I didn’t think I’d ever go to a place like Barbados. I didn’t think I could afford it. It was a place other people went while I went to Bar Harbor. I wasn’t even sure where Barbados was. But when my older brother announced that he and his wife were moving there to work for the American Embassy for three years, I started thinking about the Caribbean.

The first year my brother was gone, he wrote about the warm weather, the white sand beaches, the steel drum music, and the monkeys that ate fruit off the trees in his yard every morning.

“I live in paradise,” he wrote. “Come on down. The poinsettias grow wild here.”

That winter, I called too late to make affordable reservations, as the flights out of Boston were nearly $700 round trip. I tried again in July, and the price had dropped to $494, so I booked a flight for the following January. It was a long way off, but my careful planning and willingness to get myself to Boston would pay off in savings. It helped, too, when American Airlines had a sale, and my ticket price went down to $360.

It was a long journey from Bangor to Boston to Miami to Barbados, but when we landed this past January, I could see through the windows that I was, indeed, in paradise.

Before I got off the plane, I had changed from my tennis shoes to sandals. I had taken off my woolen sweater and winter coat, stuffed them in a bag and put winter behind me.

There is nothing like the first breath of fresh air after being stuck on a plane all day. But there is truly nothing like a breath of fresh air in Barbados no matter what you’ve been doing all day.

An island of 166 square miles, there is always a sea breeze and it smells like the ocean, like fruit, like flowers, like summer.

There’s also the smelly dump, Mount Stinkeroo, my brother told me as we whipped through a rotary and zipped down the strip of highway on the left side of the road past goats and cows and cane fields and the small, shacklike homes called chattel houses.

Malodorous as Mount Stinkeroo could be in the tropical climate, it was never as impressive as the sights and sounds that made up the rest of the trip. On the first night, I told my brother I didn’t want to do the regular tourist things. So we skipped the sugar plantation tours, the safari hikes, the submarine adventures and the flower forest. We didn’t scuba dive, parasail, dance or drink Barbadian rum at the bars.

Instead, I spent nearly the whole week on the beach where the blue-green water seemed like fluid jewels that bled into a perfect blue sky. I walked along the shoreline admiring the exotic trees and flowers that met the sand. I picked up pieces of coral and listened to the accents of German, French, Italian and American as people walked by. I took long swims in a restful cove and splattered on lots of coconut-scented lotions and oils. I was careful not to sit under trees marked with red paint because, my brother told me, if it rains (which it sometimes did in a quick burst of warm water), the tree acid from the runoff is caustic.

Occasionally, a vendor would walk by trying to sell fresh aloe or native crafts, or women would ask to knot my hair into tiny braids. Every few minutes, Bajan men would call from the shoreline where they revved their jet skis and tried to get tourists to take rides for money. A simple “no thanks” generally convinced them to move on to the next person. Twice a day, the Jolly Roger, a party schooner that resembles a pirate ship, would cruise by with dance music booming and tourists loaded on rum punch. But generally, the beach was calm, uncrowded, sparkling.

One day, my brother drove us up to the north point of the island, where the Atlantic Ocean gives a wild contrast to the Caribbean side. Here the water is raucous, as in Maine, and crashes its aqua surf against high cliffs of sedimentary rock covered in a coral cap. On the way home, we stopped for lunch at an outdoor cafe in Bridgetown, the major city on the island. I ate a Barbadian standard: rice and pigeon peas with just a touch of nutmeg. My brother had a flying fish cutter (sandwich) and his wife had marinated fish. For dessert, we chose fresh figs (pygmy bananas) from a fruit seller who also offered mangoes, cherries, starfruit, tomatoes, and grapes.

Back at my brother’s house, we strolled around the yard looking for tiny frogs, one of many animals that contribute to the jungle sounds that go on nearly constantly in the background of Barbadian life. We watched as one baby green monkey darted across the yard — under lemon trees, lime trees, grapefruit trees and into a banana grove. In its mouth, the monkey carried a round piece of fruit and was fleeing a neighbor waving a newspaper.

The next day, we took a catamaran cruise along the west coast. We stopped near an old shipwreck, put on our snorkels and jumped into the water. My brother held a plastic bag of bread above his head until we reached the wreck and then brought a handful of bread into the water. Hundreds of fish in rainbow colors darted toward us, bumping into our bodies and swimming among our limbs in hopes of getting a nibble of the bread. For several seconds, I couldn’t breathe because of the excitement, and I noticed my brother’s grin through his mask.

Seconds later, the captain of the catamaran, who snorkeled with us, grabbed my arm and pointed downward to a two-foot-long eel that was slithering through a reef. Then the captain dove after the eel, which grinned a toothy sneer at him and disappeared into a cavern of coral.

That night when I went to bed, I could still feel the rhythms of the boat as I drifted off to sleep in a chorus of frogs and crickets coming in through the screenless window.

In the morning, my brother drove me to the beach for a 6 a.m. swim before I began my journey back to Maine. In the 15 hours it took me to get home, I went from 87 degrees in Barbados to 6 degrees in Bangor. But the cold didn’t seem as cold — not with the colors of hibiscus flowers in my mind, and the smells of fruit trees and the feel of the golden warmth blowing through my hair in January.