Summer Holiday
13 July 2021
Not the 1963 Cliff Richards film but a holiday for Antonina’s two daughters who have arrived for a three-week stay. They had to quarantine for six days.
But the inefficiency of Barbados reared its head again. They had no wifi (nothing to do with storms or high winds). I was told by the hotel that the cell network (Digicel) in the area was down. Funny, I thought, as the wifi in the café attached to the hotel was working perfectly. I checked in the hotel across the road and theirs was working too — both on the Digicel network. I confronted the hotel manager who gave me the same blarney. I started discussing a 50% refund as how could two young women, one a student, be cooped up for six days unable to connect with the outside world? One had studying to do. This had a magical effect. Within two hours a wifi extender was supplied to their room and they could communicate!
Once out of the hotel, the girls, not surprisingly, wanted to hit the beach.
Unfortunately, our favoured locations are blighted with sargassum. This forced us to find a new beach and we discovered Brownes; the best beach on the island they say. The sea was clear and the seabed a gently shelving base of white sand. We took to the water. I was a little way out when two guys on the shore began to wave frantically at me pointing to the sea behind. A large dark object was moving menacingly towards me. I needed no second warning. It’s been a long time since I swam freestyle competitively but I covered the fifty yards back to the beach in record time. It was a stingray; some five feet across. It followed me in and came to within a couple of feet of the shore and swam lazily along the edge. They are not normally dangerous to humans but they carry a long wicked looking poisonous tail and I remembered it was just such a creature that killed the botanist and adventurer Steve Irwin.
After that excitement, we settled down on our loungers when a local approached us asking if we would like to swim with the turtles, look at a coral reef and the multitude of coloured fish that inhabited it; a one-hour boat trip. ‘How much?’ I asked. USD 40 each came the reply. I declined. A family from Boston just along from us took up his offer and we watched with interest where the speed boat took them. Just four hundred yards offshore. In the afternoon, we donned goggles and swam out to where the boat had been and saw turtles, small stingrays, lots of fish and a large starfish; keeping a weather eye out for the big stingray!
We took the girls on a half day tour of the eastern side of the island and saw St John’s cathedral, a pretty 1837 church; it’s earlier 1645 incarnation having been destroyed by a hurricane.
The graveyard contained some interesting people.
We visited an old sugar cane plantation high up in the hills where the 18th century white owner was expecting his first child. The child was born and turned out to be black! Unable to live with this the man rode his horse off the edge of a cliff; poor horse and poor family. We saw the only working windmill on the island but it was closed.
We ventured onto a cliff’s edge and down some steps cut of the coral.
I spied a large rusting iron bollard on a platform of flat rock. Apparently, after the slave trade was made illegal by Britain, illicit slave ships used to dock here for supplies en route to the Americas. The then plantation owner, whose land encompassed this landing point, was happy to provide victuals and fresh water in return for suitable recompense. The spot is situated in a desolate part of the coast, well away from the prying eyes of the local British authorities of the time.
We finished the day with a swim on a more turbulent east coast beach.
We also revisited the lovely west coast beach by the Colony Club hotel. The sea was clear and calm and we rediscovered our joy of spending time by the sea promising ourselves we must visit this beach at least once a week once the girls have returned home.
