(St. Kitts & Nevis)

(St. Kitts)…The island-nation of St. Kitts & Nevis (www.stkittstourism.kn; www.nevisisland.com) was a revelation. There are hardly any tourists, at least not in mid-July, the people are wonderful, and the scenery is resplendent. Added to this is the fact that really there is only one hotel, the 380-or-so-room St. Kitts Marriott (www.stkittsmarriott.com), which sits on North Frigate Bay, the bony part of an island that essentially is shaped like a chicken drumstick—although I thought I’d be creative and also suggest that it looks like a pregnant seahorse. The other hotels on the island run to small plantation-style retreats and a number of non-chain properties. Nevis (more of which later) has the celebrated Four Seasons (www.fourseasons.com/nevis), as well as the gorgeous Montpelier Plantation (www.montpeliernevis.com).
I climbed St. Kitts’ highest spot, Mount Liamuiga, a volcano that has lain dormant for 1,800 years. “Liamuiga” means “fertile land” in the extinct language of Kalinago, and the name replaced Mount Misery. It is steep, the one path climbing over rocks and roots, even through a mini-ravine. Green vervet monkeys can be spotted (introduced by the French in the 17th century), and if lucky (as I was) the rare, skulking Bridled quail-dove (see photo above), which I spotted in a side ditch off the path a quarter of the way back down from the volcano’s peak. Once spotted, though, it just sat there, and I got within 10 feet. The path up ends at a small peak of boulders that once climbed gives a great view of the volcano’s crater lake, which I also saw as my plane neared the island’s airport.
The climb was steep, and as I ate my picnic lunch an opportunistic mongoose (another introduced pest) ate discarded scraps. These critters are everywhere, and most people know the story of how they were introduced to many colonised islands essentially to take care of the burgeoning problem of rat (yet again, also introduced) infestation. That plan was a dismal failure, as rats are nocturnal, while mongoose are diurnal, but both species liberally eat birds’ eggs, and the birds themselves if given half a chance. This misguided adventure has seen hideous ramifications to the fauna of the Hawaiian Islands.
The Liamuiga hike is an all-day jaunt, but it is certainly worth the toil. The Dutch island of Sint-Eustatius (aka Statia) can be seen, as can—only very clear days—the French-Dutch island of Saint Martin/Sint-Maarten.
While the Liamuiga area is lush, receiving most of the island’s rain, the southeastern peninsula, which starts at the southern end of North Frigate Bay, is drier. I ran there one afternoon, and the small road is steep, although rewarding. The road loops around at several spots, and lonely beaches can be reached. The view of Canoe Bay was especially beautiful, a rich, verdant, tiny valley appearing bright green. It really looked like something that travellers might attach the proper noun “Eden” to. Three small mountains dot this peninsula that goes to Great Salt Pond and Major’s Bay, where a ferry departs across the two-mile Narrows to Nevis. More ferries leave St. Kitts’ capital Basseterre, a small town that almost is gone in a blink. Several remote beach bars are perfect places to spend a morning, such as the Reggae Beach Bar (www.reggaebeachbar.com) on Mosquito Bay (not as ominous as it sounds) and the Shipwreck Bar (www.shipwreckbeachbarandgrill.webs.com) on a particularly pleasant stretch of South Friars Bay.
The sister island of Nevis was becoming a minor obsession with me. I had run along the peninsula essentially to hop on the 20-minute ferry (the ones from Basseterre take 45 minutes), but the eight-kilometre-long road was steeper than I imagined, so I saw that I did not have sufficient time. On other days, the ferry times all were not convenient, so the nearest I got was a catamaran ride on Leeward Islands Charters (www.leewardislandscharters.com) that sailed past a couple of wrecked ships and the end of the peninsula, to within sight of the tiny Booby Island (named after a genus of bird) and to within 200 feet of Nevis—but not to Nevis. Another time perhaps!
Probably the most interesting historical site on St. Kitts is Brimstone Hill Fortress (www.brimstonehillfortress.org), which sits in Liamuiga’s shadow. It is a wonderful spot, small enough that it all can be seen but large enough that you do not need to see it with anyone else, and, although not immediately noticeable, there are overgrown paths that allow you not to retrace your steps on the relatively steep hills. The British built the fortress (or at least its slaves did), but the French ruled it, too. Both nations, and, a little before, the Spanish, fought over these islands, only seemingly announcing peace when together their desire was to kill off the indigenous inhabitants.
The top of the fortress gives a great view, and some 17th-century graffiti can be seen. A view of the island's cricket ground can be seen, too. My driver, Scotty, claimed he was the closest St. Kitts ever got to a Test Match cricketer for the West Indies. This is a source of shame to the island, another guide, Thenford Grey, telling me that the only player from St. Kitts to do so was Joey Benjamin, who actually played for—gasp!—the England team, and only once for them. Even more painful is the fact that Nevis has produced two or three. As many tourists to St. Kitts are Americans, this painful history needs not even to be mentioned.
Several American airlines make direct flights.

