It was a glorious blood-red sunset, the light splashing pink on the white limestone rock of Barbados. The craggy mounds to the left and right of the road were hardly more than five feet high, rising and falling gently like the island’s undulating landscape.
There are few steep rises and drops anywhere in Barbados, even in the craggy Scotland District, where the land rises to over 1,100 feet. The roads sweep gently along from one agricultural vista to the next. A long drive is soothing, the landscape rippling in the distance, the road coasting gently. The island works hard at being relaxing.
But it’s also humming with activity and new development.
Driving east along Foursquare Road across the southern end of the island, I found roads being rebuilt, and the new golf academy — part of a new national focus on golf tourism — crisp in the morning sunlight. A little further on, oil was being pumped from wells scattered across a tidy agricultural landscape.
Foursquare Plantation is a good example of the “it-looks-like-fun-but-I’m-hard-at-work” Barbadian work ethic. The factory is a triumphant remake of an old rum factory which had fallen into total disrepair. The new distillery, built on the iron bones and red brick skin of the old one, is state-of-the-art, environmentally-sound. Visitors pace along clean polished floors, marvelling at the spiralling tubes and fat tanks of chromed steel and polished brass which hum between the thickly-rusted metal and weathered brick of the original stills. Hundreds of gallons of rum are bubbling and fermenting.
As I inspected the burnt interior of one barrel kept on display for the tour, barely 50 feet away a Foursquare worker was sealing a real one. Even the picturesque clock tower that sat in the middle of the compound was quietly humming with activity; a lone man, serene with headphones pumping tunes, sat labelling tiny plastic bottles of sample product.
Later that day, as we swung into the road to Bathsheba, we passed a simple two-level concrete house. It was a solid, working family’s home, built with sweat and care, painted carefully and with love. In Barbados, street names and numbers are far from universal; many buildings are identified by name. On the front wall of this home was its name in bent metal: Labour Bless.
Built as a sugar economy, Barbados was a colony of the English from February 27, 1627, the day the first settlers came to Holetown, until independence in 1966. Sugar brought with it African slavery — the prevailing practice of using English prisoners as indentured servants proved inadequate to the demands of cane cultivation. At the height of the sugar boom in 1682, slaves outnumbered the white population 30 to one; only a fifth of the white population were landowners: the rest were indentured servants from England.
There were four major slave rebellions in Barbados: in 1675, 1696, 1702 and the “Bussa” rebellion in 1816. The abolition of slavery in 1834 is commemorated by a commanding statue at a highway intersection in the south of the island, symbolic not only of the event, but also of the heroism of the charismatic slave leader called Bussa. The scars from that period are still healing. On his consecration as Bishop of this largely Anglican island last September, John Holder offered a guarded concession, an apology of sorts, for the largely hands-off approach of the church to the injustices of that period.
The Barbados National Trust has been working with private owners of houses that trace a thread through the island’s past, and has made some outright purchases of its own. Sunbury Plantation, for example, is a privately-owned building overflowing with artifacts from the island’s colonial past. There’s almost too much to see; each surface, whether table or cupboard or bed, is arrayed with items identified with handmade labels. One wall in a passageway has at least six old maps of Barbados, each subtly different from the next.
Amid this proliferation of well-preserved clothing and furniture, I thought for a moment of the people who served here against their will. The young lady showing me around was more interested in explaining little items that spoke of a different indentureship, that of a woman to the master of the house. With a wry smile, she showed me a cylinder made of a braided, grassy material. It was a “wife leader”, and she showed me how it slips easily over a finger but pulls tight and inescapably firm when the looped end is yanked. “It wouldn’t have been very nice to be a woman at that time,” she said with a rueful smile. Now the tables are turned; “wife leaders” are sold only to women, and are called “husband leaders”.
