BY CHRIS GILL
There it was, before my very eyes, a train, complete with driver, and astonishingly it was about to leave on time.
So as you can imagine, I am not in England.
The St Kitts scenic railway is the last narrow gauge passenger train in the West Indies. It is a bit different than your average Thameslink service.
It rolls effortlessly at around 10mph through 18 miles of countryside, beyond mountains and volcanoes, abandoned sugar estates and rainforests.
Aaah rainforests, no wonder it is hammering it down.
But that is a hazard of the Caribbean, one minute gloriously sunny, the next you are wading through floods.
St Kitts is an early stop on a cruise to some of the area’s most fantastic islands and it’s amazing to see the locals’ response to the tourists who flock in their many thousands to the region.
As the train waddles onwards across bridges over ravines, you dare not look down, tiny children race the length of their school playground, cheering, almost as if they hadn’t seen another human being before.
People hang out of their shanty town homes, there are big smiles and hearty waves to be seen amidst lines of dripping washing.
And so it is the same everywhere. There is the theory once you have seen one Caribbean island you have seen them all. Not quite. Some are poorer than others, some prettier, some even have more than a whiff of wealth about them.
The only other day we were lashed by the heavens was in St Maartens, a curious destination, split into a Dutch and French sector.
The water bus whisks us from ship to shore, and to enough diamond shops to give you indigestion for a year. No one can resist a bargain, but the selling to tourists is an education in itself.
None of the goods have prices on them, but it’s out with the calculator, divide the first number you thought of, half it, add 100 and times by two then divide again by 20 and there is your price.
Oh, there is an extra £50 off for having a pretty face.
Bit of a game, but the wise Brits abroad are shrewd and realise when their number is up on a good deal.
Cruising is an expanding industry, the age range of those on board the multitude of massive ships that ply the oceans seasonally, gets lower each year.
Even though there are 3,000 people on P&O’s massive Ventura, which we picked up in Barbados, it is often hard to find a crowd, except around lunch and breakfast times in the cafe eating areas.
During sea days, there is no end of activities, learn all about digital photography, listen to a piano recital, watch Premiership football, laze on he deck, take part in quizzes, or see how many table tennis balls you can accidentally despatch into the sea.
But as soon as the ships hit port the masses swamp the tin-towns, sometimes even doubling the population of places, such as the extraordinary Grand Turk, 30 miles from the Bahamas, which sits on a coral reef.
It is almost like a land where time forgot, but with stunning beaches inhabited by very few people.
You can only guess what kind of existence the islanders have on a strip that is six miles long and barely a mile wide.
We try the stunning beaches wherever we go, Cane Garden Bay in Tortola, in the British Virgin islands is one to savour, Grand Anste in Grenada is another and then there are as many sandy shores in Antigua as there appear to be diamond shops in St Maartens… all 365 of them.
And so no complaints from me, or our gang from Bedford… well maybe one.
Am I the only person in the world to go deep into a rainforest, in Dominica, and it didn’t rain . . . that’s the Caribbean for you.