(Grenada)...Sitting up to my waist in water in the azure, cerulean and turquoise waters of Grenada’s Morne Rouge Beach, not another soul in sight, the edges of the bay arcing green and proud, I realized why until lately I had never been utterly enamored of the Caribbean: Many of its beaches are too straight of line and the countryside lacked green and topography. St. Lucia bucks that trend, and Grenada completely destroys it. I am eager one day to discover Dominica, which I am told offers similar delights.
Grenada is far to the south of the West Indian archipelago. Thus, it receives fewer tourists. The island, in turn, does not seem obsessed with tourism, although it is its largest industry. All 100,000 Grenadians have access to every beach, and no hotel or building can be—this is not unique to this island—higher than the tallest palm tree. The beaches tend to be small and postcard-perfect. The largest beach, Grand Anse, is a little over two miles in length but still does not get inundated, although when the cruise-ship season starts in late October (it ends in late March), it must be a little more busy. Another plus: Both Morne Rouge and Grand Anse are 10 minutes by taxi from the international airport at Point Salines (the fare is Eastern Caribbean S19 ($7)).
St. George’s, Grenada’s capital, is a picturesque port of 20,000 people that some call the Portofino of the Caribbean. Praise indeed, and it is very pleasant, Wharf Road leading around its harbor, called the Carenage. Parts of it have been dubbed San Francisco for its very steep streets, and dominating the skyline are several churches (the Anglican ones bear large clocks) and Fort George, where in 1983, political bickering ended with the execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, an act that led to the American invasion. Bishop’s name now graces the airport (the building of which he instigated), and snippets of graffiti still thank the United States for its intervention.
Today, that is old history for most, although the introduction of a sales tax, where before there never has been one, ensures that politics here remains heated, although much, much, much less prone to serious consequences. Tourism is a joy here, and the population is very educated.
A drive to Grand Etang Forest Reserve is a perfect alternative to the sublime beaches. Call hiking guide Telfor Bedeau (everyone knows him), a 71-year-old whose fitness will put men half his age to shame. One popular walk is though a volcanic crater of farms, through the rainforest and on to Seven Sisters Falls. At times the walk is steep, but the reward is great, two dramatic waterfalls filling your sightline. Adventurous holidaymakers can walk for 30 minutes up through the rainforest and jump down all the falls. Bedeau explains the fruits and spices seen along the way. This is done with a young man who calls himself Super Butterfly. He will tell you how to jump and where to jump, and I was told the whole experience is exhilarating. I was content swimming in the warm river water at the base of waterfall number six, and it really was warm in the September sun. A perfect picnic spot is a short drive away at the lake of Grand Etang (the accent that should be on the “E” I never saw used), whose name means Great Pond.
Grenada is, of course, called the Spice Island, known for spices, herbs and fruits such as cinnamon, ginger, all spice, cloves, cocoa, bay and, most importantly, nutmeg. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan destroyed many nutmeg trees (it smashed everything else here, too), and only now are farmers beginning to again make money from this iconic plant, and it is testament to the strength and versatility of Mother Nature that the island again looks luxuriant. Another attractive waterfall is at Concord.
A culinary tour is well worth doing. Start at Dougaldston Estate, near the small town of Gouyave, where Clifford Bridgeman, an elderly Grenadian, will show visitors that nutmeg contains two spices, the seed, which we call nutmeg when grated, and the seed’s thin reddish covering, known as aril, which we call mace. The long drying building at Dougaldston is wonderfully old. Outside, large trays covered with brown cocoa beans perch on heavy iron train tracks; inside, everything is equally ancient with dusty shards of sun shimmering a century of smells.
Perhaps some of these cocoa beans end up at the award-winning Grenada Chocolate Factory in a colorful, small building in the St. Patrick’s Parish village of Hermitage. It makes only a few types of chocolate (the cocoa content is between 60 and 82 percent), all of which are delicious. I loved the bar called Nib-alicious.
To wash all of this down, aim next toward the Rivers Antoine (pronounced “Rivers Ann-Twayne) Rum Distillery in Tivoli. It is the island’s oldest distillery, dating to 1785, and absolutely nothing looks as though it is any younger. Crumbling walls with 18th century graffiti surround and open up to working waterwheels, heavy machinery made in then-empirical Germany and England and huge piles of sugar-cane husks. A sip of its 75-percent-proof rum is, like the Seven Sisters Falls, for the adventurous. Flu will leave you! Flavored rums cut the potency. None is exported.
Back in St. George’s, dine at the very informal Patrick’s, run by a culinary magician called Karen Hall, who cooks all the food—which just keeps on coming—on eight stovetops. Dishes include locally caught crab, seasoned pork, spiced plantains and callaloo soup made with coconut milk. Callaloo is a green leaf vegetable that some might know as amaranth.
Nature buffs will want to visit Mount Hartman where the national bird, the very rare, reclusive Grenada dove, clings on. Current estimates put its numbers at no more than 200. At certain times of the year, whales glide by.
