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Today we are in Barbados, the sun is shining and the water is a thrilling blue. It’s hot — but not too hot (finally!) and we are ready to have a fun day exploring the island. First thing this morning I got up to go on an adventure with other photographic enthusiasts to take a “picture tour” of the island. We boarded a nice bus along with our tour guide, a professional photographer named Ronnie who will share his picture taking tips, his award winning photographs and his local knowledge of Barbados. You might say it was a city tour with a photography theme. Ronnie was articulate, witty,knowledgeable, and it was an enjoyable experience.
First, a little background on Barbados. It is the eastern-most island in the Lesser Antilles island chain. While it is flat compared to its neighbors to the west, it does have a very hilly highland area, called the Scotland District that rises to 1,120 feet and has steep slopes. The island is made of limestone hundreds of feet thick, being made of the same coral as the surrounding living coral reefs. You could see that the construction sites had piles of white limestone, excavated for foundations, and the roads in the hills had been cut from thick coral deposits.
Barbados followed the same cyclical settling process as most other places we’ve visited over the past months.Indians from Venezuela settled around 350 BC, followed by the Arawaks and finally the Caribs arrived from South America around 1200 AD. The Portuguese were the first to claim this area in the mid-1500’s, starting the slave trading business. By 1610 they had split for South America (they speak Portuguese in Brazil) leaving it to the British to claim and start to settle in 1625.
Until 1966, the British governed this area with significant autonomy until granting independence that year. African slaves were imported over the years and, by the late 1700’s the population had turned from mostly English and Scots-Irish to predominantly African. They had one of the world’s biggest sugar industries and a rum industry to go with it. Think Mount Gay and Bacardi.
Barbados became an independent state in 1966 although it maintains a strong connection to the UK. You drive on the left side of the street, there are numerous round-a-bouts and cricket is the big sport here. Cars are very expensive as the government pushes to encourage smaller and fewer cars. There is a 150% import tax on cars over $20,000. A Range Rover costs the equivalent of $150,000 US dollars!
They have an excellent education program and it is the biggest line item on their budget with the results being a 98% literacy rate due to free education at all levels. This has made tremendous difference on the island over the years. Like we saw in Uruguay, it is amazing what can happen when a society is committed to education. The US could learn a lot by stopping the political squabbling and spend our money wisely on our children’s future. But, this isn’t a political blog so I’ll stop there.
While the sugar industry is greatly reduced from prior levels, Barbados still remains a major sugar producer and the sugar cane fields are still one of the predominate views on the landscape. We also went by a large sugar processing plant where they were moving raw cane on conveyers. However, while there has been a great deal of sugar cane fields developed for housing, the farming has also become more balanced to provide locals with fruits and vegetables and today the sugar cane peacefully co-exists patchwork style among the crowded conditions on the island. The government is careful to protect valuable farmland and has reasonably strict zoning laws to balance progress with the maintenance of their ability to produce a significant percentage of their own food.
On our tour we learned about Chattel houses, the original “mobile homes” that the slaves built for their families on their master’s property. Because they didn’t own the land they had to build the houses on a temporary foundation (stone or cement blocks) and made the walls and roof so they could be quickly disassembled, put on a truck and reassembled at a new location, all on the same day! After slavery was abolished the government bought many of the lots and sold them to the owners at a low price. The owners then began improving the houses by putting in proper foundations and using stucco/plaster over the wood frame walls. Over time most of the original chattel houses will be gone. They are wood frame houses, normally with two high peaked roofs and very small eaves to avoid being blown off in a hurricane. We saw a large number of them and I tried to capture pictures as the bus went speeding by.
On the photo tour we stopped at a number of places to take some nice shots including a royal palm lined drive to a large home, a beautiful palm-lined beach and a rum house. Turns out that in every neighborhood, there is a church and, within a 100 feet or so, one or more local bars or rum houses. They are the equivalent to a bar with a small restaurant and sometimes a small-ish convenience store section. We had some rum punch at one on the beach where we had a chance to talk to the very friendly local people. I even had a flying fish sandwich that was quite tasty!
The tour continued with a drive back through town to the port area. This was an excellent tour and it would be great if Regent could have more of their tours to include a photographer as the tour guide, given how easy digital cameras are now, everyone is a budding photographer!
When I returned to the ship, I met up with Margaret and we immediately went on a tour exclusive to the Cruise South America guests (there are about 200 of us during the full 65 day cruise around S. America). Today we went to see a real live Concorde! Well, its not really alive but, while it no longer flies, it used to fly between London Heathrow and Barbados 3 times per week, the only “vacation” destination that the Concorde flew. Due to the engine noise and sonic booms, the only other cities it flew to were New York and Paris. The plane that we saw had flown more than 6,000 flights. A bidding process took place for the final resting places of the remaining 20 Concordes and, in 2002, Barbados got one.
Neither Margaret or I have seen the interior of a Concorde — I recall seeing one on the tarmac when I was in New York on a business trip and hearing the Concorde flying out of JFK when it broke the sound barrier. The resulting “sonic boom” is memorable so I can imagine the reaction of the Barbaranian’s (people who live in Barbados) when the Concorde took off 3 times per week! Objections to the noise were overpowered by the injection of cash from the well-heeled passengers now coming to vacation in sunny Barbados. That, and the cache of being the only resort the sleek planes flew to!
Regent put on a nice event — serving tea and some refreshments. We then walked through the aircraft experiencing what it was like on-board this incredible flying machine. The most impressive thing is how skinny the plane is — a mere 6 feet wide! The seating is nice…but not quite as nice as you might expect given the cost of a ticket. We heard that a ticket between London and New York was approximately $8,000! While that is a lot, the time it took to fly there was just over 3 hours…which meant that if you left the UK at 12 noon you would land in New York at 9 am on the same day! That’s pretty cool.
At the end of our tour they played a multi-media show that included projecting various color spotlights and video images onto the side of the Concorde. They simulated the in-flight experience which was pretty exciting. It was amazing because it could do Mach-2 (twice the speed of sound) and in order to do that it had to flex enough to grow 7″ due to the heat. In addition, the engines were extremely advanced and in over 40 years, no one has been able to duplicate it! The simulated sonic boom was everyone’s favorite part!