Barbados
I had no plan for Barbados. Really. I did not.
A couple of years ago, I was flipping through… a travel guide? No. I was flipping through the contents of my brain and the Internet trying to decide which Caribbean island would be a good fit for me to visit. The ideas that seemed to fit were no big islands (no Jamaica or Dominican Republic), no impoverished islands, probably destinations aimed mainly at snorkeling and scuba diving were not my best bets, and I needed to be able to get there preferably with a direct flight from DC, Philly, or New York. No Miami connections or Puerto Rico connections. Last year, I started trying to figure out which islands were good for summertime visits. That narrowed down the list to:
1) Aruba - oriented mainly towards package vacations and scuba diving, plus a little hotter to interrupt running
2) Curacao - not enough to do, plus also a little hotter
3) Barbados - well diversified, large enough to be slightly cosmopolitan, not on the radar for a lot of Americans, but popular with Europeans
That’s how I landed on Barbados. Also, I found a part of the island where I felt I wanted to stay and I found an affordable but comfortable-looking guest house. I realized this spring that it was cheaper to fly to Barbados and stay for eight days than it was to take two long beach weekends to Delaware and stay somewhere I felt comfortable, so back in May I booked it.
Then I showed up without a plan.
Sure, I got a rough overview of the island and I asked for tips. I even downloaded Lonely Planet Caribbean and checked out their information on the island. But for the most part, I landed without a plan. I merely had a rough idea where things were. The people were mainly concentrated in the southwest. The flatter beaches were in the west with some rough water beaches on the south. The natural areas were in the east. I was staying in the east.
I decided when I landed, that I would stay around the guest house in Bathsheba my first full day there. And then the next morning, I promptly discarded that idea. I woke up wanting to go out and explore - to go for a drive and find a beach. This resulted in me trekking to Heywood Beach, north of Speightstown, the second largest town on the island and one of the old ports. I parked in Heywood Beach and walked the beach and settled down on the sand for a few hours and then I walked into Speightstown for lunch - flying fish, fried chicken, sides, and two Banks beers. Then I saw the Arlington House Museum which told a bit of the history about slavery, sugar cane, and shipping in Barbados over the years. And then I made my way back to the hotel to sit and relax. Eventually I made my way to Oistins fish market for the Friday evening festival (they do this every week - dining, signing, and dancing at all of the market stalls) bringing along with me the German couple I had made the night before.
This is something I ended up doing while I was staying in Bathsheba. The hotel where I was staying served dinner five nights a week, and if you paid for dinner, they would seat you with the other guests who paid for dinner. This is how I got to know most of the guests at the hotel. Most of the time while I was there, there were only four or five rooms full of guests out of 12 rooms total, being the off season and all. The guests consisted of:
- A couple from NYC, one Chinese-American and one Norwegian
- The German couple, Uricke and Henning, both probably in their upper 20s, work colleagues who started dating less than three months ago who were very much tentative around each other
- A Swiss family of five, man and woman and three boys; their dialect, although German, was noticeably different than the German couple’s dialect, and very hard for me to comprehend
- Two ladies from Michigan - Patricia who was 62 and Laurie who was 55, aunt and niece, who had been “best of friends” since childhood
- A Jamaican man staying with a British woman
- A British couple, early 30s, who lived on St. Martin; they piloted a 52 foot sailboat for a yacht ownership company and actually stayed for 2 ½ weeks, moving from the room next to me to the room above me so the Jamaican guy with British girlfriend could have their room
- An older British couple, probably in their early 70s
- Sheena, from Brooklyn, newly broken up from her divorced boyfriend; Sheena, Patricia, and Karen ate dinner with me the last night there and were every bit as entertaining as the British couple (boat captains) were the night they tried to get me intoxicated
When I left Barbados, I felt as if I could stay another week or two. I spent my whole time on the island basically wandering from place to place. Every morning, I woke up, went for a run, had a shower, and then came up with a plan over breakfast, and frequently I discarded my plan entirely. I figured out a day or two after arrival what I definitely needed to see - a few of the beaches, Oistins, Bridgetown, the museums, at least one old plantation, and the wild west coast - and I mapped out a rough route to make sure I saw it all while making sure I still had plenty of time to lay on the beach and sit in a hammock. I regret not doing a few things and I also regret not doing a few things twice, but I do not regret not doing a few things that a lot of different people told me to do. I did not go out in the submarine, nor did I go snorkeling, and I definitely did not go on a catamaran cruise. Would I have enjoyed these things? Certainly, but at $75 - $150 each, I enjoyed the time I spent having lunch at a beachfront bar and having an overpriced home cooked meal at the hotel with foreign guests far more. And I certainly enjoyed wandering down the road to “De Garage” to sit with four drunk men after dinner until Laura called.