Hotels range the gamut. Modest but very comfortable, Caribbean-infused and delightfully low-key spots include Cinnamon Hill (Grand Anse Beach) and the new Kalinago (Morne Rouge Beach), while upscale roosts include the all-inclusive Les Sources (Pink Gin Beach) with a spa and upscale restaurant.

(Barbados)…I arrived in Speightstown at 8 a.m. because the bus from Bridgetown was going there, and there did not seem to be another bus waiting to go anywhere else. I was happy I did so.
Speightstown has a laid-back feel of a forgotten, perhaps colonial gem that had its hey day when business was far less regulated than it is today. As my bus curled around the west side of the island—though communities such as Batts Rock Beach, Oxnards, Lascelles and Gibbes Beach, I wondered if this circular island could rightfully be considered part of the Caribbean. Bermuda certainly isn’t, but Barbados also is outside the natural arc of the West Indian archipelago that stretches all the way from Cuba to Grenada. Shamefully I did not have a map, but I rectified that situation by visiting the Cloisters Bookstore, before walking down to a church that stood in the middle of a cemetery and was populated solely by a sleeping Rastafarian.
The town, an inviting mix of friendly locals, peeling pastel paint and fading grandeur, was the site where Admiral Sir George Ayscue, a navy man in the service of Oliver Cromwell, could only defeat the Barbadians, who chose to be loyal to King Charles I, by paying for the services of a Barbadian turncoat and tricking his way onto the island’s soil.
No one was fooled. Seeing what a generally incompetent admiral he was, the locals agreed to charter that technically saw them realign their allegiance but which in practice gave them incredible benefits unheard of in England’s dealings with the “native races,” including the oath that taxes would not be increased without the express written approval of the Barbadians’ representatives. Ayscue proved no more capable later, when his flag ship ran aground and he was forced to surrender and be imprisoned to and by the Dutch.
The only battle he won, according to my research, was the capture of the Scilly Isles, a handful of beautiful rocks off the extreme tip of Cornwall. He was the 17th century equivalent of a modern-day CEO who runs his company into the ground, produces huge savings by the wholesale sacking of his staff, destroys most of the benefits of the formerly healthy pensions scheme and then gets a massive golden handshake and a new job within a fortnight.
Pronounced “Spites-town,” Speightstown has a gentle feel that I instantly liked and reminded me of Falmouth, Jamaica; it once enjoyed a regular boat service to Bristol, England. Barbadians are wonderful people. Walking up steps at a back of a building leading to second-story bar might not be everyone’s choice, but I wanted to go to the balcony that I could see from Church Street, as everyone on it looked like they were relaxed, and within five minutes of being seated, two locals bought me a beer, the first one just appearing from the waitress without the buyer announcing himself. Good people. I returned the hospitality, and it was convivial right to the very last moment I really had to be back on the bus to Bridgetown.
It perhaps wasn’t always so friendly there, the term “Speightstown flattery” being slang for a backhand compliment. I took a smaller bus into the interior, and the bus driver went half a mile out of his way to drop me off at a spot—Pleasant Hill—that was much nearer to my goal, Farley Hill.
This is an interesting, little-visited place that is home to a troop of Green monkeys. Their fur perhaps might be construed as green, and there they were, swinging around the trees over the heads of Tropical kingbirds. The site features a ruined manor house, with gardens, built in the early 19th century by an Englishman called Sir Graham Briggs (with a name like that, I hardly have to say he’s English, do I?). The ruins, which feature in the 1965 film An Island in the Sun starring Sidney Poitier, burnt down in 1966, and then Queen Elizabeth II opened it all up as a national park, which seems curious, as royalty of England rarely is asked to open perhaps still smoldering buildings, but anyway, that year also was the year of Barbados becoming independence, so maybe such trivialities were overlooked. That said, Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert and their son, the future King George V, did stay there, so maybe she just felt like following in their footsteps. In Poitier’s film, it was called Belle Fontaine, for another reason lost to knowledge.
I walked back to Speightstown, some five miles, and then stopped for lunch in a low-key little place called the Fisherman’s Hut, which featured black-and-white photos of former cricket stars (see photo above). In bustling Bridgetown, I made a beeline to the Jewish synagogue for its oddity value, and then to a very strange statue purporting to be a likeness to Horatio Nelson. It is covered in bird excrement.
Supposedly, Nelson saved Barbados from the French, but many here see no relationship to him and want it removed from its prominent site and replaced by a worthy Bajan. Maybe he is looking so rough because the statue now is two years short of being 200.

(Martinique)…Looming high over Martinique is Mount Pelée, which is in the record books as being the third worst volcanic eruption in history. Perhaps there have been worst since, but as—generally—mankind is better able to predict, avoid and plan for such disasters (perhaps), maybe the death tolls have been reduced.
When it last erupted in 1902 (it blew its top twice that year), it killed more than 29,000 people, a tragedy only dwarfed by two 19th-century eruptions in Indonesia, including legendary Krakatoa. I drove up to St. Pierre, the town right beneath it that was swallowed whole.
