Mark Fiorentino
Writer - Technologist

...come to visit Barbados? There are countless stories of why and how and I’m always interested to hear the details. Some stories are mundane; a travel agent chose it. Or it can be pure luck, as when you work with someone who has a time share here. Sometimes it is special, as when your sister has chosen to come marry here. Perhaps it is just the place you always wanted to visit. In my story, which is probably my favorite story, it is family. In particular, it is Mom who was a child of the island. Somebody must, right? Born here in the twenties, she left Barbados as a teen on her own. No runaway, she was destined for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; City of Brotherly Love, where she would attend University. Over the summers she would bring acquaintances home to visit. Now these were folks with a great been-to-Barbados story. In those days, international holiday travel was just not the thing for the working class, and Mom’s college acquaintances would have grown up just so in Philadelphia. In that time and place, going to the beach meant Saturday’s in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Now, at school, they meet this “alien” friend with an odd accent and English ways, and it comes as the most pleasant of shocks that she could bring them to visit her exotic home where they will wind up spending summer months eating mangos and eddo soup, riding horses along cane-field roads and collecting shells along beach strands like they could never have imagined. Not a bad story at all, and since that time when Mom brought her first friend here, she has brought friends and family time and again. One, in those college days, turned out to be Dad. In the course of achieving college degrees, she did also find love in the US, and of course had to bring him home for inspection. When Dad came for the first time, it was as if he had fallen asleep to awaken in a dream land of plantation mansions, yachting, lawn tennis, and cricket; all giving a very new meaning to the concept of coming home to meet her parents. Though he was something of a stranger in paradise, it seems everyone hit it off well enough, since his second visit saw their wedding, conducted in the grand style, and their honeymoon, up to Kingsley Club on the east coast, at Cattlewash on Sea. These events were the seeds of something big for the family they would start in the US – American kids that would come here and love it and keep coming back, bringing friends and eventually families of our own.

So maybe my story of getting here falls more in the category of luck. I have been lucky to visit quite a few times, and I love it like no place else. And in many ways it is like no place else. For its history, its cuisine, its culture, its weather, its geography; both how it looks and where it sits, it is a rare jewel of a nation that’s always been a challenge to get to and, in a different way, yet more of a challenge to leave. By its location, off to the east of the Lesser Antilles, it still maintains the divide between the bath-tub Caribbean to its west, and the butter-churn Atlantic to its east. Everybody has their preference, but for me, as I write this I long to be on an east coast beach; at the Crane with its waves of champagne, or Bottom Bay riding breakers all day. It was at Cattlewash where my parents, as newlyweds, first collected shells and stayed clear of the fierce rip tide. I know that for most visitors, the frame of reference is the west coast, and for good reason. The west coast bristles with resorts and shopping from the island’s bottom to its top. The azure waters of the Caribbean pour gently like a cool blue cocktail, and there is more tourist day-life and nightlife along the west coast by far. But since I have always been visiting family here, I have been looking neither for resorts nor shopping. I grew up knowing much more of the rough-and-tumble cliffs and tides of the east coast; from North Point down to Foul Bay, than of the swimming-pool beaches and cocktail bars that stretch along the west coast from South Point up to Archers Bay. In my experience, it is to the east coast where locals go for a break.

As always, after my most recent visit I wondered, when can I come back? And while I surely was not asking it at the tail end of my very first visit - I was one – after every trip since, at five, at eight and ten, at thirteen and still when? I have asked it more emphatically each time. At some point a transition started, from my parents deciding when I had come, to my wife and I deciding, along with my brother and his wife. We had the nerve to come here with them on their honeymoon! (So I have that special been-there story as well.) Before long we had children to bring, and for some years it has been us answering the question for the next generation who has discovered our good fortune that Mom; Granny in this case, left Barbados, giving us all the chance to come back again and again.

Sands of Time

For my work I travel -- a lot -- but I do enjoy it thoroughly. I visit more places in a year than most people visit in a life. I find that folks expect flying off here and there every other week should drive me crazy, but traveling has meant such excitement for me since I was small that I consider it a treat. I even see business travel as a part of my compensation. Travel is an optimistic endeavor no matter where I’m headed. Yes, I’ve been to Barcelona, Spain and Paris, France and Oslo, Norway but not every destination is a glamour spot, and I may wind up in Oakland, California, or Bismarck, North Dakota or Livingston, Ontario. Still I still find reason to be enthusiastic about travel, and that feeling ties back to the excitement I felt as a child headed for the airport. Whether my family was going to an airport to travel out, or we were going to retrieve someone coming to visit from overseas, driving to the airport always meant that something big was happening. Now, when I step onto a plane, somewhere deep inside, maybe I expect that I’ll step off in Barbados.