Another of the great old houses of Barbados, Tyrol Cot, was the home of two political leaders of Barbados: Grantley Adams, one of the towering figures of the pre-independence period (and also Prime Minister of the brief West Indies Federation), and his son Tom, who died suddenly while still in office in 1985. The house has been carefully restored to its original state, frozen in time to when Sir Grantley and Lady Adams called it home. Lady Adams’s fine china collection is put away just so, while young Tom’s old Radio Shack computer sits in a corner of his room. The reproduction is so perfect that it feels a little creepy to be walking through the Adams’s bedroom, with the twin bed that Sir Grantley bought as a wedding gift for his new bride now roped off and immaculately made up.
Outside the house, in the spacious yard at Tyrol Cot, the National Trust has created a small heritage village of chattel houses, the collapsible living spaces once used by island labourers. Inside the brightly-coloured buildings were vendors selling craft items. There was a weathered old chattel house, complete with a Dutch oven and a miniscule living room, nearby, just past the Cockspur Rum Shop.
Further up, Richard Garnes, a newly-trained blacksmith, fired up an ancient bellows (the leather had been recently replaced, he sheepishly admitted), and worked iron with the tools of centuries past. The work, he said, was arduous, even making little craft items for key chains. And the heat was pervasive once the fire got going, though nowhere as hot as a real blacksmith’s shop. “As blacksmith,” says Garnes, with a cultured British accent, “I would have been responsible for taking care of the tools. The work would have been done by an apprentice. But they come, take in the heat and they don’t come back.”
But perhaps you don’t want to delve too deeply into the history of Barbados. Maybe you prefer to lie around on the island’s fine white-sand beaches and emerald-blue sea. But even there, there’s plenty going on.
You can tour the seascape from both above and below, for example. Atlantis cruises offer a fascinating submarine tour; Tiami cruises offer the Jolly Roger cruise and a relaxed catamaran cruise.
On Tiami’s Excellence II, our boarding tokens were exchanged for a warm-up drink of champagne and orange juice. I felt like the man who brought a hockey stick to a cricket match. Not out of the game, just ill-equipped. The trip would last five hours: I was wearing my all-purpose travel-writer gear, which includes a heavy camera bag and a pair of dark jeans. Out on one wicket.
My inability to drink hard booze sent my other stumps flying. Truth to tell, on this boat, being a teetotaller was by far the more crippling condition. Don’t make my mistake. On a day cruise, be prepared to strip down to bikini briefs and absorb a seemingly endless supply of Bajan rum the minute the boat pulls away from the dock.
Our first stop was at Turtle Beach, where dark circles glided by in the clear water and every so often a turtle would break the surface, gulp air and disappear. We stopped at Folkstone Marine Park, to snorkel a reef and a sunken barge. Then it was on to Sandy Lane beach for a swim. The younger passengers capitalised on the gentle waters and nearby beach, jumping from the roof of the catamaran into the water, over and over for at least half an hour.
It wasn’t until we began to glide back towards Bridgetown, buoyed by the effervescent sounds of The Merrymen and Sparrow, that I had a sense of how relaxing the cruise had been. All around me exhausted passengers sat or, lacking the energy for even that, lay down exhausted, full of Bajan flying fish and rum, serenely baking in the sun.
Some of the most beautiful spaces you can visit in Barbados make no more demands on you than a casual stroll. Even at an historical site like Gun Hill, a former military station that overlooked much of southern Barbados, there is a well-kept and labelled garden, which is almost as intriguing as the view from the lookout tower. There are several other fine gardens on the island, including Andromeda and the Flower Forest.
Visiting the Orchid Garden involved nothing more challenging than a relaxing stroll along a gorgeously landscaped pathway, through spectacular floral grandeur and horticultural artistry. There were orchids of every colour under the sun, some with unlikely blends, others with spatterings of colour across their petals, as if an ill-tempered artist had decided to comment brusquely on nature’s palette. In the greenhouses, new breeds and experiments in orchid styling were being seeded.
You can’t walk through Harrison’s Cave, though. This is a guided tour on a trolley that looks like the vehicles that bring baggage to and from airplanes. The entrance is 850 feet above sea level. Inside, the cave is cool but damp, a refreshing contrast to the blazing midday sun outside; water drips steadily overhead and surprisingly brisk breezes rush through the tunnels. The only signs of human intervention are the cut marks in the walls and ceiling where the passages were widened for the roadway, which is almost exactly the width of our tram transport.
