You don't realize you're awake when you first become aware of the whispering of the waves. Moments later you still haven't opened your eyes, because you don't remember that when you do you'll be greeted with the day's first glimpse of paradise, a twinned and inverted image of the vision that you drank down slowly the night before. It's morning on Tortola, and breakfast is waiting.

Breakfast consists mainly of a plate of magnificent local fruit. Mango and papaya trees grow wild here. If you've never had a ripe mango off the tree, you just don't know what mango tastes like. Some non-native watermelon and lime wedges fill out the presentation, with a garnish of the peppery oregano-style herb that grows like a weed in the surrounding jungle.

At the corners of our breakfast plate is a fruit picked off a nearby tree. Its woody scales might lead one to mistake it for a pinecone, but when cut open it yields up a comb of creamy white flesh studded with hard black pits the size of almonds.

This is Annona squamosa, more commonly known as a sugar apple. A tropical cousin of the mulberry, it thrives in South America, the Caribbean, and has even been cultivated in southern Florida. It sometimes passes under the name "sweetsop", a contrast to the "soursop" fruit whose juice is popular in the leeward islands. It is also sometimes confused with the custard apple, which is in fact a related but quite different (and not nearly as luscious) fruit, Annona reticulata.

The flesh of a sugar apple is creamy as custard, its texture (but thankfully not its odor) reminiscent of durian. The sweet, mild flesh can be scooped out of the hard shell with either a spoon or the teeth. The flesh is sucked away from the onyx seeds, which are then spit out. A bit uncouth, perhaps, but this process pays dividends. We toss our seeds over the side of the balcony, into the jungle covering the weaving path down to the sea. In two to three years there will likely be a few more sugar apple trees bearing fruit here, and as far as I'm concerned they are well worth the wait.