ANTIGUA, West Indies -- Picture perfect.

In some places in the world, that phrase isn't a cliché. It's an accurate description.

The beaches of Antigua, for example, are picture perfect.

Located in the heart of the Lesser Antilles' Leeward Islands, Antigua boasts 365 beaches (``one for every day of the year'') -- a sandy parallel to lush Dominica, 100 miles south, which claims 365 rivers.

But while Dominica's waters act as if they're charting their own courses, twisting, turning and entwining themselves -- sometimes violently -- within dense jungle paths, Antigua's beaches, especially on the southern and western shores, lie still and serene.

Antigua's sand is the stuff of hourglasses: perfectly smooth, almost sparkly in appearance. And Antigua's waters are warm. Bathwater warm.

Goes-perfectly-with-a-cool-drink warm.

But as soon as you drive south of the airport into the island's interior, away from the multimillion-dollar resorts and their property lines that divide and define the beaches, a very different landscape unfolds. Paradise and poverty become neighbors. At least that's what I discovered on my second day here, in search of Hermitage Bay.

LAP OF LUXURY

The stretch of gravel that leads to the all-inclusive Hermitage Bay resort is unmarked and easy to miss, thanks to dozens of indiscernible, pothole-laden roads veering off from Valley Road on the island's west side.

About four miles southwest of the capital of St. John's, Hermitage Bay lies due west of the village of Jennings, which, like others here, is distinguished from its neighbors not by a welcome sign but by its church and petrol station.

Brochures list the resort's address simply as ``Hermitage Bay,'' synonymous with a small inlet of the Caribbean Sea protected by Pearns Point. Mail is received via a post office box in St. John's; guests are received via explicit directions from town, recited over the telephone by the resort's front-desk clerk.

In other words, Hermitage Bay is so remote, it's almost impossible to find. Which is precisely the point.

Parts of the makeshift street I followed were so wrought with foliage that it was hard to find a clear path to follow. After 15 or 20 minutes of blind navigation and several false turns, there it was: an oasis in the form of a neatly landscaped roundabout guarded by a single attendant and, behind him, a simple, elegant, open-air lobby through which shone a stretch of white sand and a horizontal stripe of turquoise sea.

After parking my economy-size Toyota and allowing the attendant to open my squeaky door, I straightened my sundress and approached the sleek, low-slung monolith that is the Hermitage Bay resort. Once in the lobby, I approached the concierge desk and asked if I might have a word with the co-owner, Andy Thesen, whose name had been passed along by a host at my lodging a few days before. I was in the market to swap hotels and wondered what the rates were for this oasis in the dust. A few minutes later, when Thesen emerged from his property's wings, he appeared just as one might expect an owner of a multimillion-dollar luxury Caribbean resort to appear: of indeterminate age, evenly tanned, casually yet elegantly dressed down to his leather flip-flops, and talking with a thick British accent.

He was pleasant enough in answering my questions and, after consulting briefly with a member of his staff, humored me with a quote for a slightly discounted two nights' stay: $1,200. Per night. In U.S. dollars.

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