A winter walk in hot sunshine along the west coast of Barbados, between Holetown and Speightstown.
How quickly landmarks become familiar to a walker, even when you have been in a place for only a few days. Being on foot means being much more in touch with buildings, views and objects. Our walk from The Garden (a village a few kilometres north of Holetown) to our swimming beach at Thunder Bay is now a familiar parade of stages.
The first landmark, just down the road, is the Albany Primary School. The school gate bears one of my favourite signs. It instructs parents on what they may or may not wear when visiting the school. Surprisingly, men are expressly banned from wearing "pants below their waist". I didn't actually see any fathers picking up their offspring from school wearing their trousers on their heads, nor any dressed only in their boxers, but maybe they were all disobeying the official policy.
At the start of our stay, we used to cross to the other side of the road here, to avoid walking against the traffic round a sharp bend, but now, veterans of several days walking this route, we stay on the same side and take the short-cut under a breadfruit tree, like everyone else. It looks like part of someone's garden, but the shortcut has been so well established that nothing short of a barbed-wire fence would stop it now from being the public route of choice.
We discovered one morning that it actually was part of someone's garden. My husband, walking in front, suddenly stopped and said, "Oh look, one of the breadfruit has fallen off. Let's take it back to the apartment and cook it tonight". He picked it up, pleased with his foraging skills.
"Oy!!!", came a disembodied voice. My husband dropped the breadfruit and looked around, then up; the voice had clearly come out of the tree. Mortified, I started apologising to the tree and whoever might be in it.
"You! Wait!", the voice came again.
This time we spotted an elderly man peering down through the branches, from some distance up, perched on a rickety ladder and holding a very sharp-looking machete. Which was directly above our heads. I hoped that he had a good grip on it. Oh dear, is he now going to give us an angry lecture about it being bad enough that everyone uses his garden as a shortcut, without foreign tourists coming along and stealing his breadfruit?
Not quite. "I get you one! That one's rotten."
With that, he reached up into the branches, cut effortlessly with the machete through the thick stalk of a big, ripe breadfruit and tossed it down towards our outstretched arms. We offered to pay for it, but he refused. We shouted our heartfelt thanks and trotted off home with our prize. We were genuinely grateful - the price of any fruit and vegetables in the local supermarkets had left us speechless when we first ventured on a shopping trip. We cooked it later, baked as a souffle with cheese and hot pepper - Martinque-style (we lived on that lovely French-speaking Windward Island for a while when we were students).
But I digress. After the breadfruit-garden shortcut, our walk reaches a large, vacant lot, for sale with planning permission to build a huge villa, with stunning sea views and direct access to a beach. Yours for a mere US$30m.
After the vacant lot, we reach Nathalie, the fish and fruit seller, shouting to - and sometimes at - passers-by from her mobile stand. She is always clad in white overalls and, despite the heat, long, white wellies. Nathalie's fruit and vegetables are not given away - or, at least, not most of the time. Once, having shocked us into gawping silence by the price she wanted for a couple of limes, she seemed to relent. The next time we walked by, she shouted to us and threw a volley of oranges. The time after that she gestured to us to follow her and thrust a whole carrier bag of bananas into our hands. To say the least, they were a little past their best, but when a small bunch in the supermarket costs the equivalent of £5 - £6 (despite growing on the island almost like weeds), it was a generous offering. Nothing wrong with over-ripe bananas, especially if you put them in a frying pan and douse them in local rum (the only foodstuff which is cheap here).
Next comes a field of goats. They are pale brown, with white bellies, black socks on each of their feet and elaborate, black markings on their long faces. They don't seem to mind the heat, strolling around their enclosure in full sun on the search for anything vaguely edible.
After the goats, we reach Reed's House, an apartment block with a strange, lighthouse-like tower that is lit up in different colours at night. After that comes an old, almost derelict, but charming wooden, traditional Barbados shack. Nobody seems to live there, but looks can be misleading. It might be in need of some work, but it boasts a position every bit as good as the US$30m site up the road: uninterrupted views of the Caribbean sunset horizon and direct access to a white-sand beach. It even has the tallest coconut palm anywhere on this part of the coast, its coconuts towering out of reach of even the most intrepid palm-climber. Walking under it needs some caution in strong winds.
After that comes an Anglican church with my favourite sign, warning those coming up from the beach against any kind of desecration of church property. I don't quite know who "the management" refers to, but perhaps perpetrators are lucky just to be prosecuted, rather than sent to hell.