Tour guides here tell delighted crowds that the only person to survive was a rum drinker who due to intoxication was inside a cell that protected him. Thus, their argument goes, rum can save your life…please buy a bottle in duty-free.
The truth is that this lucky man, Louis-Auguste Cyparis, who went on to be a star attraction in P.T. Barnum’s circus, was in jail because he had inflicted a wound on a friend with a cutlass, a less romantic tale; in fact, a second man survived, too, who was fortunate enough to live on the edge of town.
Today, fewer than 5,000 people live in St. Pierre, and the volcano is deemed one of the world’s most likeliest to yet again explode. I had arrived in the island’s capital Fort-de-France on a Sunday morning, and all was closed, except the large cathedral, the Cathédrale Saint-Louis de Fort-de-France, which was built in the 17th century but has been repeatedly set up again following fires, volcanoes, earthquakes and indifference.
Another more interesting church is just up the inland road on the way to the botanical gardens of Balata. Modeled on the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur in Paris, the Sacré-Cœur de Balata is smaller than the original but to the same scale.
Back in St. Pierre, there are still reminders of that fateful day. An amphitheatre lies empty with scorched walls, inoperable cannons stand facing a sea that provided far less threat than the land behind it and a statue remains headless. In his 1903 book, Mont Pelée and the tragedy of Martinique: A Study of the Great Catastrophes, Angelo Heilprin, who visited in May and August of the fateful year writes that “The landscape was barren as though it had been graven with desert tools, scarred and made ragged by floods of water and boiling mud, and hardly a vestige remained of the verdant forest that but a short time before had been the glory of the land. Great folds of cloud and ash hung over the crown of the volcano, and from its lower flanks issued a veritable tempest of curling vapor and mud. Lying close to its southern foot, and bathed in the flame of a tropical sunshine, was all that remained of the once attractive city of Saint Pierre—miles of wreckage that reached up from the silent desert of stone and sand, showing no color but the burning grays that had been flung to them or that had formed part of mother earth.”
Looking down at the town, the first thing I noticed was a toy train shuttling tourists along the front. Small grey waves lapped at the shore, and a local in a short-sleeved white shirt stood inside a school building and conducted an unseen orchestra. Everything seems normal, but scientists studying this peak—translated literally as Bald Mountain—say that it remains one of the most active volcanoes on the planet, despite not having blown its top for more than a century.
Climbing up the side of the volcano, everything looked green and idyllic. The landscape has names here such as Le Morne Rouge, Le Morne Vert and Gros Morne, monikers that speak of beauty, power and natural colour from the bowels of the planet.
Just before St. Pierre is the seaside village of Le Carbet, where supposedly in 1502, four centuries exactly to the date of the disaster, Christopher Columbus landed on his fourth voyage to what he still might have thought was Japan. A little farther towards the looming volcano are the Pitons du Carbet mountains on which grow ferns reaching more than 30 feet.
Everything is large here. A fantastic—awesome is a better word, in its true meaning—idea of the power of this volcano was that its ash enveloped, destroyed and sunk a ship out at sea called the Roraima, and there were survivors from that, too. One of them described the scene on Martinique—which has a really wonderful flag, by the way, four snakes twirling around staffs on a blue background with a white cross—saying “No darkness was ever like it. Imagine the darkest night you ever saw, imagine it a thousand times darker than that, and then you may get some idea of that the air was like for fifty miles in every direction from the harbour of St. Pierre.”
I walked around St. Pierre for a couple of hours. It does not feel like a town in imminent danger, but what town would? A grey stone house had been made pretty with a thin staircase of the same material bordered with a postbox-red rail, lush, green potted plants, wooden shutters and a mauve door; the main street curves by prim houses and shops of white, blue and yellow.
Only the sight of wetness on the ground (this is the only place in Martinique where the rains fall steadily, the clouds forming over Pelée and dropping their loads on St. Pierre) and a twin-towered church with flaking stone and rusty, squat steeples give a wider picture of any potential neglect that stems from the always possible futility of nature and the idea of the pointlessness of civic pride in the face of sweeping, sudden cataclysm. Bananaquits and Purple-throated carib hummingbirds flitted around, oblivious to the danger but first to leave if conditions change, wondering why the humans cannot pick up on the differences in the atmosphere and the conclusiveness of the catastrophe to come.

(Cayman Islands)—Scuba, scuba, scuba. This is the main reason to come to Grand Cayman, an island that initially struck me as rather soulless. The small capital of this small island, which remains one of the United Kingdom’s few remaining colonial outposts, George Town, has little to recommend it, apart from some interesting statues and tasteful wall murals in a central square. Mostly it contains luxury shops selling to the cruise-ship passengers that stay here from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. on any given day.
