First we hear the screams. Guttural shrieks that echo through the whirr and drip of the rainforest. The sound is half fear, half exaltation, and it’s coming from a series of zip wires strung through the top of the trees. The last time I went zip lining, I was seven and we called it a ‘death slide’. Today our guide, MacGuiver, straps us carefully into the safety harnesses.
There are 12 high-tensile steel cables spread through the trees of Errand Estate, a former spice plantation, inland from the fishing village of Dennery. The early wires are low, but they become progressively faster and higher, with the highest at 150ft. Looking down is vertiginous, but summon up your courage and jump and the feeling is close to flying. At 800ft, the longest wire bursts through the sun-dappled canopy and into open sky above a river, affording stunning views over the top of the forest. St Lucia is fringed with bright, powder beaches and crystal-clear water, but the interior is a tangle of primeval rainforest, wet, shady, crawling with life. Above rise crumbling volcanoes, whose fumaroles puff sulphur, and famously the twin Pitons, the two jagged peaks that are emblems of the island.
As MacGuiver catches me onto the platform at the other end, I ask him why the tree holding it is padded. ‘Sometimes we get huge people, and they go very fast,’ he says. ‘And it’s for the guys who finish up wrapping their legs round either side of the tree.’
If you prefer to be self-propelled, on the southwest of the island, Anse Chastanet, a former sugar plantation, is now home to a jungle bike circuit. The bikes, an impressive array of Cannondale 500s, are stabled in the buildings where the cane was squeezed, and the juice boiled into molasses.
Tyson, nicknamed ‘Bike’ Tyson, leads us onto the main two-mile circuit, off which the expert routes loop. It is a stunning place to cycle: orange birds of paradise and red ginger lilies break up the green of the elephant ferns. As the track twists through thickets of bamboo, my tyres shudder over roots, skidding when I corner in the dirt. The air is rich with the smell of breadfruit and heavy with humidity. I’m grateful for the cold spray from drenched banana leaves I crash through, as I shoot down decaying sugar irrigation systems to the old reservoir.
Exhausted, elated and coated in mud, I hand the bike back and walk down to Anse Chastanet’s private beach. The scuba diving here is some of the best in the Caribbean. The area is a marine reserve, containing the dramatic Superman’s Flight – a hard and soft coral reef, where you see turtles, seahorses and frogfish.
