Погода: Розо, январь

December and January are the months regulars call perfect for Guadeloupe, with November to March or April the wider good run, and our row agrees more quietly than it looks: 18.6 precipitation days sound alarming until you see the 51.3mm spread across them, under three millimetres a day. The row is also unusually flat - 26.5C by day over 24.1C at night, barely two degrees apart. The honest part concerns the town itself. Regulars are blunt that Pointe-a-Pitre is a working city rather than a resort, worth passing through quickly except for the Memorial ACTe, and that the beaches and hotels are at Gosier a short ride away. A hire car is treated as essential. The record: humidity 77 percent, 10.5 hours of sun, a 26.7C sea and AQI 35.

Dominica's forum is upfront that October sits in peak hurricane season, so the odds of a tropical wave or storm affecting a trip are real, though a direct hit remains the exception rather than the rule. As a lush rainforest island, it's genuinely going to rain somewhere on Dominica most days, but posters describe showers as typically brief and scattered, heavier up in the mountains than down in Roseau itself, with a lot of the rain falling overnight. October through December is actually recommended by some specifically for the World Creole Festival, drawing visitors despite the storm risk.

Forum posters consistently describe Dominica, 'the nature island,' as the most rainforested of the Eastern Caribbean islands - genuinely rainy somewhere on the island most days, which posters point to as exactly why it stays so lush and green with so many rivers. Posters are equally consistent that showers here tend to be brief, usually followed quickly by sunshine again, and one visitor's multi-week April-May stay in Roseau itself saw no rain at all, even as areas just a few miles inland got frequent heavy downpours. Posters generally name the December-through-April stretch as the main dry season with the calmest seas, and specifically recommend April for hiking, noting that conditions only get hotter and wetter as hurricane season approaches in the summer months.