Every morning, I would sit on my balcony at the Sunset House Hotel (www.sunsethouse.com) and have a coffee, and I found I could set my watch for when the cruise ships (Carnival and Royal Caribbean) came in; and there were more than usual, a result of ships at that time not visiting Mexico and its H1N1 swine flu. Farther up the coast, Seven Mile Beach indeed has a strand to be proud of, but its hotels and strip mall-style shops, lining up against the road, left me cold. Far to the east of the island (a 30-minute drive) there was the gorgeous Queen Elizabeth II Botanical Garden (www.botanic-park.ky), which has several well-kept but wonderfully ragged gardens, a lagoon, rare Blue iguanas and the Cayman Islands only fully endemic bird species, the Vitelline warbler, which I saw very soon upon arrival.
But it is for scuba-diving that most people come to these islands, and it was also the reason I came. I had done my Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI; www.padi.com/scuba) course of online study, and on my first morning on this warm island was ready to become certified. This was a two-day operation, which initially included having to swim 700 feet and to tread water for 10 minutes. My instructor, Mike Sutton-Brown, originally an inhabitant of Blackpool (www.visitblackpool.com) in Lancashire, England, was a member of Sunset Divers (www.sunsethouse.com/staff.php) and an able teacher. All the skills I needed, and which seemed obtuse when read about on line, became simple and relevant when we practiced them in the pool and improved them in the Caribbean Sea, which laps up to the rocky front (that means there’s a reef right there waiting for you) of the resort.
On my second day of training, I started to see members of PADI arrive from their headquarters in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., there to prepare for a week of diving collectively known as Total Submersion 2009, or Total Sub for short. To be certified, divers need to complete four dives of deeper than 20 feet and for more than 20 minutes. My second dive of the day was the only one that I chose to abort, one of my ears refusing to equalise the increasing pressure that comes with depth. Thankfully, the next day, I did three dives with no problems, and after that, during Total Sub, I did another 12. Mike showed me how to do each skill, and then he would sign that I should repeat it. If I did it correctly, then there was shake of hands to show that I had passed.
Some of the trickier manoeuvres included taking your tank and buoyancy-control jacket on and off under water and getting rid of the water that you allowed to completely fill your mask (your eyes are smarting), but I was aware all the time that I was breathing—thank you very much—so I did not feel nervous. And then after one last certification dive, I was a fully-fledged Open-water Certified diver, and that felt good. On the next morning and for another three mornings, I and 15 other divers—together we were Team White and we ruled the seas in the post-dive water fights against the other four teams—went out to various sites chosen by our crew leader, Trevor, to experience the wonders of the deep. I have been to 58 countries and love travelling, but it occurred to me as I emerged following my first dive that three-quarters of the world was previously off limits to me.
The sea, I instantly decided, is a wonderful place. I saw Hawksbill turtles and glided after them; spotted a huge Green moray eel with its tail stuck through one hole and its head through another; smiled at large Hogfish swimming in pairs and as curious of you as you are of them; recognised diamond-shaped Southern stingrays accompanied by Blue tang fish that were preening them; inspected amazingly shaped coral and sponges; saw an octopus’ sucker-laced leg emerging from a crevice; marvelled at juvenile Spotted drums, a black-and-white fish that has a gorgeous tail and dorsal fin that can only be told apart because of their position in relation to its head (adults lack the fin), and generally had a fantastic time enjoying a huge host of other fish, only a few I was able to name following a careful analysis of a field guide. We swam above reefs, along passages, over sandy flats and close to wrecks. On the seabed we saw Garden eels rapidly popping back into the sand, Peacock flounders disappearing into the floor and lthe large forearms of conch encased in beautiful pink shells. The smile on my face when I emerged, following the standard three-minute safety stop at 15 feet below sea level, I could feel from ear to ear. I love this world.
Then, we would take the necessary surface-interval rest, before going in again, but at a lower depth, which is one of the golden rules of safe, no-decompression diving. Back at the bar at Sunset House we compared adventures, and everyone—and there was an incredible array of people, of different ages, sizes and athletic abilities—was excited that there was a new diver in their midst. At one dive site, and there are more than 70 within a short boat ride of Sunset House, called Oro Verde, we were told the amusing, although also tragic, story of how it got its name.
The Oro Verde is a sunken wreck and very much the stuff of local legend. Apparently, its captain wanted to retire, and he thought retirement might be made easier if he conducted some illegal activity just before giving up work. A certain white powder was secretly stored on board, but very soon the crew discovered the contraband and approached the captain to ask for a share of the proceeds. The captain refused, so the crew “dispatched” him. It was then that things went very wrong for them. They wanted to put the boat somewhere safe to dwell on their next move, but they lacked the captain’s knowledge of the local reefs. The boat grounded, and the panicked crew all drowned. Rumors start to spread on the island that there was an interesting cargo still aboard, and all boats turned towards the Oro Verde. Fortunately, the police reached the site first and confiscated the drugs. This is when the police made its big mistake of the whole error-prone tale. They took the cargo to the more desolate East End of Grand Cayman, wanting to get rid of the drugs before the weekend started. So they burned them, but just as they began to do this, the wind changed direction. Locals joke that still to this day, residents of George Town and Seven Mile Beach, to the west, stand outside their houses and shops every Friday night and wistfully stare eastwards with their nostrils dilated.

