The region has many drawcards in addition to its famous white-sand beaches and azure waters. Norwegian Cruise Line offers a tantalising taster.
Already a subscriber?In a flash, I have my ready response to those inevitable post-holiday questions about trip “highlights”.
To imagine what it was like when buccaneers terrorised merchant shippers and sovereign navies in the Caribbean, this fascinating museum is a fine place to start. The ground floor features authentic artefacts and tales of shipwrecks and recovered treasures from the Golden Age of Exploration, as well as Spanish galleons and modern salvage gear.
After enjoying the vista, I head back to port to board a Ford pick-up converted into an open minibus with capacity for about 25 passengers. My destination is Magens Bay Beach, a gorgeous expanse of flour-white sand surrounded by native forest and a rambling park area with picnic tables, toilets and showers that often pops up on “World’s Best Beaches” lists.
The abundance of deep, natural ports, hidden coves and shallow beaches suitable for careening made the region a strategic staging ground and restocking station for European navigators, including pirates and traders, for centuries after Christopher Columbus happened across it. By contrast, my only experience with cruise liners had involved a weekend aboard a moored ship with my then-wife in Barcelona.
The allure of cruising, of course, is that once settled in your cabin, you can take in a multitude of destinations without more packing or moving. And, on this voyage of discovery, every dawn brings a new Caribbean gem.I awake early after the first night’s sailing with the wet, fruity smell of the tropics wafting in through my open state room balcony door. Everything is still and warm as I take in a few twinkling lights of Road Town, Tortola, in the eerie first light.
Day two is Tuesday, so it must be Saint Lucia. And while I’m still adapting to the ship’s layout and rhythm, NCL has kindly organised a shore excursion, which turns out to be a highlight of the trip . We board a catamaran for a cruise along the west coast of the island, from the port of Castries in the north to Soufrière in the south.
Barbados means “the bearded ones” in Portuguese, and was named for the preponderance of bearded fig, or wild banyan, trees on the 439 sq km island. It is often grouped with the Lesser Antilles, but is actually too far east to be a part of them. It is also the most exposed to the wild surf rolling in from the Atlantic Ocean on the east coast.
However, we head north-east from the capital across farmland once covered in sugar cane until the abolition of slavery, and then global oversupply, made the crop less viable. It is still grown to make rum, an important export. The “one-eyed man” in local slang is shorthand for a shot of the island’s legendary Old Brigand rum. We visit Sunbury Plantation House, a 17th-century estate whose period furnishings were lost in a fire in 1995.
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