Just the traveling here does bring memorable adventures, and so I enjoy the activity of traveling all on its own. There are sweet memories like a flight we took on British Overseas Airways; BOAC – when I was five. The head flight attendant (the stewardess in those days) pinned me with airline’s wings; real metal wings. She gave me a logbook for recording my travels, and brought me into the cockpit for a pre-flight tour. I remember it like I could still work the controls, and I do still have that logbook. There have been less pleasant travel memories as well. In the days before cell phones, my brother seemed lost in transit with his girlfriend, as they had been off-loaded from a stop-over in San Juan because the plane to New York was overbooked. We had no idea where they were for a time, and it was a long night at JFK, but we eventually did see them home. On another stop in San Juan when I was thirteen, I found that US Immigration really meant it when they said they wouldn’t let me off American protected soil without proof of who I am; no birth certificate, no departure. If you leave without proof of who you are, they will not just be able to let you back in on your return. Eventually we did pay a notary to swear that I was an American citizen – perfectly legal, mind you. Meanwhile my birth certificate was shipped on ahead so I could get back home when the time came. So even the less cherished travel memories have seemed to work out and make for good stories to relate over time. Mostly, of course, it is not the plane flights or airports that have been so memorable, as it has been the places we’ve stayed and the things we’ve done while we were here.

From trip after trip over the years, we naturally accumulated stacks of photos that have been discussed and displayed to friends and family over and over. From my younger years many related “memories” surely result from having been told what was going on when a certain photo was snapped. The scene with the pipe, the pith helmet and the cocktail glass was at a family gathering in sixty six… I know I have constructed recollections from photos that I wouldn’t otherwise have. But the memories I treasure most are the ones that do not involve a photo. I remember, without need of a photo, when I was five, we stayed in an expansive villa, known as Beachy Head, and shared it with 4 other families. Now still known by the same name, it is no longer for rent, but back in1966, when we did rent the place, it was a palace from a dreamy summer-holiday film. The guests came from all over and we sat for huge dinner meals and there were vast morning migrations of people down to the sea. We watched the fishermen pull in the catch of sea urchins and we hid in the caves behind the great coral boulders. I have not been back to that house since, but I have been to the beach, and it truly remains as I remember it from when I was five.

From Beachy Head, around the corner may be one of the sweetest beaches in the world. It is the Crane, and above it the Crane Hotel. Upstairs you have a spectacular view and a meal to match. Downstairs you have a cane sugar beach, seeming almost private (though none of Barbados beaches are), where you can get a stiff rum punch and feel the unexplainably light frothing surf that mystifies all who visit. I do not see folks diving from the Crane cliffs any longer, but I remember that when small I watched with awe as my brothers and cousins disappeared over the edge and into sea below. It took me years to gather up the same courage, and when at thirteen I finally dove off the cliffs at Sam Lord’s. I have only just done that again recently and I was petrified. I now cannot believe I had the courage to do that at thirteen!

So Beachy Head, Crane Beach, Sam Lord’s and many more along the east coast are the beaches that make my memories most special. Afternoon’s in the waves with family. Tennis-ball cricket on the beach with whoever is around. Roasting roti and the Christmas tree in a bon fire on twelfth night. Foul Bay, Soup Bowl and Cattlewash, Long Bay, Skeete’s Bay, and the Ragged Point light; the beaches and cliffs of the east coast are a wonder. Gun Rock is a cliff with great memories for me. It is not so very far north of where the coast turns a corner and begins to get crowded with houses, docks and businesses at the Village of Oistins. Still, Gun Rock is hard to find, along that section of the southeast coast, where cliff and beach access is not so regular. But what a joy it is to see the waves at play there when you do find it. I was ten when I stayed in a vacation house there, and we would walk out along the cliff, over the thorns of the eroded lava rock. When the sea is surging with the tide’s advance, Gun Rock takes in more water than it can hold, and the volley of sound builds from a splash to the great gun blast that gives the rock its name. On a light night it’s simply a wonder. Recently we stayed near there again, at Sam Lord’s, where the cliffs can be at angle to the lineup of waves flowing in. On a rare stormy day, I sat on the veranda with my children, niece and nephews. We watched as each wave burst out from pockets along the cliff wall for a mile down towards Gun Rock. A good one would explode five or six times as contact with the island made its way along the cliff wall in our direction. A stormy day along the east coast may keep you out of the surf, but it will pay you back with such entertainment and rare beauty.

