THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9605310060
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
LENGTH: 180 lines
I HAD BEEN to Barbados once before, but only long enough to fly in and board another ship. This time, with an entire day ashore, I wanted to see the whole place.
This seemed do-able. The cosmopolitan, porkchop-shaped island with strong British influences is only 21 miles long and an average of 14 miles wide. I picked, from the Seawind Crown's shore excursion offerings, an ``island highlights'' land tour.
Big mistake.
Here's how shore excursions work. It's something every cruise passenger should know.
On most cruise ships, these trips ashore at ports of call are an additional expense; on some luxury cruises, shore excursions are part of the all-inclusive cruise price.
In either case, the ship, through its cruise director, contracts with a land-based operator to conduct various trips ashore. Prices are based on their length and the type of activities involved. Passengers pay for the excursions aboard ship and are given a voucher to present to the land operator.
Here's my advice. Study about the ports of call you will visit. Do some planning. Know what you want to see and do, and determine whether the ship's various excursion offerings meet your desires. When in doubt, ask the cruise director for specifics.
If not, make your own arrangements for a personal tour with a tour operator at the port facilities (if available) or with one of the ever-present taxi drivers. Again, ask your cruise director for recommendations. He's like a concierge at a hotel.
But, if you make independent arrangements, ALWAYS agree on specific details and a price before you enter any vehicle.
If you get to see and do what YOU want to do, it's worth the extra price you may pay. And it may not be much more expensive than a general tour designed to satisfy the masses.
Some general shore excursions are essentially worthless. Which brings me back to Barbados.
My ``island highlights'' tour was a three-hour, butt-bumping ride in a seven-passenger van over winding macadam roads. The driver - not a guide, it quickly became apparent, but merely a driver - seldom spoke, and when he did it was with great indifference.
What had happened, obviously, was that the land operator had sub-contracted the job to a simple taxi driver.
Mostly we rode in silence - past fields of freshly plowed, dark, rich, brown soil underlain by porous limestone, perfect for sugar cane, which we also saw, field after field after field of light green stalks.
Are we having fun yet?
Well, if the driver won't talk, I'll tell you something about Barbados.
The Spanish and Portuguese explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries knew about the island. The Spanish named it ``Los Barbados'' because of their fascination with the pendulous, aerial roots of the indigenous bearded fig tree - ``barba'' meaning beard, and ``Barbados'' meaning bearded ones.
But no Europeans settled here until the English arrived in 1625, mostly because Capt. Henry Powell had made some serious navigational miscalculations. Oops.
They loved the place. Of course many sailors will tell you that after a long time at sea a LOT of things look pretty good. But the thing the English liked most about Barbados was that it was vacant and they wouldn't have to fight anybody for it.
So Capt. Powell and the boys claimed the island in the name of King James. Oops again. They had been at sea so long they didn't know he had died. There was no CNN back then.
We made only two stops. The first was for 15 minutes at St. John's Church - your basic 19th century Anglican Church built of native limestone on a bluff with a wonderful view of the Atlantic Ocean.
The second stop was at Sam Lord's Castle. Sam Lord was a pirate. The crenellated, two-story white stone castle is really a manor house, so grand that it might make you think seriously of going into the pirate trade if it weren't for all the swordfighting and keelhauling and walking the plank.
The clifftop house is part of a very upscale resort with modern lodging and dining facilities operated by Marriott.
It is located on the easternmost point on this easternmost of the Caribbean islands. Out there is nothing but the Atlantic - its heavy surf crashing menacingly on an absolutely stunning beach - until you get to Africa.
We were given 30 minutes to view this. We also got a bar chit if we chose to ``splice the main brace,'' as we ancient mariners say.
So my Barbados experience was a disappointing one. I expected more from an island whose principal industry is tourism.
But I learned a little more about how shore excursions work.
Other ports of call aboard the Seawind Crown were more interesting.
Just after dawn we sailed into the harbor channel of Curacao's little Dutch-like capital of Willemstad, past the twin stone fortresses, past the buildings with gabled roofs like you see throughout Holland, but adorned with pure Caribbean colors: pink, rose, peach, ocher, lemon yellow, orange, gold, turquoise, sky blue, cobalt blue, royal blue, leaf green, lime green . . . Get the picture?
Curacao is the largest of the six Caribbean islands that make up the Netherland Antilles. The Royal Dutch Marines have a garrison here to protect national interests - oil refineries (Curacao is only 35 miles from petroleum-rich Venezuela) and off-shore banking - and to work on their tans.