(Dominican Republic)...I was quite proud that I manage to travel completely around the southeast corner of the Dominican Republic under my own steam, or at least the steam of local, rickety gua-gua buses. I took 20 in total, and it was while taking them that I saw how wonderful Dominicans are. Gua-gua drivers flagged their peers down if they knew I needed a connection, or went out of their way to drop me off at the next bus stop I needed. Right from the pleasant, thatch-roofed Punta Cana International Airport, I took my first such bus. Just walk through the gauntlet of taxi drivers, skirt the car park, and you’ll see a bus stop to your right. I was a little anxious my journey started well, as it was edging towards darkness as I headed 40 kilometres over pleasant arable fields to the country’s religious centre, Higüey.
This ramshackle, dusty spot is best known for its Basilica de Nuestra Señora. Its blue trim, many faceted steeple and relative isolation keep it from being a concrete monstrosity. Inside is the 15th-century painting of the Virgen de la Altagracia, brought over from Spain by soldiers. I visited at 7 a.m. after an evening drinking beer and eating shrimps in a series of open-air restaurants where Higüeyanos come to dance. Surreal was watching a large-screen TV showing a baseball game from Venezuela. It was men versus women. The women wore shorts, the men trousers, and one of the men only had one arm. Excellent, I thought, a game for both sexes and incorporating disability, and then up to bat for the women’s team, dressed in a blue, yellow and red tracksuit and Adidas trainers, came Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who, on the evidence I saw, was not born to the game.
I took buses—some crammed with 25 where 17 would have done nicely—to El Seibo, Hato Mayor and finally Sabana de la Mar, where I jumped on the first of my five motoconcho scooters for the eight-kilometre trip to the wonderful Paraíso Caño Hondo (www.paraisocanohondo.com) hotel on the edge of the Parque Nacional de los Haitises.
Perched in a dry subtropical forest, the hotel is the most pleasant lodging I found in that part of the Dominican Republic. I took a walk through the park to see birds, caves, huge spiders and petroglyphs carved by the country’s original inhabitants, the Taíno, including a Christian cross that must have been etched after the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Fat lot of good it did them. The park also is the only remaining site of the very endangered Ridgway’s hawk (www.wptc.org/wildlife/dominican.php). Perhaps 120 remain.
Early the next morning, I hiked through mud and rivers and saw one perched on a branch. As I looked down at my binocular-holding hands, I realised that mosquitoes are not in the same danger of extinction. I only caught one rubbish van, but that was between this hotel and my next stop at the fishing village of Miches, where a deaf-mute showed me the large fish he had caught that moment just off shore. At Playa Limón, which is the wildest, most pristine beach I came across, a young lad was trying to prop up his absolutely intoxicated grandfather back onto his donkey while himself trying to continue to push his scooter that still had its engine on.
From the road—every road in the DR is potholed to an almost Armageddon-like manner—I walked three kilometres down a gorgeous lane looking at Northern parulas and surrounded by 200 or 300 butterflies at a time. I was on the lookout for a lagoon, so I was most happy when I discovered first the Rancho La Cueva (www.rancholacueva.com) hotel. It was run by a jolly Austrian font of information called Walter. Apart from myself, staying there, were a Milwaukee couple and a mother and daughter from Utrecht. It made for very interesting company. Sitting at the edge of the nearby Río Cedro with the hotel’s dog at 7 the next morning was a joy.
Later, Walter dropped the Dutch and I at La Otra Banda, a community of dodgy-looking pieces of meat hanging off shop beams that was founded by Canary Islanders who the dictator Rafael Trujillo invited in the 1930s to whiten the Dominican popular in the hope that it would shore up his regime. Trujillo supposedly spent fortunes on powders and creams in order to blanch his own skin, much in the way that pop singer Michael Jackson is purported to. At the far south of this southeastern corner is the nation’s last remaining fishing village, Boca de Yuma, where the photo above was taken. It has a curious population of ex-pats from Trieste. The hotel I stayed in, La Vieja Pirata, had an owner from this far-flung Italian city, who smiled when I said I had been there three months before.
The weather was patchy, and I saw four rainbows in 24 hours. It is a short walk to the ranger station (no clothing allowance, quite obviously) of the Parque Nacional del Este. An endemic Hispaniolan lizard-cuckoo greeted me at the gate, and I saw a minute, brilliantly shiny, green Broad-billed tody inside. The forest here somehow roots itself into coral, which is hard on one’s boots. A fish lunch here can be expensive, perhaps the only thing to be so in the country. A fish is brought out, but the price is quoted by the pound. Just be careful, is my advice. Back on the north coast, I walked five kilometres from the main road to La Vacama Beach, only to be quoted a hefty price for a room at a hotel that featured an ostrich in a large cage. The price was tall, as I would have been the only person to stay there, so I decided to walk to the little village of La Vacama back at the main road (for what it was).