Bathsheba can be entertaining, and it can be dangerous. I have watched a troop of surfers battling the morning waves to get beyond the breakers of Soup Bowl, and Bathsheba is where I first learned the words dangerous undertow. Locals will tell you that Cattlewash got no back door. But for all its rugged power and majesty, the Bathsheba coast can be charmingly calm and quietly beautiful as well. The first time our children came to Barbados, we happened on Bathsheba as the sun sank behind Chalky Mount. We stopped into the Round House and we walked along the sometime sandy sometimes rocky shore. In beyond the reach of the softening waves of low tide, just below the water’s surface, the eroded coral of Bathsheba provides natural bathtubs, complete with a paint box of aquatic friends. The kids did not know whether to chase the sea creatures or to run from them. Yet at a different time of day, you could visit the same spot where our children splashed and giggled in knee deep pools, but you would be up to your ears in a roaring and powerful ocean.

The Bathsheba bite was carved, from out of ages upon ages of coral reef, by the power of the eroding sea, winds and rains. The great rocks of Bathsheba that were left standing are still slowly battered to pieces by the sea. The poignant Finger Rock stood true to its name and 20 feet high when I was a child, but my children never had the chance to see it. It is gone completely now; lowered in a storm two decades past. It’s neighbor, one of a number known as Round Rock; stands both rotund and defiant, yet still loses a bit of its girth each year to the gnawing teeth of the sea. All along the Atlantic coast there are smaller bites out of the coral wall that have ground down into charming and secluded beaches – each with its own special character and challenges to access. But if you find them, you will thank me for pointing the way.

What’s for Dinner

Man cannot live on beach alone. When it does come time for a meal, you will find that, small though it is, the foods of many nations fit into Barbados. It seems that once there was an empire, and the variety of food came with it from home and from its possessions around the world. Those foods have all been shared and passed down through the generations, and, as a result, had their impact at home on our family dinner table - and all who shared it. Though the exotic cuisine of our evening meal wasn’t always a favorite for visitors, I have many friends who recall a meal at mom’s table, for good or bad, as among the most unforgettable of their lives. My wife and my sisters-in-law each recall their initiation to our family’s diet as nothing if not a shock to the system. That is largely thanks to the unique blend of culinary culture that followed mom as she left this melting pot of - well - food. If you have been here for more than a day, I’m betting that you have already enjoyed one of the now many chic, artistic eateries that paint a dining masterpiece using the most sophisticated of leading edge gastronomic palettes. French and contemporary kitchens thrive here on tourism with the same kind of success as the local artists and the rum distilleries. Make no mistake that my favorite places to dine out here are in amongst the world’s top ranked, but if you are looking for a local experience, keep in mind that the traditional organ meats, curries and unbearably pepper-hot stews are not typically found amidst the fare of the top shelf eateries. From amongst the more challenging items on the traditional menu, my personal favorite is a pepper pot, but if you seek it out, please be warned it has laid low both the Teflon tongue and the cast-iron stomach.

Obviously, no matter how challenging the offering, how adventuresome your tastes, whether you eat out, or cook for yourself, if you are not indulging in the fruits de mer you aren’t getting all you can out of the island. For its A-1 favorite fruit of the sea, Barbados is known as the land of the flying fish. The place has uniquely developed the knowledge, throughout the population, of how to properly bone the little gems and so you will not find them eaten anywhere in the volume that they are eaten here. The bones can be worse than a nuisance, so other islands will just sell their entire whole-flying fish catch to Barbados because they have not the technique and perhaps the patience to make the sweetmeat safe for ingestion. I had an uncle who always said, one bone and I’m done. Eating the flying fish, for us, is among the treasured rituals of the visits to or from the islanders. Regardless of the time of day or night, the first thing to do on congregating in the kitchen with the newly arrived, has always been to mix up a batch of rum punch and to heat up the breaded and spiced flying fish fillets. As unique as the flying fish here, the hot sauce is unlike that from anywhere else and makes the perfect topper. Give us a glass of planter’s punch, a stack of fish with a puddle of hot sauce and we could drink, chew and chat on into night.