This was my first time to travel to a foreign country alone without expecting to see anybody I knew. Barbados in many ways feels like a different world, as well. The infrastructure in Barbados looks a little rough around the edges. They have roads with huge holes in them and cracks and crevices that make it so the roads might as well be unpaved, but at the same time nearly every road in the island, of which there are a huge number, is indeed paved. Honestly, it looks third world in many ways with roadside chickens and cows, but it is not.
One thing that struck me about Barbados is that everyone is incredibly friendly whether they are wealthy or poor. By my third day there, I was known as “the guy who runs” in Bathsheba because so many of the locals had seen me out running while they were waiting for the bus in the morning. At one point, I ended up in a very wealthy enclave while I was looking for beach access, and the opposite approached me - a man in a very expensive German sedan flagged me down in my cheap rental Jeep as I was looking for beach access and helpfully told me how to sneak through Crane Hotel in my tank top and sandals past the other up market tourists to enjoy the beach there.
I was content while I was in Barbados, far more than I was in New Zealand when my world seemed to be in flux back home. And compared to England and France which I visited for New Years again this year, I felt as if I was out on my own wandering some more. Every time I go somewhere, it feels as if I leave a piece of me behind. In Barbados, I released my fears. When I left, I was apprehensive about being alone in a foreign land for eight days. When I came back, I was ready to do it again. Next time? Maybe Brazil or somewhere else in South America. Perhaps I am ready for my Faroe Islands expedition. Or someday, somewhere else.
Now, five days later, I am home. For the first time in a long time, my vacation glow has not worn off right away.
A couple of years ago, I was flipping through… a travel guide? No. I was flipping through the contents of my brain and the Internet trying to decide which Caribbean island would be a good fit for me to visit. The ideas that seemed to fit were no big islands (no Jamaica or Dominican Republic), no impoverished islands, probably destinations aimed mainly at snorkeling and scuba diving were not my best bets, and I needed to be able to get there preferably with a direct flight from DC, Philly, or New York. No Miami connections or Puerto Rico connections. Last year, I started trying to figure out which islands were good for summertime visits. That narrowed down the list to:
1) Aruba - oriented mainly towards package vacations and scuba diving, plus a little hotter to interrupt running
2) Curacao - not enough to do, plus also a little hotter
3) Barbados - well diversified, large enough to be slightly cosmopolitan, not on the radar for a lot of Americans, but popular with Europeans
That’s how I landed on Barbados. Also, I found a part of the island where I felt I wanted to stay and I found an affordable but comfortable-looking guest house. I realized this spring that it was cheaper to fly to Barbados and stay for eight days than it was to take two long beach weekends to Delaware and stay somewhere I felt comfortable, so back in May I booked it.
Then I showed up without a plan.
Sure, I got a rough overview of the island and I asked for tips. I even downloaded Lonely Planet Caribbean and checked out their information on the island. But for the most part, I landed without a plan. I merely had a rough idea where things were. The people were mainly concentrated in the southwest. The flatter beaches were in the west with some rough water beaches on the south. The natural areas were in the east. I was staying in the east.
I decided when I landed, that I would stay around the guest house in Bathsheba my first full day there. And then the next morning, I promptly discarded that idea. I woke up wanting to go out and explore - to go for a drive and find a beach. This resulted in me trekking to Heywood Beach, north of Speightstown, the second largest town on the island and one of the old ports. I parked in Heywood Beach and walked the beach and settled down on the sand for a few hours and then I walked into Speightstown for lunch - flying fish, fried chicken, sides, and two Banks beers. Then I saw the Arlington House Museum which told a bit of the history about slavery, sugar cane, and shipping in Barbados over the years. And then I made my way back to the hotel to sit and relax. Eventually I made my way to Oistins fish market for the Friday evening festival (they do this every week - dining, signing, and dancing at all of the market stalls) bringing along with me the German couple I had made the night before.
