Sandy Lane Beach

Barbados is the most easterly of the Caribbean Islands, a hundred miles away from St Lucia. Perhaps more importantly, it's the island where the rich go to play (unless they own their own island of course). It’s beyond expensive, if you patronise the jet set establishments. I’ve chosen an independent hotel on a beautiful stretch of sand, just south of the infamous Sandy Lane Hotel. This is the establishment where the likes of Simon Cowell hang out. Though, of course, we can’t see them from our lowly section, as it’s fenced off.

There’s a better view from out at sea. My all-inclusive package includes snorkelling on the reef, the usual windsurfers and kayaks and, wait for it, water skiing. Super fit Roscoe is very happy to take me out on his boat for lessons, so I can watch the bronzed and beautiful, on their beach. Amazingly, I manage to ski for five minutes as well, on my second attempt. The other ski apprentices, all male, are less than congratulatory - none of them succeeded. To be honest, I think it was a combination of having skied on snow, good luck and not fighting the tow bar. I didn’t have the strength to do the latter.

East Coast of Barbados

It’s very tempting to spend my whole week on the sheltered west ‘platinum’ coast where all the resorts are. Roscoe keeps begging me to take to the speedboat again. But I feel I should see a little more of Barbados, so I take off with a car and driver for an outing.

North Point

At the very northern tip, North Point, of Barbados is a sheltered look out where you can admire the view. Close by this is, on this rugged, wave-pummelled Atlantic coastline is the Animal Flower Cave. The cave gets its unique name from the sea anemones which live in its shallow rock pools. On calm days (definitely not today) , visitors can swim inside a deep, translucent natural rock pool inside the cave, which is filtered directly by the ocean. Massive openings in the cave wall act as frames, offering panoramic views of the open ocean.

The History of Barbados

• They say that nowhere in the Caribbean seems to resonate with history quite like Barbados. Spanish navigators took possession of Barbados from the Amerindian inhabitants in the late fifteenth century.
• The island was then claimed by the Portuguese Empire in the 1530s, but abandoned in 1620 (with the exception of wild boar left to ensure a good supply of meat whenever the island was visited).
• The English (on the ship, the Olive Blossom) arrived in 1625 and were followed by settlers. So, Barbados then became an English colony.
• This was a traditional plantation economy, relying on the labour of enslaved Africans, who worked on the island's plantations until the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.
• Barbados became independent in 1966.

St Nicholas Abbey

A little further south, St Nicholas Abbey, dates back to early English colonial times. It is a sugar plantation with a Jacobean mansion, built in 1658 and one of only three of its type in the western hemisphere. There's also the requisite rum production to visit. (The world renowned Mount Gay distillery is not too far way.) They still grow sugarcane, using a restored 1890 steam mill to crush the crop, during the harvest season, to supply its traditional pot-still rum distillery. There are exquisite views from the Cherry Tree Hill viewpoint.

Bathsheba

The fishing village of Bathsheba, in the centre of the east coast, is where the hills of the Scotland District meet the ocean. It’s very different, remote, hardly any habitation. Just the odd hut or small hotel, with immense limestone cliffs. Dramatic coral limestone boulders line the beach; these blocks split from the inland cliffs millennia ago, and the tides have since eroded their bases into top-heavy shapes.

The Atlantic wind and high waves make this surfing country. It’s spectacular, but cool - even in the Caribbean. A shallow reef blocks the open ocean, creating a barrier of interconnected chest-deep rock pools. This is the only safe place to swim. Immediately past this reef, the seabed drops off, forcing the Atlantic swells into a heavy, famous right-hand wave break, known as the Soup Bowl. It is a regular stop on professional surfing tours.

Landslides in the area's clay and sandstone hills made the village difficult to reach by road for generations, keeping the fishing community relatively isolated. To connect it to the rest of the island, engineers laid a narrow-gauge railway in 1883, to haul sugar, fish, and passengers to Bridgetown, so the east coast is where tourism here all began. Though the high cost of maintaining tracks across the shifting terrain forced its closure in 1937

Andromeda Botanic Gardens

After admiring all the views, I’m transported to the lush Andromeda Botanic Gardens, just up the hill. Here, there's a panoply of cultivated orchids and other exotica, over 600 tropical plant species, including a massive native Bearded Fig Tree - the species from which Barbados allegedly took its name and the odd green monkey. This eight-acre organic landscape was founded, in 1954, by the award-winning Barbadian horticulturalist Iris Bannochie. It began as a private plant collection and is today owned by the Barbados National Trust.

Barbados - Facts and Factoids

• The name 'Barbados' is derived from the Bearded Fig Trees once common on the island
• Barbados is 21 miles long and a smile (14 miles) wide
• People from Barbados are known as Bajans
• The island filters its entire municipal water supply naturally through underground coral limestone, making it safe to drink straight from the tap across the country.
• A barrier reef off the southwest coast of Barbados has caused over 200 shipwrecks, turning Carlisle Bay into an active underwater graveyard for vessels dating from the seventeeth century to the present day.
• Mongooses were exported to the island in the 1870s, from India, to hunt rats in the sugarcane fields; because rats are nocturnal and mongooses are diurnal, they rarely met, however, and the mongoose population multiplied rapidly instead.
• The Barbados Green Monkey, originally brought from West Africa, now outnumbers humans in several rural parishes and possesses a distinct genetic profile separate from its African ancestors.
• The grapefruit first appeared in Barbados as a natural, accidental hybrid cross between a sweet orange and an Indonesian pomelo.
• It is completely illegal for civilians, including children, to wear any form of camouflage clothing or carry camo bags, a restriction strictly reserved for the Barbados Defence Force
• Barbados’s national dish is pudding and souse - black pudding and boiled pig’s head and feet
• There's so much English influence here that Barbados is sometimes known as Little England, or Bimshire, as in an English county.

Bridgetown, Capital of Barbados

A final dip into the capital. Bridgetown, in the southwest corner of the island. It's Cruise Ship Central, known for its racetrack, high end shops and restaurants, elegant Georgian buildings (the area around the Garrison Savannah, two miles southeast of downtown, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and traffic jams. The pace is much too slow, so we don’t hang around. It’s back to the beach.

N.B. Roscoe demanded my email address, but as there was no romance involved, on my part anyway,  I was surprised and flattered to receive a message a month later. Until I realised that it was actually intended for someone else.