt, Uma Thurman and Rod Stewart. The official tourist brochure is glossier than Vanity Fair
But the truth is you don't have to be an Oscar winner or a rock star to afford a holiday on this most northerly of the Leeward Islands. Markedly different from its near neighbours, the designer-store clogged St Martin and the resort saturated Antigua, there is a deliciously languid vibe to the deserted beaches, undeveloped scrubland and slow-as-syrup waters of the salt ponds.
The island's fascinating history is displayed at a museum owned by Anguillan Colville Petty. Fought over between the English and the French for hundreds of years, the locals were enslaved, then largely ignored as attempts to create profitable trades in cotton, tobacco and sugar all failed - largely because of the lack of rain and dry scrubby land of the interior.
Ruled by neighbouring St Kitts from 1825, Anguilla's larger neighbour neglected the island to such an extent that come the 1960s there was still no electricity or phones. Most Anguillans fled the poverty. Those that remained revolted during a beauty contest one night in 1967, throwing the St Kitts police force off the island and asking to be taken back under British control.
One of the most wonderful things about the island is that every single beach is publicly owned - so there is nothing to stop you sharing the same stretch of fabulous white sand as De Niro et al, though you probably won't get the butlers from the secluded, wallet shreddingly expensive resorts such as Altamer rushing to fill up your champagne glass.
David Lloyd, the owner of Lloyd's, the oldest hotel on the island, a charming wooden clapboard building, shows me the bullet holes from 1967 when the hotel was fired on in the revolution. My delightful room, with its 1950s colonial feel - except for the air-con and decent showers - cost £56 per night. The hotel is only two minutes' walk from Crocus Bay, a secluded beach which, for each of my daily visits during peak season, was totally empty.
For the greatest of all of Anguilla's beaches though, head to Rendezvous Bay where the secret of how to have this island on the cheap is revealed. The Anguilla Great House is a collection of beautifully-maintained gingerbread style cottages on the beach to which you have the same access as the elite staying in the swanky Cuisinart resort and spa next door, but for as little as £85 per night instead of several hundred.
All the top resorts are open to day visitors so each morning I pottered over to Cuisinart to enjoy incredible breakfasts of saltfish with salsa and eggs benedict, all for less than £10 a head.
Gwen's Reggae Grill is Rod Stewart's favourite. It's located in a prime position in Shoal Bay East next to one of the island's few coconut groves, but it's pretty reasonable too. Food typically centres around generous chicken and rib combos and an array of lobster, shrimp, snapper and crayfish, with a whole lobster priced at £15. The best of the local food shacks is the little known B and D's on Long Bay where locally caught fish, including hind and mahi-mahi was served al-fresco to me on a paper plate with rice, chips, salad and beer for around five pounds.
I was finding it a struggle to get my heart rate above the pace of a nonagenarian elephant until the last night. Then, thanks to a local taxi driver called Calvin who refused to take me back to the hotel until I'd joined him for a drink, I was propelled into what he called 'a proper Anguilla place': the extremely sweaty and anarchic Red Dragon Dance Club, the only place on the island to have something approaching a proper dance floor. Reggae and occasional calypso hits roar out of the speakers until dawn at weekends and it was only here that I really felt something of the vibe that goes on among locals far away from the cocktails and sun loungers.
As Calvin explains as the dawn begins to break on my last morning on the island: 'I had Ethan Hawke here last year. I just headed straight for the posh places but he made me stop for fish at this shack on the way. He loved it. Man! That's the place where I eat every day!'
It seems that Ethan and his showbiz ilk may be savvier than I thought when it comes to finding the numerous bargains in this corner of the Caribbean.
Essentials
There are no direct flights to Anguilla. Virgin flies to Antigua from £398 from where Liat has 40-minute flights to Anguilla for around £90 return. Rob Crossan stayed at the Anguilla Great House and Lloyd's Guest House which cost from £85 and £56 per night respectively. See www.anguilla-vacation.com for more.