Dramatic lighting splashes the pools and washes light over tiny caverns, revealing hundreds of stalagmites and stalactites, the ghostly-pale, slickly beautiful daggers of rock which have brought us all here. Their growth rate is one inch every 120 years: the tour guides are naturally alert to tourist erosion. You can’t roam much through the cave, though it’s tempting to think of running along the water that glides through the caverns. You are discouraged from touching the slick, almost organic cavern walls along which water trickles.
Back in Bridgetown, with Patrick, my guide on this Barbados adventure, I was working my way through a huge grilled snapper at The Waterfront, which has a commanding view of the old Careenage — the old harbour where boats used to be hauled out for repair work — and the bustle of downtown Bridgetown. By night, it plays host to visiting jazz performers who work on a tiny stage tucked into a corner of the space, with a piano taking up most of the stage. Photographs of past performances cover the walls; in most of them, the horn players are teetering on the edge of the stage just in front of the piano, blasting away over the heads of the vocalists.
On this trip, we’d been through Bridgetown several times, but this was the first time I’d had had a chance to just sit and watch the city pulse. As we ate, I watched the bustle of the city from across the still water of the Careenage. Nearby, several tourists, seemingly on a gastronomic tour of Barbados, planned to have their next creole meal at Brown Sugar Restaurant out by the Garrison.
Bridgetown is a city turbulent with change. New streetlights were being installed, tall handsome structures mimicking the gaslights of old London; but the electric cabling runs underground, so the streets were being torn up and patched as the lights were installed. The old swing bridge no longer worked; it had rusted into instability and been given the final kiss of goodbye by engineers who pronounced it unsafe for vehicular traffic. Now pedestrians had the run of this historic roadway.
If you manage to survive all the touring, the surfing at Bathsheba, horseback tours along the east coast and four-wheel drive adventures on off-road tracks, the gardens and the beaches, there is still the matter of Barbados’s night life.
St Lawrence Gap is a curve of road on the south coast that is host to more than 20 hotspots. You can find all kinds of food along this crescent road, including Bellini’s Trattoria, known for its Italian cuisine. But it’s the music at The Gap, as this area is known, that keeps everyone going till the wee hours. A one-man-band pannist tickles the steel at Jambalaya, Café Sol offers Mexican food and fierce drinks, and at Ship Inn there’s The Carvery, where what seems like pounds of meat are piled high on your plate and Wesu Wallace, a vocalist with a bitter-sweet tenor, accompanies himself on guitar, performing soul standards.
Later, around 11, things really get started. I spent some time at B4 Blues, a tiny space that managed to squeeze in a restaurant, bar and small but spirited blues band called High Street Jive. Over at Ship Inn, Wesu was just leaving as the crowds jammed in for the performance of 4 De People, an Earth Wind and Fire-inspired techno-funk band that brings young Barbados out in droves.
The gem of the evening was at McBride’s, an Irish pub and restaurant that was weighing into the night’s wild cultural mix with alternative rock and, more specifically, with Desire, a four-man group which attracted a quirky mix of young Barbados, from young blondes to dreadlocked surfer dudes, with their enthusiastic covers of current rock numbers.
I left Barbados with a sense of a country in subtle transition, of people gearing up for the next big thing. Will it be golf? Increasingly upscale visitors?
The enormous works at Sandy Lane, where more than B$300 million has been committed to create the ultimate golfing resort, and the tremendous hopefulness of Roddy Carr at the Barbados Golf Club, both point in that direction. But at its heart, I found something very real, very warm and devastatingly charming about Barbados, in the people who are the real engine of all this development and growth.
It happened while I was touring Port St Charles, an exclusive resort with its own man-made lagoon and port, where the residences start at US$6.5 million. I was sitting on their water taxi, a flat ungainly boat that looked more like a bridge than something with an engine, with the operations manager, an affable young man with an earnest smile. He leaned forward to me, clearly taken with my enthusiasm for the understated opulence of one of the new rooms.
