Go to Heaven if you want,” the celebrated 19th-century American novelist Mark Twain once said. “I’d rather stay in Bermuda.” The creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn knew a thing or two about the great outdoors, but while his tales tended to have an expansive setting, he also had a keen and critical eye for life’s minutiae.
And Bermuda, a scorpion-shaped string of islands in the Atlantic some 650 miles east of North Carolina (four hours time behind the UK), is undeniably minute. However, like all great miniatures, the detail is magnificent. Bermuda has been described by a local writer as “a coral jewel set in a

turquoise sea.” If so, its eight golf courses are like emerald studs on a 22-square-mile coronet lined with rose-quartz pink beaches.
Travel writers making comparisons with jewellery deservedly lay themselves open to accusations of hyperbole, but when it comes to Bermuda some special pleading is in order. The elegance which characterises every facet of this astonishing place and the natural beauty which greets its visitors wherever they cast their gaze puts it truly in a class of its own.
Granted, though, like so many of the world’s sumptuous