As I trudged back, a violent downpour ensued. I at first enjoyed the warm rain, but then my boots started swimming. I ran to a cow shed and tried to loosen a rubber handle off a gate. I abandoned that when I saw the reward of my effort would have been to stand in six feet of mud, so I made instead for an abandoned house. This time I did get the fence open, and it fell on the ground like a row of dominoes.
Diving out of the rain, I saw that the house was not abandoned. A little, wizened black Dominican was in one corner—all was bare concrete and live electrical wires—roasting a plantain over a small fire. I apologised, but he insisted on my continuing to shelter there and would not say no to my eating half of his lunch, despite it being small and there being no other food apparent. We chatted about the general lack of money and the crops he was growing in the shadow of the house, which was not his. When the rain stopped, we walked the 20 minutes to the village, where I bought him a beer and the other villages wondered who his new friend was.

(Bahamas)...Four days in the Bahamas to escape a Northeast U.S. winter is an excellent idea, and a fantastic opportunity to go to a new Caribbean island. I have only been to one once before—Antigua & Barbuda (see posts passim), so off to Nassau on New Providence I went. I was there essentially to see the new Sheraton Cable Beach (www.cablebeachresorts.com/sheraton), which is the first part—together with the existing Wyndham hotel—of a new megaresort called Baha Mar.
That hotel, to open in 2012, they hope, will also include a Caesars Park Hotel & Casino and properties W, Westin and St. Regis, which means—so the developers gushed—the largest cluster of Starwood-branded properties in the world. So there. The sea was a magnificent shade of turquoise, and the beaches are attractive. I was very interested in an abandoned, dilapidated horseracing grandstand, which stood slightly inland from the hotel.
I assume this will finally disappear, rather than slowly doing so, when Baha Mar’s golf courses (of course!) are finished and West Bay Street (the coastal road) is re-routed.
Or at least I assume it was for horse racing, although I do see that betting on horse racing is illegal in the Bahamas. In fact, it is illegal for Bahamians themselves to bet on anything. Only foreigners are allowed to. Anyway, the track—if such it is—could be reached fairly easily. No sign barred one’s way, and there were no security personal stopping you tearing up your legs on the brambles as you hack your way through. On the road out, there is a large shed full of old juckanoo costumes and floats. We went to the Junkanoo Museum in Nassau, which chronicles this Bahamian Mardi Gras-style parade that is held at Christmastime. All the costumes are made from pieces of paper or card, and the costumes reminded me of Dogon costumes and masks from Mali (or at least, pictures and photos of Malian costumes and masks that I’ve seen).
The different teams that compete for bragging rights have names such as “Roots,” “Fancy Dancers” and the “Valley Boys.” Seemingly, European warrior races are popular for names, too, with both the “Saxons” and the “Vikings” doing battle. Away from the port and its huge cruise ships (also avoid the terrible Straw Market and its cheaper-than-cheap souvenir schlock), Nassau—the capital of the Bahamas—does have a pleasant feel. Everything seems to be named for Queen Victoria, who never went there. The police walk about very smartly, and all the government buildings are pink.
One wonderful stop was the Graycliff restaurant, on West Hill Street, which I did not eat at. It is expensive in any way you could calculate it. It has, we were told, the world’s most-expensive wine cellar, which extends beneath the road, the world’s most-expensive collection of cognac and the world’s most-expensive collection of single-malt whiskies from Scotland. The one I saw was a 1948 bottle of Macallan, which sells for $5,800, or in a restaurant, probably at $11,600; apparently, also there is a bottle of Château Lafite going for the princely sum of $250,000. The restaurant’s building is beautiful, and its gardens and courtyards serene (see the photo above), a far cry from its original 1740’s days as the home of John Howard Graysmith, the pirate-captain of the schooner Graywolf. (I guess that Graysmith and Graywolf are not suitable names for restaurants.)
I got wet at Stuart’s Cove (www.stuartcove.com), where on one day I went scuba diving, the second day, snorkeling. The highlight of the first day was seeing delicate Tiger cowries (Cypraea tigris), while the highlight of the second definitely was bobbing over 40 or so Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus perezii). We were allowed 10 minutes of doing this (10 minutes from the first person jumping in, not the last). After 10 minutes, the sharks (who have worked in tourism for many years) start getting restless and moving slightly nearer the surface.
After I had got back on to the boat and turned around, the sharks’ fins were breaking the water, and when some dead fish were thrown in, they positively went crazy. So did the gulls, and I was told it has been known for the sharks to grab one of them, despite their preference for scavenging food, rather than hunting it. It is confined to Caribbean and northern South American waters and is not considered dangerous to humans. Back at the dock there is a photo of actress Selma Hayak looking suitably unimpressed by being photographed while she is trying to enjoy herself scuba diving.
