Barbados

There´s an Island in the Sun

26.09.2007 - 01.10.2007 36 °C

Barbados: A truly Rastafarian land…

It was only 5 days in Barbados for us - plenty for our budget, too short otherwise...

Barbados is called Little England for a reason – it is bloody expensive !!! It is also quite English in its culture, somehow. Like Guyana, they drive on the left, they eat fish and chips (though with a Caribbean flavour), they speak English and they have a government system mirroring the British one. They also have a very high concentration of educated rastamen: many and varied. We booked a studio flat on the internet and when we got there, guess who the landlord was – Gregory the rastafarian!!! Living with a German lady, Isolde, very nice and helpful and offering the most down-to-detail flat we have ever come across. Everything pea green and blue, from the tiles to the towels, the plates, the sofa, the bins, the cutlery, the wardrobe doors, the table lamps, the vases and every other piece of furniture you can think of. The studio flat was $50 a night and really worth it, situated in the south side of the island, which is the most built up and closest to the airport, where the sea is slightly wavy. We had a gorgeous beach about 10 mins walk away, Maxwell beach, with turquoise blue clean water. The whole island is like this, beaches with the most stunning turquoise water surround the whole island, quite striking. The only problem is that it has been and it is being built absolutley everywhere, so access to the sea is not so straightforward. There is one coastal road running along the south-west and it is all built up left right and centre, which is a real pity. The same road offers very limited pavement, often missing completely, which makes strolling about absolutely dreadful. So basically there hasn’t been any sort of building planning in this place, and the result is very obvious.

While here, to make the most of our time we did a couple of organised day trips - one day snorkelling from a catamaran and one day ‘jeep safari’. The catamaran trip was excellent, though the coral reef was not as good as we expected. The highlight was the turtle encounter, where you stop at a spot where green turtles hang about and happily swim around you, being fed shrimps by the guide. Beautiful green-yellow turtles!!! Unfortunately we do not have any pictures, since the underwater camera we enthusiastically bought – it said ‘reusable’ as you can reload new films in it - decided to open up in the middle of the sea and I rescued it only thanks to my super fast reflexes.... we have not tried to develop the film yet to see if anything has come out at all. On the catamaran they had an ‘open bar’, which means that we could drink anything we liked for the whole 6 hours of the trip....crazy! The obviously have a lot of rum to give away and generally the tourism offering is quite highly developed and organised. Like calling the turtles and schools of fish to the snorkelling spots by feeding them and so on – very organised and tourist-oriented, though to me a little too over-developed, like the whole island.
The other trip we did by jeep was also quite good, though that day I had gotten up with a really sharp pain in my back which, by the end of the trip, became so bad that I could hardly walk. Our driver was a local celebrity that looked like Spyro the little green dragon – he had been a boxer, a fire-eater, a children’s music band manager and much more. Very chirpy and enthusiastic, he made sure our adventure safari through the country was really such and drove at kamikaze speeds through the sugar cane fields and up and down the hills, with stunning results on my back. We went to see the east side of the island, Bathsheba, which rocky coast ideal for surfing and some other more or less significant points here and there on the island.

On Monday we flew to Trinidad, where we stayed one night waiting for our flight to Caracas. From Caracas we managed to take a bus to Colombia the same day - only problem is that they told us it would be 16 hours and instead it was a whopping 26!!!!!!! The journey was not that terrible, really, if it wasnt’t that the Colombian police kept stopping and searching the bus every 15 minutes for a good 2 hours, making us all get off the bus each time and stand in the scorching sun at unbearable temperatures. At one point I got so exasperated that I promised Gregory to refuse getting off the bus again and telling the officers that it made little sense to keep stopping the bus and searching ALWAYS the very same bags and maybe they should get a bit smarter and radio each other to see what the hell they were doing. Fortunately after that point the searches stopped and we were able to continue our odyssey. Despite the good advice that Becky gave us to break the journey and visit the Tayrona National Park, on the way to Cartagena, we bought a ticket straight to Cartagena, where we eventually arrived late at night. We managed to share a taxi with some Isreali boys and check in at Hostal Familiar in the Old Town. So this is where we will be for a few days, till we find a flight or a boat to Panama.

Inside Our Room 1- Emville Guest house