Then comes lovely Thunder Bay. First, there is the beach bar, right at the access to the beach from the road. In fact, right next to a sign that tells us that the bar is "1/4 mile (ish)" away. It must be no more than a dozen paces. You often get the impression that if any walking at all is involved, it is far too hot and far too much bother for cool Bajans.
The beach is wide, of pale sand, fringed with coconut palms and manchineel trees, each carrying its scarlet warning against eating the very poisonous apple-like fruit and against standing under them in the rain. The sand curves round in an almost absurdly perfect horseshoe, ending in a small, rocky headland and lined, at the top, with a select row of very, very desirable villas.
After Thunder Bay, our walk continues along the roadside, dodging on and off erratic pavements and verges, sometimes swept along by the slipstream of a passing reggae bus. These are privately-run minibuses which offer an alternative to the state-run buses. They are hot and cramped compared with the air-conditioned Barbados buses, but they make up for it in character. Their specialities are speed (hence the slipstream) and music - very loud music. This makes things difficult when you want to get off, as you have to shout "Stop, please!" to the driver before you reach your stop. Making yourself heard is practically impossible, so you have to shout to the passengers next to you and hope the message gets passed down the minibus before your stop whizzes past the window at 60 mph.
The next landmark, after the headland, is a wonderful Jamaican jerk restaurant called Reggie's - hot, spicy, home-cooked style food, served in generous portions on a terrace overlooking a tiny beach. Definitely worth a visit if you are ever in Barbados.
Just after Reggie's is the next bay, called Gibbs. Before we reach the access to the beach, we pass another parade of multi-multi-million dollar villas. We got talking to the housekeeper of one of them in the supermarket queue one day. She advised us never to look at the prices of the produce on the shelves if we wanted to stay sane. When she finally reached the front of the queue ahead of us, we watched as she handed over more than $1,000 for her trolley-load of goods. I still wonder at how local people manage to eat.
Gibbs Bay is one of the most beautiful beaches on Barbados. On a "normal" day, the intensely turquoise water laps on to the perfect, white sand and people wallow in the water contentedly, accompanied by the occasional pelican.
However, during most of our stay, conditions were rather different. Kick-em Jenny is an underwater volcano in The Grenadines, to the west of Barbados. Kick-em Jenny had decided to kick off and, with a series of underwater eruptions, she was busy throwing up huge surf along the west coast. The first time we walked to Gibbs Bay, the waves were about 2m high. They hit the beach with such force that they rebounded and smashed into the next wave, sending up a ridge of water which was even higher. If you were foolish enough to try to swim (well, it was worth a try!), you found yourself being thrown around like a rag doll. It was impossible to walk out of the water, against the rebounding waves, so making it to the safety of the beach involved being tugged back and forth in the region just beyond the breaking waves, waiting for a slight lull, then riding each successive wave further and further in, hoping for the best, until you were flung on to some solid ground. Few came out unscathed.
Eventually, our walk reaches Speitstown. This is the second biggest town in Barbados, after Bridgetown. Although there are many tourists, mainly Canadians, there is also a refreshing sense of ordinary life going on here - local people going about their lives, teenagers off to school, old people sitting outside their houses, chatting to their equally old friends.
Top of the tourist trail in Speitstown seems to be Caboose. It's a makeshift food stall, fashioned from an old boat and random bits of fishing gear, selling the famous fish cutter. This Bajan delicacy is a bread roll filled with crispy-coated, fried fish fillet (traditionally flying fish), along with salad and a LOT of hot, hot pepper sauce. They look irresistibly delicious.
Two people are handing out beers and soft drinks and taking food orders from the side of the old boat, now rigged up as a bar, while two others cook, entombed inside the old hull in what must be the hottest and most cramped kitchen in the Caribbean. We join the growing queue, collect our numbered ticket and go and wait in whatever shade we can find until the chefs have cooked our order.
Tourists keep arriving and joining the queue. It grows and grows. Local people arrive nearby, wave a couple of fingers at the barman, walk to the side of the boat, pick up a beer and hang around for a few minutes until they receive a paper bag containing their hot fish cutter. The system seems to work, if you know the right hand signals (and have known the barman all your life).
We wait. Luckily, we have arrived just before the lunchtime rush, so our wait is only 45 minutes. Others, still arriving, might still be here at sunset. But Caboose fish cutters are worth it.
We sit in the shade a while longer, before heading back south along our hot and dusty route, towards an equally delicious, cooling swim back at Thunder Bay.
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