The most authentic Bahamian thing I did was to walk to Arawak Cay, where are several rows of shack restaurants cooking up local cuisine. Collectively, it is called the Fish Fry, and when I passed it on a bus one morning, I did not have high hopes for it. But it turned out to be fun. I chose one that had a crowd of local workers eating their lunches. An argument (from what I gathered, it was concerned with what was better, Electricity or Water; I suggested getting a large bucket, filling it with water, sticking an arm in and then, with a lead in a plug, shoving something electric in it to test their theories) was conducted in very loud voices. The radio was tuned to a religious programme, and the news told of four murders that weekend in a depressed neighbourhood of Nassau called Over-the-Hill. These murders were apparently drugs-related.
At the other end of the cay is an abandoned aquarium that looks the perfect place for one of James Bond’s arch-nemesises to live, a round, white structure atop a small base and topped with a high white spike. This aquarium was put out of business when the Bahamas’ other megaresort, Atlantis, opened; I wonder if that was the same fate that befell the track mentioned above. Now this former aquarium sits on a smaller cay of its own, the only people living there those paid to keep others off.

(Puerto Rico)…I started to wait for a bus from San Juan International Airport, but very soon realised that the Puerto Rican bus service was far from up to scratch. Get a taxi. Flying in from St. John’s in Antigua & Barbuda, I saw the old section of San Juan from high above and grew excited just looking at it. I was dropped off just off Avenida Muñoz Rivera, at the Plaza Colon, a neat, small square of cafés and shoe shiners. I like colonial places, the bright colours of its tidy houses, its small restaurants and cafés where it feels as though patrons come to the same establishment every day and tall linden trees. Walking north towards the Caribbean Sea, I discovered my first section of the city’s famous defensive walls. This was the Fuente San Cristobal.
Puerto Rico’s symbol, seen everywhere, is a turret poking out over the edge of the bluff and with a small window, and the first one I saw was here. It was very hot. Juan Ponce de León, who had traveled with Christopher Columbus in 1493, originally set up a settlement a couple of miles from the present site of San Juan. It was called Caparra. He did not live long enough to see the start of the fortification of San Juan, which started in earnest in the mid-16th century. Its most celebrated defence was that of repelling Sir Francis Drake of England. The principal defensive fort, called La Fortaleza, later on became the home of the Spanish province’s governor. I had the addresses of a few cafés and bars that looked interesting, but all had been closed down. Perhaps they were not tacky enough.
Tacky, though, is the Calle de la Fortaleza. I preferred the streets both up and across that are to the north, towards and left of the San Felipe del Morro fort. Well worth doing is the walk along the base of the wall, starting at the San Juan Gate, but note that if you walk to the right and all the way along to the end, towards El Morro, then there is no access back into town but only back from the same gate. Continue past the gate, that is, if you would be going left if coming out of town, and walk along this shorter stretch. A cool, attractive garden with a café is to your left, with sculpture and parrots. One spot I liked was the Museo Felisa Rincón de Gautier, in the last home of the city’s first woman mayor, or alcaldesa, a very colourful woman also known as Doña Fela and who in her advanced years took to wearing huge glasses and elaborate hair-dos. She was mayor between 1946 and 1968, a huge length of time for a politician by my reckoning, and died in 1994, aged 97.
The museum has numerous photographs of forgotten friends and politicians. In fact, the entire museum has an atmosphere of having passed its usefulness, which made it feel even more necessary to visit and dawdle in. I was the only one there, apart from three museum staffers. Perhaps there really was only one, the other two being friends of hers. It is at the junction of Caleta de San Juan, a treed street that drops down in large steps and is bordered by colourful, high houses, and Calle Clara Lair. (Problematic to me was my attempting to take photographs, an impossible task, of all the places where I saw seven or eight or so juxtaposed houses all in different bright colours—lemon yellow, Fanta orange, pastel blue, lime green, etc.) This definitely is a museum for Puerto Ricans, who still hold her in great esteem.
I often do not bother with the world’s great museums, preferring to see modern life on the street. In this, I am certainly not alone. My excuse is that I have little interest seeing dead people’s furniture. It does not even have a Web site, which further endeared it to me. Over the side of the northern walls, which in places is said to be 20 feet in width, is poorer housing. I did not walk down to it, which was possible, thinking that the residents probably would not appreciate me gawking at the colour that often is present in poverty, or as the Sex Pistols once hollered, “A cheap holiday in someone else’s misery,” always one of my favourite song lines.
That said, such scruples did not stop me visiting the favela slum of Rocinha in Río de Janeiro, Brazil, the name of which, by the way, means “little ranch” in Portuguese. Also to the north side of town is a parade of sculptures of heads, which caught my attention, next to a house’s forecourt of luxuriant foliage and squawking parrots, all things that are suitably Caribbean and add to the general enjoyment. Along these lines is the Butterfly People (www.butterflypeople.com) gallery at 257 Calle de la Cruz, where pinned butterflies are displayed for sale in small to gigantic picture frames. Signs deter photographs. The art is no doubt beautiful, the butterflies appearing to fly even after death. Other signs say that the butterflies are bred in the tropics especially for the gallery, rather than being plucked from some sylvan glade in Costa Rica. Prices are not cheap.