This is something I ended up doing while I was staying in Bathsheba. The hotel where I was staying served dinner five nights a week, and if you paid for dinner, they would seat you with the other guests who paid for dinner. This is how I got to know most of the guests at the hotel. Most of the time while I was there, there were only four or five rooms full of guests out of 12 rooms total, being the off season and all. The guests consisted of:
- A couple from NYC, one Chinese-American and one Norwegian
- The German couple, Uricke and Henning, both probably in their upper 20s, work colleagues who started dating less than three months ago who were very much tentative around each other
- A Swiss family of five, man and woman and three boys; their dialect, although German, was noticeably different than the German couple’s dialect, and very hard for me to comprehend
- Two ladies from Michigan - Patricia who was 62 and Laurie who was 55, aunt and niece, who had been “best of friends” since childhood
- A Jamaican man staying with a British woman
- A British couple, early 30s, who lived on St. Martin; they piloted a 52 foot sailboat for a yacht ownership company and actually stayed for 2 ½ weeks, moving from the room next to me to the room above me so the Jamaican guy with British girlfriend could have their room
- An older British couple, probably in their early 70s
- Sheena, from Brooklyn, newly broken up from her divorced boyfriend; Sheena, Patricia, and Karen ate dinner with me the last night there and were every bit as entertaining as the British couple (boat captains) were the night they tried to get me intoxicated
When I left Barbados, I felt as if I could stay another week or two. I spent my whole time on the island basically wandering from place to place. Every morning, I woke up, went for a run, had a shower, and then came up with a plan over breakfast, and frequently I discarded my plan entirely. I figured out a day or two after arrival what I definitely needed to see - a few of the beaches, Oistins, Bridgetown, the museums, at least one old plantation, and the wild west coast - and I mapped out a rough route to make sure I saw it all while making sure I still had plenty of time to lay on the beach and sit in a hammock. I regret not doing a few things and I also regret not doing a few things twice, but I do not regret not doing a few things that a lot of different people told me to do. I did not go out in the submarine, nor did I go snorkeling, and I definitely did not go on a catamaran cruise. Would I have enjoyed these things? Certainly, but at $75 - $150 each, I enjoyed the time I spent having lunch at a beachfront bar and having an overpriced home cooked meal at the hotel with foreign guests far more. And I certainly enjoyed wandering down the road to “De Garage” to sit with four drunk men after dinner until Laura called.
This was my first time to travel to a foreign country alone without expecting to see anybody I knew. Barbados in many ways feels like a different world, as well. The infrastructure in Barbados looks a little rough around the edges. They have roads with huge holes in them and cracks and crevices that make it so the roads might as well be unpaved, but at the same time nearly every road in the island, of which there are a huge number, is indeed paved. Honestly, it looks third world in many ways with roadside chickens and cows, but it is not.
One thing that struck me about Barbados is that everyone is incredibly friendly whether they are wealthy or poor. By my third day there, I was known as “the guy who runs” in Bathsheba because so many of the locals had seen me out running while they were waiting for the bus in the morning. At one point, I ended up in a very wealthy enclave while I was looking for beach access, and the opposite approached me - a man in a very expensive German sedan flagged me down in my cheap rental Jeep as I was looking for beach access and helpfully told me how to sneak through Crane Hotel in my tank top and sandals past the other up market tourists to enjoy the beach there.
I was content while I was in Barbados, far more than I was in New Zealand when my world seemed to be in flux back home. And compared to England and France which I visited for New Years again this year, I felt as if I was out on my own wandering some more. Every time I go somewhere, it feels as if I leave a piece of me behind. In Barbados, I released my fears. When I left, I was apprehensive about being alone in a foreign land for eight days. When I came back, I was ready to do it again. Next time? Maybe Brazil or somewhere else in South America. Perhaps I am ready for my Faroe Islands expedition. Or someday, somewhere else.
Now, five days later, I am home. For the first time in a long time, my vacation glow has not worn off right away.