For many business executives, life's not complete until you've travelled enough to complain about travel. It's a mark of endurance, commitment and savoir faire. My progress towards that highest form of business life was aided last week. I found myself in Bermuda, at an international funds conference.

When you are fairly much a home bird, travel not alone broadens the mind, but revives an Aristotelian sense of wonder. You remark on the unfamiliar and compare them to things back home. And engage in the habit of moaning about how much better everyone, everywhere does things than in Ireland.

Bermuda was balmy warm, but wet. On arrival, experienced Bermuda hands from Ireland of whom there are quite a few, given the standing of Dublin in the international funds area assured us that it would be brilliantly fine the next day. Not quite.

It rained from Saturday to Wednesday, when we checked out. With the rain came interesting lessons.

On the way to the large Southampton Princess hotel from the airport in the dark, you see white roofs among the shadows of trees. You could be forgiven for thinking of expensive mobile homes, but these white roofs were not just a pretty feature of indigenous architecture. They collect the rainwater to be stored in tanks beneath every house. There is no other fresh water source in Bermuda. Dire necessity was the mother of invention.

The roofs displayed a sort of single-mindedness that is not so evident in our island. White roofs in Bermuda make you think we could do with more immediate crises to give birth to some more inventiveness.

The same single-mindedness must be at work in Bermuda to sustain a policy of one car per household and a speed limit of 30 m.p.h. Could we display such purposeful policies to visitors? Certainly not in traffic management. Perhaps in attracting foreign investment, but not quite yet in the management of the infrastructure required for tourism.

"We brought the weather with us," we said to the grateful Bermudans and not-so-grateful visitors. In terms of tourism, places like Bermuda and the Bahamas are supposed to beat our chilly, wet island hands down. But when it rains, what do you do in a place with hotels, beaches and golf courses?

The visitors to Bermuda I saw did something familiar to us: the hardy ones played golf in the rain and the others coveted limited easy chairs in the hotel to look out the big window at the rain-swept sea.

In terms of tourism, Bermuda has tremendous assets, but without the sun, it seems, like many other places, pretty limited. Ireland, on the other hand, is not so dependent on one major factor. There is plenty of variety here, the sort of variety that comes with a long history, enough people and a deep culture, and it is our business to make that advantage pay.

Bermuda, of course, is a great place for conferences because it is normally sunny, it has some big hotels and five easy-to-reach golf courses for that essential conference activity.

There is no "national conference centre" however; you'd wonder whether the controversy over ours has held up development of conferences as a tourist or visitor product here. If so, why?

The other thing that is obvious about Bermuda is that, although it feels American due to its proximity to the North Carolina coast and its popularity with Americans, it is still a British dependent territory. Judging by some local press analysis, islanders do not have warm and fuzzy feelings about Robin Cook, who has completed a review of the British Dependent Territories.

Complete reciprocity between Britain and the territories is being sought, it was reported. "Dependence" is not generally a positive attribute, but things have worked out well so far for Bermuda. A downside of that relationship with London may become clearer to some dependent territories before long, insofar as going their own way in criminal law or human rights is concerned.

All told, Bermuda is a fine place with lots of that unique, traditional Irish, I mean Bermudan, charm. It was a pity to leave, but Manhattan beckoned and I couldn't resist.

Even one day in New York offers opportunities for reflection, plus it gets you nearer the blessed day of being able to whinge about travel.

For now, just one observation will do: the traffic moves, unlike you-know-where.

Oliver O'Connor is an investment funds specialist