“So, perhaps we’ll see you again, then.”
I began to explain that I might not be back to Barbados on a story for a while, then I realised what he meant. I searched his face for even the vaguest trace of irony, and there was none. And that’s when I made the link between him and everyone I’d met here. That openness and lack of judgement. That sense of human possibility that engages everyone as someone. You can’t teach people to feel that way.
Golfing
Golfing Barbados
Barbados is becoming deadly serious about golf. Jack Nicklaus Productions has filmed a series here. The local golf academy has an attractive practice range, and Sir Garfield Sobers, knighted for knocking red cricket balls about, has switched his allegiance to stippled white as one of the loudest local voices in favour of golf development.
I went to look at the work being done at the new Sandy Lane Golf Course and the area once known as the Norwood and Bennet estates. The land was in a daunting state of manmade upheaval; giant mounds of limestone rock and fine gravel, some of them more than 100 feet wide and 40 feet high, were piled on the grassy hillsides.
But soon, these mountains of gravel and gouges in the earth will become a pro-calibre golf course, another stake in Barbados’s push to become the premier Caribbean destination for the golf enthusiast.
Roddy Carr’s enthusiasm for the game comes to you in a rush. He understands the marketing needed to make a success of his current project, the Barbados Golf Club, and once he’s out on the course he speaks of nothing but golf, the nature of the game and how it works best in Barbados.
With a small team of workers and artists, Carr has resurrected 120 acres of land, buried in 25 years of neglect and wild tropical growth, and returned it to service as a golf course. The property, at Durant’s estate, was once a public golf course, built as the leverage for a housing development.
It was a grand idea, but it was a quarter-century too early. The houses were never built, and there were only about a hundred people in cricket-mad Barbados with enough of an interest in golf to pay the maintenance fees. “They just walked away,” Carr says, shaking his head even now, after telling the story dozens of times.
Carr, a former pro circuit golfer who has worked with Jack Nicklaus, saw the potential in the place, but even more importantly, he saw the potential of golf in Barbados. He got investors together, put his own money into the project and set to work. It took just 18 months, but in that time, Carr worked day in and day out on the project, driving and inspiring his workers to match him.
“We must have moved 1.5 million cubic feet of earth during the landscaping,” he recalls, “that and two million rocks.” He looks intently at my disbelieving face. “Well, they wouldn’t move themselves. This is sugar cane land, ‘gumbo’ they call it; sticky and hard to work. We had to bend down and pick them out, one by one.”
Slowly, a European-style Links course began to take shape. Gentle mounds and gullies undulate across the landscape of the Barbados Golf Club, subtle but definite sweeps of terrain that cause the golf cart Carr is driving to sway and pitch disturbingly. “It should remind some people of Scotland,” he says as I hold tightly onto the roof of the jerking cart. But you won’t even see the most difficult aspect of the course. Carr and his design team have planned the course around the stiff breezes that race across it from the sea.
The word that Roddy Carr uses constantly to describe the course is “enjoyable.” It isn’t a particularly hard course, but it has sneaky challenges like the “Amen Corner”, which he hopes will bring a prayer to golfers approaching the 15th hole; then there’s the “Hell Bunkers”, with devious little crushed coral traps all over the course.
Carr points out one cunning approach at the 16th hole, inviting a player to make a bold shot. I can see the easy path to the hole, down the fairway followed by a second stroke to the finish. But there’s a more tempting way, one stroke to glory that invites the player to lob the ball over a looming banyan tree or through a tiny space beneath its branches. This practically guarantees that the ball will fall into a Hell Bunker, an ugly sand trap hemmed in by limestone walls. Carr smiles diabolically as he describes the shot, even now relishing the challenge of dropping the ball just so on the other side of that dauntingly tall tree.