While the flying fish often comes frozen because it is seasonal, in our recent visits here, we have done well at getting the fish too-fresh as well. At Skeete’s Bay and Oistins or even from the fisherman right off the beach we’ve had memorable meals on today’s catch. I have been to Oistins for the she-dolphin (a.k.a. mahi-mahi). The female is tastier and easy to tell apart from the male because of her sloped forehead compared to his square. I have been to Skeete’s Bay for the fresh flying fish by the fist full, or at least by the bag. If you are lucky enough to stay out on the rocks at Sam Lord’s, dinner can be the freshest sea food meal possible. Standing looking over the cliff, we met Cedric and James, floating in a colorful open fishing boat, bobbing like a cork on the sea fifteen feet below. The men called up to us that they were goin’ out spear fishing and would we want them to bring back dinner? Well, yes, thanks, we called back – enough for ten. They were gone and home, licketey split, and brought back a catch of chub and grouper from the reef to the beach just down the stairs from our villa. They cleaned it all on a table at the beach and sold it to us as fresh as the moment, and for a damn good price.

So that was a yummy meal and a good keepsake, but getting fresh fish for dinner was never so memorable as a trip out to the reef, from Gibbs Beach, with a fishing party composed of my Uncle, my brothers and a friend we brought along on that visit. We manned an open wooden boat, with a motor that would take us out and back but not much further. I was young; only 8, and that meant I was big enough to go without a life vest, but too small to fight in case anything big came along on a line, or so I was told. So, I didn’t fish but I watched closely. I want to tell you, I remember the menacing teeth of my brother’s catch; a 30 inch barracuda thrashing angrily in the bottom of the boat, and I remember the rainbow of struggle that his friend reeled in; a mahi of about equal size. I’m hoping you’re lucky enough to know, first-hand, such a fresh catch for dinner some day.

There was a time when certain fruits of the sea other than fish where available; exotic items such as sea eggs and turtle eggs. Knowing their rarity and the struggle that sea turtles have just to survive, most people would not dream of eating a turtle egg now, and thankfully so. Not long ago that was just a little delicacy that came along now and again and eating it seemed like a treat instead of a threat to a species. Sea eggs do not get so much airtime on TV with the nature crusaders, but they too are endangered here. Sea eggs are urchins in fact. The white ones with the short stubby spines are edible, though no longer legal to harvest in most of the islands. With the consistency of scrambled eggs when cooked, and the color of poached salmon, they may not be appealing to everyone, but in their day they were a delicacy.

The inedible sort of sea urchin you will know from the waters off Barbados is the long-spined urchin with a less affectionate moniker; black cobbler. You will want to stay clear of these nasty’s that actually reach out and grab with their spines if you get close enough, and to assure that their victim is convinced of its mistake, the spines deliver a toxin that burns like a hot poker. If you put enough people snorkeling out with the cobblers on coral in 8 or 10 feet of water, someone is bound to get stuck. Sadly, for my dad, on a perfectly blue-sky beach day at Blue Point Beach, in an effort to help my brother out of an imagined swimming distress, dad took a dozen quills in the foot. The quill is as sharp as a pin, but more brittle then a dry pine needle, and so although the black cobbler quill goes in easily enough, it does not come out in one piece. Though there are a number of recipes for extracting the poisonous quills, in dad’s case the photographic record shows that he took the dripping hot wax treatment, the rum-punch sedative, and the appropriate level of bravery. I myself have been fortunate not to take on a cobbler spine in my snorkeling forays, but have not been so lucky as to escape the grasp of another local scourge; the man-o-war – a blue-tentacled relation of the jelly-fish that has adapted the additional skill of sticking to its victims to deliver the most potent dose of its poisonous secretion. I did have a tangle with a man-o-war, which got me primarily around the posterior. In this case the photographic record shows me, cheeks up, with baking soda caked on supposedly to draw the toxin from the slash marks left by the evil beast.

