The pigs drink beer, my friends at the organic farm where I was to stay told me. I knew right away this would be a special trip to the Caribbean. But it wasn't until later, when I tasted my first farm-fresh mango on the beach after going for a snorkel-dive, that I started to understand what agritourism was all about.

Sensations completely new to me washed over me - from sandy bottom to sweet pulp entangled teeth. As I sat on the beach and watched the sunset from underneath the canopy edge of the thick west end forest, my preconceived notions of the ideal Caribbean vacation faded away forever.

I was lucky as a child, since my parents took my brother and I almost once a year to different island location. Cozumel, Bermuda, and even some Philippine islands were all on the list. Yet the more diverse places we went, the more I realized they seemed the same. The canned hotel experience offered less and less opportunity for us to interact with the unique qualities and people in each of these wonderful places. Even when we went to Jamaica, we strayed little from the high-rise resort and its many familiar safety-assuring comforts. Years later, when I started to appreciate my earlier travel experiences, I realized that I had learned very little about the peoples and lands for which we paid top dollar to visit.

Agritourism, which simply means low-key tourism in an agricultural setting, gave me a chance to do what I always wanted – to blend in with the people and landscape in meaningful ways. Now that tourism is the world’s number one industry and nature-based tourism is its fastest growing sector, my fellow maturing “X-generation” members have new travel opportunities cropping up all over the world.

One such a place is rural St. Croix, in the US Virgin Islands, where farming and fishing has been a traditional way of life – even before Columbus greeted Taino and Carib Indians there during his infamous 1493 landing. In modern colonized times, St. Croix’s two larger yet more visited sister islands have followed different economic routes. One caters to the mega cruise-ship “mass tourism” market with intense shopping-mall type development, and the other offers park ecotourism, where people visit nature during the day and return to hotels at night. Of the three islands, and many others in the Caribbean, St. Croix offers a distinctly fertile playground where natural beauty dominates and people are still part of the process. Indeed, I found it to be a delicious relationship.

At night, the Caribbean breeze blew through the hardwood cabana where I stayed at the Virgin Island Sustainable Farm Institute (VISFI), making a soft shaaa-wunk sound when the heavy-laden mango tree brushed against the outer wall. All around my comfortably simple abode were other strange fruit-bearing bushes, trees, and vines, like fiddlewood, moringa, and passion fruit. These were all part of a breakfast that was hearty enough to power me along for an expertly guided Danish windmill ruins interpretive hike through the neighboring Mount Victory Camp later that morning.

I returned to VISFI for a farm-fresh lunch and joined an afternoon workshop where I learned with other visitors from an older seventh-generation medicine woman and a 7-year old dreadlocked girl how to make a beautiful bowl out of the calabash fruit (which is gourd that hangs from a tree said to have washed ashore thousands of years ago from Asia at the very beginnings of agriculture). Then I went to another neighbor’s farm, which also had a fully-stocked island rum bar, where I was stunned to see two giant pigs open and guzzle full cans of beer (non-alcoholic, of course). Finally, toward the end of the day, I made my way down to the sea where I swam through the coral reefs teeming with colorful creatures.

When I returned to the beach, I realized that I had changed as a person. Never before had I quite a tourism experience as that first day. In many ways, I felt more at home than I did at home. Yet I was far away, in an agricultural paradise. I reached into my beach bag for a towel, dripping wet, and felt that hefty mango that had woke me during the previous night. As I punctured its skin with my fingernail, the aromatic release was simply intoxicating. Normally, I would have used the beach chair to enjoy the setting sun. This time, I plopped myself contently in the white sand and looked out over the Caribbean. I still have yet to find a more refreshing mango.

Nate Olive is a coastal conservation scientist and journalist who studies meaningful interactions between people and ecological  conservation areas. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the Warnell School of Forestry at the University of Georgia, in the department of  Natural Resource Recreation and Tourism. His work on sustainable tourism planning is funded by the Virgin Islands Sustainable Farm Institute on the island of St. Croix.