For a tourist (with a lot of money), Antigua might be the perfect spot. White, long beaches, ridicolously expensive resorts with background-checked staff and no exposure to local issues. A traveler would have a different time though. Antigua is crowded, has quite a lot of crime, boatloads of tourists, and according to a local Rasta in Dominica, there’s lots of people with evil intent. I arrived there on March 31, and departed the next day. I won’t be going back if I can help it.

However, 24 hours in Antigua gave me some insight in the local political process. That part of the story started something like this:

“Sun beatin’ on ya”, Mr Josiah said. “Get in the car”. I was walking from my guest house to the city along the local roads, and it was anything but cold. Mr Josiah and his wife drove by on the way to St. John’s, my destination, and wouldn’t be the ones to leave the pale-looking traveler out on the streets to fry. They set me off at a local bar so I could get a beer and some food.

“Good choice for you to come here”, Mr Josiah uttered as I left the car. “It’s interesting here today”. I didn’t understand what he meant until I spoke to Sid.

Evernote, for those who don’t know, is a magnificent application. It synchronizes your notes to any Mac, PC, iPhone and Windows Mobile, or you can use the web interface. And it recognizes handwriting or printed text in images. I’ve used it actively since July, and I’d like to share my experiences with it.

I loathe excessive paper. The only paper I use is my Moleskine notebook for note-taking, sketching and brainstorming, I still enjoy books in dead-tree format, and there are some meetings where paper is inevitable. Other than that, Evernote has made me free from paper. Or rather, liberated from paper.

Here’s my most important use cases for Evernote:

1. Business card and paper inbox. Whenever someone gives me a business card, I take a picture of it on my iPhone (with the Griffin Clarifi, that is), upload it with Evernote, then give it back.

Evernote’s image recognition gives me a searchable database of business cards. Way better than crumbling them up in my pockets. And it’s simple to add them to my contacts later.

Incoming paper that can’t be made into a task or needs archiving of some sort immediately gets “scanned” in batches with my digital camera, then added to Evernote. The physical version gets thrown away.

I’m risking some trouble with warranty receipts and tax papers since I throw them away as well, but you don’t have to. Less paper is still better than it used to be!