The Catamaran

When my brothers and I were children, naturally we did not live in a theme-park and video-game world. To counter the saturation of exhilarating experiences we have provided for our kids on DVD’s, we have also tried to provide a mix of other sorts of enjoyment. We cling to a hope that the video-game level of stimulation is not always required to adequately amuse them. Concerts and shows and great museums and sporting events and simple enjoyment as well have all found their way into the experience of our children. Still, if they do not get at least a modicum of over-the-top excitement on a regular basis, an imbalance can develop and really take the wind out of the sails on an otherwise perfectly good vacation. While visiting here does offer a good number of unusual activities and great bragging rights, the truly exciting times can be limited for young kids. Fortunately, we have found an activity that we all love and that gives us both the sublime enjoyment of nature as well as the visceral jolt of a blazing roller coaster. We’ve twice taken a catamaran charter from Bridgetown up to the middle of the west coast and back, and for all the other activities we’ve notched, I don’t think we’ve had six solid hours to compare, where we all enjoyed the same activity so very much and came back with so many varied stories to tell about it. And if these things matter to you, it’s a big bonus that it is not a theme park of some kind, added just to solve the problem that all parents have with a paradise vacation. The catamaran is genuine Barbados, mostly powered by nature, and all about participating in and being thrilled by nature. My family has sailed on Bajan seas for generations, but by my birth in the US, I missed that boat all but entirely. When I come back and I have the chance to sail and to take my children, I feel as if I am fulfilling a family obligation. We have done it with local family and with family that has come along with us. There are always lots of strangers on the boat, but to a person (aside from the seasick) it is ceaseless and fairly unbridled joy for the entire trip.

For anyone not experienced at boating, the adventure begins by simply setting foot on the craft. My kids want to know where can you walk and where can you stand and don’t we need life vests and when does the sail go up? The excitement builds as we get under way, and ship out engine-powered from the careenage and out beyond the point to what seems it must be the open ocean!... though not a quarter mile offshore. As the sails are raised, the wind grabs hold of us where the mast meets the hull. Even if you understand how that works, it is still amazing to sense that invisible force pressing us smoothly forward through the swells that alternately become the valleys that shelter us and the ridges that provide the view into the next valley. On board, we are draped across the net that serves as the deck for a third of the ship. Arms and legs dangle through and thrill for a splash from the crests we are leaving behind. We crash and cruise on a course straight out from the deep water harbor and turn north to follow the coast up into the calm of the Caribbean. We take on cocktails and snacks and watch for the next way point.

Although a few introductory words are spoken about where we are going, and what we’ll see, the catamaran is not a guided tour with points of interest barked from a megaphone throughout. That’s not to say points of great interest aren’t on the itinerary. On one trip we stopped to take lunch at the beach below one of the most expensive properties on the island. That was more of an amusement then anything, but the stop before lunch is the one everyone sees as most engaging. Some time not so long past, there was a man who lived near the Crane and he made a hobby of raising and releasing turtles; sea turtles. Hard to say whether he had a grand plan in doing so. Nonetheless, thanks to his efforts, at certain spots along the south coast and the west coast you can find a reliable gathering of turtles just doing what they do. The catamaran knows where to drop anchor so we can don mask and fins and have at it to keep up with the unlikely speedsters. Though there are usually dozens cruising up and down in the water column at 200 yards offshore, getting the touch of a foot or a shell is quite an accomplishment. You will be glad for an underwater camera to capture that moment, since friends at home won’t believe it unless they see it.

So in and out of the water we’d go, snorkeling in search of a tolerant turtle, and straying to identify which dazzling reef fish are pecking their lunch off the coral outcrops nearby. When snorkeling gets old, the kids have found great excitement in leaping off the gunnels of the boat, with or without a life preserver, into the welcome waters 8 feet below. When our time is up and we point the bow south again, my family lines up along the bow beam of the boat, arms latched over the supporting strut, and legs dangling as near the water as we dare reach. As an afternoon breeze picks up and we near the boundary between the calm sea and the churning ocean, the hulls press into the swells giving us the momentary thrill of dipping a toe or being full-on splashed by the chop we’re chasing. Better than the turtles in my mind, that reach for home, latched to the bow by only our limbs, has got to be one of the most exciting times I have had with my children. I cannot recommend it enough.

Fin

I am out of stories for the time being. I hope my recollections give you some new ideas to go on as you make your second and third and twentieth visit here more memorable than the one before. Right now I truly don’t know when is the next time I’ll step off a plane in Barbados, but I’m always scheming to come back, and until I do I’ll relive these memorable visits, often and vividly.