The other words he uses to describe the course are “value for money.” Carr is openly enthusiastic about the work being carried out at Sandy Lane and the other courses that are being planned for the island. Sandy Lane, a Tom Fazio-designed course, will, he believes, be a “nine out of ten” in world rankings; a premier course that will draw the likes of Tiger Woods and other golfing luminaries to the island.
The Barbados Golf Club has already been sanctioned by the PGA for a seniors’ tour. It sold out the local membership quota of 200 in two weeks, and has a waiting list of 50 Barbadian hopefuls.
In the months since its opening last June, more than 4,000 rounds have been played on the initial nine holes. Garry Sobers, Barbados’s most famous golfer, visits at least twice a week.
So it’s an exciting time for golf tourism in Barbados. Two major new courses will be open by the end of 2001; five world-class courses will be running over the next five years. Since golf visitors spend up to five times as much as traditional “sun and sea” visitors, that ties in neatly with Barbados’s emphasis on an upscale product for a discerning market.
Roddy Carr’s Barbados Golf Club will remain pitched to the middle and lower end of the market, golfing enthusiasts who can’t afford private clubs. His price is US$50, and the ambience and accessibility of the place have begun to create a seductive social atmosphere at the Club. Says Carr: “People should be able to enjoy a round of golf and then visit the bar and chat with Bajans. When they leave here, they shouldn’t just remember that they had a good game; they should remember that they had a good game in Barbados.”
Under the Deep Blue Sea
Aboard the Atlantis III, there is a slab of glass three-and-a-quarter inches thick between me and the seabed, 135 feet below the surface of the Caribbean Sea.
How did I get here? The first step was onto a dock at Bridgetown, past an ominous if gaily-painted booth with a porthole, through which a young lady was quietly taking photographs of each person lining up to board the ferry Ocean Quest, which would take us out to the submarine. I set my jaw grimly and stared ahead. Like most people who take pictures, I deeply dislike being photographed, particularly without explanation. If this was going to be used as evidence, then I was determined to look as guilty as hell.
I was with a group of well-tanned tourists, some of whom had had a wild night at Harbour Lights but seemed none the worse for wear. We boarded the flat, open ferry with its tightly-packed seating and lookout deck above, and listened with carefully feigned interest to the cheerful but serious lecture delivered by one of the crisply attired seamen. While the Ocean Quest may dock at the same port as the Jolly Roger II, Barbados’s legendary party-boat, this was not going to be pitched at the same level of gaiety.
As we sat on the Ocean Quest, its engines chugging gently to keep us in place, the reasons for that seemed altogether clear. The white, whale-like bulk of the Atlantis III surged slowly up from the ocean floor. The submarine was quickly sandwiched between our ship and another, smaller tug-like boat called a “responder”, which serves as the eyes for the sub.
Deftly, the three boats were tied together, a gangway lowered and tethered, and the crew ushered up into the sunlight 20 or so tourists just returning from their dive. They climbed awkwardly up through the hatch, blinking at the brilliant sunlight as they boarded the Ocean Quest. The rear hatch was battened down and we were queued up for our trip. There weren’t quite 48 of us; I sat quietly jammed between the tanned tourists on either side of me.
Bill, our host for the dive, began to lighten the tone of the proceedings. He was good-looking and knew it, but chose to play the cheerful Sad Sack, offering a self-deprecating commentary from the time the ship began to dive. The first 35 feet of water were over our heads before there was even the sensation of downward movement. The Atlantis III was on the seabed in less than two minutes, offering us the rather unspectacular sight of clouds of coral sand, stirred by its propellers. “Can everyone see the seabed?” Bill asked. “Yes,” someone answered. “Good,” he quipped. “Now we can go back up.” There was a nervous titter. Nobody was quite sure if he was joking.
Slowly, the big ship began to turn, and in a couple of minutes we were cruising next to one of the wrecks which have been sunk to provide dive sites around the island. “In the old days,” Bill said, “it was a water boat. It’s still a water boat.” This was a tough crowd and he didn’t get the laugh. So he worked the line. “Just carrying a different kind of water.” A few people chuckled, but kept staring at the ship outside the windows, encrusted with rust, coral and anemones.
