(Antigua & Barbuda)...Recently, I went to the Caribbean for the first time. Considering how fortunate I have been to get to go travelling quite often, this is either very strange or a fault on my part. I have always been engrossed by Latin America, both Central America and South America, so my time, money and enthusiasm have gone in those directions, rather than to the Latin islands of the Caribbean or anywhere else there. I have been to Caribbean coasts of Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico, but never to one of the island-nations that sweep around in that broad, attractive archipelago. My first chance was to the small islands of Antigua and Barbuda, which together constitute the nation—independent from the United Kingdom since 1981—of the same name. Its most famous son, seen in posters everywhere and in the name of its brand new stadium, built to host games for the 2007 Cricket World Cup, is Sir Vivian Richards, who I remember playing cricket in England in the 1970s and 80s. They refer to him as a living legend, a label that is ridiculous, but there can be no mistaking—and neither should there be—the importance to this small country of 70,000 people of having someone of his world stature representing them.
The day before I got here I was listening to him bemoaning on the radio the shocking state of West Indies cricket, from England, where his team was being soundly thrashed by the old colonialists. I stayed near a small village called Bolans, which seemed typical of all the places I saw there. Few seem well off, but poverty was not present.
My map suggested it was possible to walk from Hermitage Bay (home to a new, very expensive hotel of the same name) to Mosquito Bay on which was my hotel, but the Jolly Beach Harbour Resort has muscled its way, together with a wide entrance for yachts, in across what was once able to be walked upon.
So, I walked back past one of the island’s many abandoned sugar mills, across a small lagoon (water is rarely evident anywhere here) and through this straggly village of small houses, tethered horses and free-roaming pigs.
On the other side of the island is Nelson’s Dockyard, which always was called English Harbour until the name of Horatio Nelson became more marketable. He detested the place on his one brief visit as a junior officer, and his words cannot be disputed by the marketers as it was the only statement he made about the place.
Today, it is pleasant, so much so that guitarist Eric Clapton has a house nearby that blends into the reddish rock and is stared at for ten minutes by every tour group to the island. The capital St. Johns has a little to recommend it, but the tiny village of Seaton’s, on the other side of the island, has more, especially an old man called Louie who I started chatting to as he was chopping the tops off coconuts. He gave me one.
And I especially liked Deadwood Bay, which is in the village of Crab Hill. There I found a deserted beach with warm, turquoise water and a perfect view of Montserrat, with one side of it still destroyed by the July 1995 eruption of its Soufriére Hills volcano. From my idyllic spot, I could see yellow-white slopes to one side of the island, darker colours (vegetation?) to the other. Boats do go out there for a price, but the currents discourage kayakers. I took a small place to the neighbouring island of Barbuda, which is coral and flat.
On a clear day, the Barbudans can see Antigua, but Antiguans can never see Barbuda. I had a wonderful day here, visiting a colony of Magnificent frigatebirds that is accessible only by boat; exploring some caves that were the homes of the island’s original Arawak people and that now house small crabs that inhabit shells that look like broken rocks (I crawled through a small gap to see a garden of cacti, only to be told that recently a woman in a wheelchair made the same short (but not for her) journey; to the Beach House where I was dive-bombed by Roseate terns defending their nests and ate spiny lobster together with a glass of Glenmorangie single-malt whisky; searched for and found a rare, endemic Barbuda warbler; saw the remnants of the K Club resort where Princess Diana used to hide away, and saw island capital Codrington, which houses most of the island’s 1,800 people.
Passengers sit under a tree at the airport until they hear the one afternoon plane (of two the whole day) coming to land. Calvin, my guide, told me that if you were born on the island, or were resident for sufficient years, you could build a house wherever you liked and then claim ownership of that particular parcel of land. Back in 1981, some of the people on the island were not so excited at the prospect of being united in a new nation with Antigua, but economically they had no choice. It seems that the union did neither island any harm. People on both were invariably pleasant.