This week’s travel dream: Letting go in the Caribbean

Caribbean beach vacations are “indulgent, lazy, and uneducational”—but that’s the appeal, said Nicole Krauss in Condé Nast Traveler. After years of traveling only to challenging locales like the Arctic or postwar Sarajevo in search of revelatory experiences, I finally realized that there might be nothing wrong with a vacation whose purpose was simple escape and recuperation. “To want only to be removed from it all—was that really so much to ask?”

Before catching our flight to Turks and Caicos, our family had to get used to friends “going into paroxysms about the extraordinary color of the water” surrounding this archipelago in the southern Bahamas. In truth, the “startling electric blue” of the sea didn’t disappoint, but its clarity is its more important feature, allowing sunlight to nurture one of the largest barrier reefs in the world. Amid all the angelfish, parrot fish, and eagle rays on display, my favorite sighting was a sea turtle that “graced me with its company” as I snorkeled alone one day. Its “beauty and fragility” haunted me long afterward. Such wonderful moments became routine. By a beach bonfire, my oldest son saw the moon through a telescope for the first time, along with Venus and Jupiter with its moons. Another day, his brother spent hours in the ocean learning the fine art of floating.

The most important lesson of the trip came to me as I was lounging about at Amanyara Resort. The resort is located on the island of Providenciales, but whereas the hotels on Grace Bay are crammed together “like the crowded properties of someone who is about to win at Monopoly,” Amanyara sits in a private reserve on an otherwise uninhabited coast. The staff proved devoted to fulfilling guests’ every request, from off-menu dinner items to the removal of a mildly imperfect concrete wall. But vacationing in Turks and Caicos isn’t about having endless choices—it’s about having nearly none. After waking up, you go to the beach, lie around, read, swim, and drink something fruity. “Today will be like tomorrow, and tomorrow like yesterday.” For a week, it made me happy.

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At the Amanyara Resort (amanresorts.com), pavilions start at $1,300 per night.