Some call Willemstad little Amsterdam, and I suppose there is a resemblance - except here there are no great art museums, no filth, no graffiti, no third-world whores and no old hippies who are still so stoned that they haven't heard that the '70s are, like, over with, man. No, this is an attractive little place.
There's a floating pontoon footbridge across the harbor channel built in 1888 to connect the two sides of town. Something of an island treasure. It opens every time a ship comes through - 30 to 40 times a day - and when it does, two little passenger ferries steam into action.
There are two don't-miss attractions outside Willemstad.
The Curacao liquor factory. This is the real stuff: Curacao of Curacao, since 1896. It's made from the sun-dried peel of Curacao golden oranges and comes in coffee, chocolate and rum-raisin flavors as well as orange.
They only make 400 gallons a month and it's not exported. The liquor called Curacao you get everywhere else in the world is made by Bols of Holland. The people here say it's not the same.
The Sea Aquarium, a sprawling seaside affair. There's an underwater observatory where you can watch the sharks and sting rays and other fish.
Or you can don scuba or snorkeling equipment and get in there with them. Sort of. Netting and plexiglas keep you and the sharks apart.
At first sight, Tobago is underwhelming. It is the unpretentious step-sister in the two-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. The good news is that Tobago is largely unspoiled by tourism. So far.
It's very rural - lots of cows and goats (or close-cropped sheep) on tethers along the roads, grazing on dry, brown grass. There are, you may like to know, two ways to tell the difference between a goat and a close-cropped sheep. One is that a goat's tail points up, a sheep's down. The other is that mutton tastes better.
The landscape is a little scruffy with lots of second-growth vegetation where plantations once bloomed. A guy I know from Arkansas said it reminded him of ``back home, except the roads here are better.''
Of the republic's 1.3 million people, only 45,000 live on Tobago. It's an interesting mix of people, though. Most are of African descent, but others are from India, Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and China. There are Christian churches, Hindu temples and Moslem mosques.
All speak English. This was, until 1962, a British colony, and the vestiges of that era remain. Cars drive on the left, children wear neat school uniforms and towns have names like Scarborough, Plymouth, Roxborough and Speyside.
The focus in Tobago is eco-tourism and the island's natural assets - a small rain forest and a widely acclaimed bird sanctuary, for instance, but particularly the beaches and most particularly Pigeon Point Beach, a 15-minute ride from the cruise-ship port of Scarborough.
It's been called one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. In fact, it doesn't compare to the world-class Magen's Bay beach on St. Thomas or several on St. John that many Caribbean cruisers know. But it is very nice.
This is supposed to be the beach of the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe - one of my lifelong role models because he always got his work done by Friday. I don't know if that's true or not.
Today, he'd never see a single set of footprints here. There are thousands of them when a cruise ship docks.
The sand is soft and a tannish white. The water is what I would call Miami Dolphins home-jersey green-blue. It changes colors as clouds glide past the sun's rays the same way the Dolphins' jerseys change if you haven't got your color TV adjusted properly.
A loud steel band greets visitors at the beach. Of course. This is the Caribbean.
This particular ensemble includes a woman with a section of tin stovepipe punched full of holes, which he scrapes with a hair pitchfork to produce a rhythmic chicka-chucka, chicka-chucka sound.
There's also a guy wearing a wolf mask and playing a clarinet in the low surf.
And also an improv trio making its way through the well-oiled sunbathers looking for a buck. One has wild dredlocks and taps on a bongo drum. Another in a baseball cap clacks a stick on a piece of metal the size of an envelope. The third, in untied big sneakers, big baggy pants and big exploding hair, taps a stick on a beer bottle. The tone seems to change slightly each time he takes a swig.
If you're into something a little more quirky on Tobago, there's a mystery inscription on an 18th century tombstone in the town of Plymouth that passes for a tourist attraction.
It records that Berry Stivens ``was a mother without knowing it, and a wife without letting her husband know it, except by her kind indulgence to him.''
Go figure. MEMO: Information please:
Barbados Tourism Authority, 800 Second Ave., 17th Floor, New York,
N.Y. 10017, (800) 221-9831.
Curacao Tourist Board, 400 Madison Ave., Suite 311, New York, N.Y.
10017, (800) 332-8266.
Trinidad & Tobago Tourism Development Authority, 25 W. 43rd St.,
Suite 1508, New York, N.Y. 10036, (800) 232-0082. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
STEPHEN HARRIMAN
An improv trio works the sunbathing crowd at Tobago's Pigeon Point
Beach, which has been called one of the most beautiful beaches in
the world. by CNB