The submarine turned toward the coral reef where we would spend most of our time, gliding up almost 25 feet of steep coral face. It was a gorgeous sight, even to a cynic like me. Fan corals waved gently in the currents, brilliantly coloured fish, various kinds of trigger and angel fish, darted along the multicoloured reef, nibbling at the algae on its surface. With Bill’s running narration, some of the action was even beginning to make sense to my biology-challenged mind.
Bill pointed out a brilliant orange clump right outside my porthole. “That’s an orange-encrusted sponge,” he said. “You might be tempted to touch it.” It was true. Even 50 feet below the surface in the odd blue-green light that made everything seem lit by cheap fluorescents, this sponge was a standout.
But Bill had his punchline to deliver. “It will shoot tiny needles into you,” he said, “delivering a poison that will cause spasms, high fever and for some people, respiratory problems.” He paused a moment for this to sink in. “There’s a rule of the sea. If it’s very pretty, it’s probably dangerous.” He waited the beat. “Come to think of it, guys, that rule works pretty well on land too.”
He still didn’t get the laugh. Poor Bill, he just don’t get no respect.
Barbados by night
Harbour Lights
The Harbour Lights crew has a serious commitment to fun. In addition to their nightly commitment to the art of the beach party, they have produced a party-themed Kadooment band for Crop Over for the past nine years. The beach party is aimed squarely at younger tourists, and the music is pitched to the middle-of-the-road charts. The house band Full Force has a capable live brass section and a capable lead vocalist (who insists his name is Troy Special). In addition to lead vocals and sideshow comedy, Special manages the amateur limbo and calypso singing competitions with agreeable aplomb. The evening show in the beachfront backyard of Harbour Lights features an exceptional, if wince-inducing, fire-eating act.
Friday nights at Oistins
It’s a rare buffet in Barbados which doesn’t include some fried flying fish, but if you want a real adventure with cooked fish, Oistins on Friday night is the place for it. The fishing village is transformed into a massive street party, and if you get there late, be prepared to walk some distance to the festivities. Densely packed people jostle among huge speakers playing Jamaican dub reggae at top volume and vendors preparing every kind of fish caught off Barbados, each vying to create the ultimate dish. Then, right in the middle of all this youthful exuberance, one of those delightful incongruities that you’ll find throughout Barbados: an eddy of relative quiet, where everything moves more slowly and the music is Nat King Cole, not natty dread, and elderly Bajans twirl delicately, executing intricate ballroom steps under the orange glow of scattered lightbulbs.
Tropical Spectacular
John King isn’t just the star of the Tropical Spectacular show at the Plantation, he’s the manager as well. His official title is Director of Business Development, ever since Colin Brewer and Anthony Hoyos took over The Plantation, the home of the show. King hasn’t so much revamped the show as evolved it. There have been historic and aquatic themes in the past when the show was organised by its former owner, Emile Straker, a founding member of The Merrymen. It now has a carnival theme, exploring the festivals of the Caribbean, with a lot of feathers and well-shaped leg.
The real excitement is the music, which starts off with Casablanca, a pleasingly competent mini-steelband, and ends with the Plantation Band, led by King, which performs a solid mix of King’s calypsos, nostalgic ballads and reggae standards. One of the pleasant surprises of the Plantation Band’s performance is the emphasis that King places on his supporting artists. The bassist sings the Temptations’ Just My Imagination with a convincing falsetto; his backup singer, Tamara, offers soulful ballads.
1627 and all that, a historically-based show, might be seen as competition, but according to King, a tireless activist for the advancement of the local entertainment business: “Our show is about charisma, 1627 is more about grassroots culture. Both shows are worth seeing.”
For information on BWIA’s services to/from Barbados, fares and ticketing, visit the BWIA website at www.bwee.com
or call BWIA at:
208-577-1100 (UK)
1-800-538-2942 (USA & Canada)
868-627-2942 (Caribbean)
For vacation packages call:
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