Cave Bay

The Approach to Cave Bay

From Shrewsbury Chapel we walked along to Harrismith Road (or Harry Smith, as on some maps) and turned right towards the coast. This is a mid- to upscale residential area, and the houses get ever more opulent as you get close to the sea.

At the end of the road, an arid, grassy plain opened up before us. We started across it, feeling very hot and exposed (rather like the old lady in Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native who has to cross Egdon Heath).

We would have been more cheerful if we had known what we were about to see ...

"We Are Almost There"

So the walk from Tropical Winds to Cave Bay and Bottom Bay took about an hour in the middle hours of a thirty-degree day.

We trudged northwest from the coast near Sam Lord's and Shark's Hole up to Highway 5 and walked northeast along that for about half an hour. Highway 5 isn't that busy with traffic, but there isn't much of a sidewalk, so it probably wasn't the world's safest pedestrian outing.

At Shrewsbury Chapel we asked a nice old lady waiting at the bus stop if she knew how far it was to Bottom Bay. She said she didn't know, but immediately after I saw this sign on a pole:

At first I thought it applied to our quest for Bottom Bay, then I realized it was a warning of the apocalypse. October 21, 2011? Obama won't even have finished serving his first term yet!

Tropical Winds Hotel

So the Sam Lord's Castle bus actually goes a little beyond Sam Lord's Castle, but we asked to be let off at the Castle and fetched up at the Tropical Winds Apartment Hotel.

It was a welcome sight to a hot and hungry tourist. But even though the hotel was very clean and attractively appointed, we seemed to be the only people there apart from the staff.

The restaurant was completely empty. If it had been anywhere in Southeast Asia (Mersing, say), this would have been a thoroughly lugubrious experience. But our waiter's cheeriness more than made up for the lonely situation, and we had a very respectable dolphin sandwich.

The waiter thought our plan of walking all the way to Bottom Bay seemed ambitious, but we assured him that we were good walkers. So we are, but as it turned out, we would have been better off staying on the bus to the very end of the route.

What of Sam Lord's Castle itself? It is closed, after a spell as a hotel in the Marriott chain.

Grantley Adams International Airport

The Sam Lord's Castle bus stops at the Grantley Adams International Airport on its way east from Oistins. So if we were purists about taking the bus (which I must confess we're not), this would be our route to and from the airport.

There are other buses that stop here (including the Speightstown-Kirtons, St Philip bus and the Fairchild Street-Yorkshire, Christ Church bus) but the Fairchild Street-Sam Lord's bus seems to be the only one with a regular schedule seven days of the week.

We usually take a cab to and from the airport. The fares don't seem to be fixed and our host P.H. said she had sometimes been charged exorbitantly, but in general we have found that a cab from the airport to St Peter's Parish costs about USD40.00 or so.

At some other point I will discuss the food options at Grantley Adams, but for now I should concentrate on our excursion to Bottom Bay, which was part of an attempt at Oistins Fish Fry Traffic Jam Avoidance.

Fairchild Street Bus Terminal, Bridgetown

Bridgetown has two bus terminals, the main one on Fairchild Street and a secondary, open-air one on Alice Street. The Fairchild Street terminal lies just across the O'Neal Bridge, which is what Bridge Street is called where it spans the Careenage.

The Fairchild Street terminal is a slightly claustrophobic building, but like the Speighstown bus terminal it is efficient and well signposted. The Sam Lord's Castle bus leaves every half hour from Gate 12.

This is the bus that goes along the southern coast where most of the tourist resorts are located, so it was packed with a fair number of tourists. At the end of the stretch, as the bus turned away from the coast just past Oistins, we were the only conspicuous non-locals left on board.

The driver was so concerned that we had missed our stop that he shouted back to make sure we knew where we were going! Just one of many instances of kindness we've met in Barbados, and a major reason we keep going back there.

Bridgetown

The yellow bus we took into Bridgetown let us off on a narrow shopping street near the centre of the city. I'm not sure which street it was, but it may have been Milk Market or a street parallel to it. In any case, we walked down to the corner with Broad Street and turned left to head towards Trafalgar Square and Bridge Street, which crosses over the Careenage to where the Fairchild Street Bus Terminal is located.

We've only been in Bridgetown twice. It's a busy, dusty city, and not really what we like best about Barbados (after all, there's lots of city grime where we come from). We tried once to have supper there at the end of a long day and found to our surprise that everything, even the restaurants, shuts up at about five-thirty.

I'd like, however, to stop here for a Chefette roti lunch the next time we are here changing buses for Sam Lord's Castle. There is a Chefette around the corner from the Fairchild Street Terminal, which is what I'll write about next.

Oistins Traffic Jam Avoidance

So our cunning plan to get to the fish fry without meeting the Oistins traffic jam was this: We would spend the day visiting the famous Bottom Bay on the southeast coast of Barbados. Then, at about five, we'd catch a bus to Oistins, travelling in the opposite direction to everyone else!

It was an excellent plan. We just executed it in a less-than-perfect way, so if you're going to try this, please learn from our mistakes.

At about 10.30 in the morning, we left our digs in St Peter's Parish and caught a yellow bus down to the Fairchild Street Bus Terminal. From there, we caught the noon bus to Sam Lord's Castle. There, we had lunch at the Tropical Winds Apartment Hotel, then walked the rest of the way to Cave Bay and Bottom Bay.

The walk took about an hour, which wasn't great in the 30-degree heat. The GH got a big blister on his heel, though by the next evening he had rather more to worry about in the wounds and swellings department! If I did it again, I would stop for a Chefette roti lunch in Bridgetown, then head out on the bus. The bus goes beyond Sam Lord's Castle to Shrewsbury, which is where we should have got off.

Instead, we ended up making something of an epic journey, which I'll chronicle in the next few posts.

Oistins Craft Market

There is a craft market at the Oistins Fish Fry, on the promenade at the waterfront. We always visit the stall where we bought these bowls. They are, incredibly, made out of fish scales. The artist who makes them (of whom, more below) once showed us a fish scale the size of a poker chip. I'm not sure what kind of fish it came from, but I bet it was big.

He also makes lovely turned wooden bowls that are so heavy and smooth they feel like they're made of soapstone.

When we visited last, I thought I'd take a photo of all the lovely bowls at his table to post on this blog. Unfortunately, he must have thought I was planning to steal his patterns, because he started yelling at me from where he was sitting nearby. I erased the photos I'd taken--it seemed like too much work to explain to him that I was going to try to promote his work online, and he didn't look like he was in the mood for conversation.

I hope that if he ever sees this post he will realize my intentions were all good!

Oistins Bay At Sunset