Beautiful Barbados

By SETH KUGEL

I picked up a few money-saving tips during my four days in Barbados last week:

1) Drink tap water instead of bottled; it’s safe.

2) Take the bus, not a cab, from the airport to your hotel.

3) Avoid paying the cover for live music at McBride’s Pub by befriending the Brazilian women’s boxing team.

I admit, the third may not be universally applicable, but it sure saved me some bucks (15 Barbadian dollars, or $7.50 at a simple 2-1 exchange rate), so I’d be remiss in not passing it along.

Turns out that my trip coincided with the world championship of women’s boxing, also being held on the easternmost island of the Caribbean. My first night, I spotted three women wearing Brazilian athletic outfits and strolling along the island’s night-life row. I am a big fan – and part-time resident of — Brazil, so I introduced myself and invited them all for a drink.

Lest you think that either a) the Brazilian women’s boxing team boozes during tournaments or b) the Frugal Traveler can afford to buy three women a cocktail, let me clarify. First, my new friends Glauce, Clélia and Andréia had already been eliminated from their weight classes. And second, I was taking them to Café Sol, where the two-for-one, 10 p.m.-to-midnight happy hour meant a round would cost a mere 24 Barbadian dollars ($12).

So soon we were sipping mediocre, beggars-can’t-be-choosers frozen margaritas, and I was doing what any man surrounded by female Brazilian boxers must: beg for a team T-shirt. Clélia said she had an extra uniform (like the one in the photo accompanying this article), and would bring it to me the next night. She did, I put it on, and we were all waved into the dance party at McBride’s, where a mixed crowd of tourists, Barbadians and Barbadian-American tourists packed the sweaty house.

It was a nice change from my trip to slightly stuffy Bermuda. Both had perfect swaths of white sand lapped by brilliantly, pleasantly warm blue waters. But Barbados also had a vibrant, warm, slightly scruffy local scene to go with them. Add to that the incredible kindness with which this island’s residents — who call themselves Bajans — treat foreigners, and you’ve got one heck of an island.

Even its size seems perfect. Shaped like a ham (or, for vegetarians, an off-center pear), Barbados measures about 22 miles from top to bottom and at most 14 miles across – too big to get bored in, too small to get lost in.

Upscale resorts dot the western coast, and the bustling southern coast is full of budget hotels and nice – if teeming – beaches. The rest of the island is more raw, more wild. There are empty beaches; former plantation houses; historic parish churches; and small villages largely consisting of what Bajans call chattel houses, tiny old wooden homes, many of which are barely bigger than a small New York City studio apartment.

I spent a lot of time in the south, on the beach or at the Gap or eating at good places like Just Grillin’ and Ackee Tree, but I spent more on trips around the island. Buses will get you just about everywhere. Blue public buses, yellow private buses, and private vans are all 1.50 in Barbadian dollars (75 cents) per leg, no matter how far you go.

My favorite spot by far was the sparsely populated east side, where surfers – and few others – flock. I got to see the east side’s other, er, side. I figured an easy way to do so was one of the free weekly hikes run by the Barbados National Trust that start out from a different point of the island each Sunday morning at 6 a.m. That’s how I found myself standing in the Bath Beach parking lot with about 60 or 70 Bajans on my third morning there. (I could spot only one other semi-outsider, a Bajan visiting from New York. ) The trust’s general manager, William Gollop, showed frightening good cheer as he explained that the hikes were available in five levels of difficulty. I joined the second easiest.

Make that the fourth hardest. We set off down a sometimes grassy, sometimes wooded trail that hugged the rocky coastline at a pace I associated more with speed walking than hiking. But the terrain was flat, and I kept up as we ducked under branches, swashbuckled through high grass and admired the crashing waves against rocks below.

It was when we cut inland and sharply uphill into the woods that I began to suffer. Pretty soon my heart was beating so hard that it upped the intensity of the pounding in my skull. Note to self: next time you are going hiking at 6 a.m., lay off the Mount Gay Rum on the rocks at Sweet Potatoes’ Latin night the previous evening.

The leaders of the hike felt my pain, though, and swung into be-kind-to-tourists mode. When I had to stop and catch my breath a few times, someone always waited with me, never remarking that several young children had passed me by. When I finally reached the top of the hill – after a final narrow, steep and tortuous passage between two rocks that required you to pull yourself up by vine, I was rewarded with a view of the coastline below, and a long, easy trip down.

The trip down, through villages and by churches, was much more sociable (in that I could breathe). I struck up a conversation with a Bajan named Roslyn Straker, who took it upon herself to become my fruit tree guide, picking fruits growing from trees everywhere – dunts, Barbados cherries, guava, even a fruit I had never heard of before, the janum. (Yes, I had heard of dunts – the day before.)

After we finished the hike – at barely 9 a.m. — I downed two snow cones (1.50 Barbadian from a woman who drives her snow cone truck to meet the hikers’ finish every week), and Mr. Gollop was kind enough to give me a ride to Bathsheba, the main town on the east side of the island.

I headed straight for the beach, where a swim and a nap were in order. The surf was fierce, in some spots crashing just offshore into dramatic rock formations carved by waves over the millennia. But there were other places to take a dip, and a handful of Bajans were taking advantage as I dozed.

Everyone I met in Bathsheba recommended that I eat lunch at the Round House Inn up the hill above the beach. I landed a choice table with a view of the water and ordered pork chops in Bajan barbecue sauce, macaroni pie, salad and a spiked rum punch. Cost? Fifty-six Barbadian dollars, which I justified under the you-deserve-it-after-a-tortuous-hike clause of the Frugal Traveler unwritten contract. I ended the day with a walk (uphill, argh) to the Andromeda Botanic Gardens: nice, but no better than the free fruit-tree-tour I had gotten that morning from Roslyn.

One other worthwhile daytrip was to Speightstown, a slow-going historic port town on the northwest coast with little to do but walk around and enjoy the atmosphere – including a drink at a traditional Bajan rum house called Val’s Hideaway, housed in a chattel house on Mango Lane. I wish I could say there was some great chattel house hostel I stayed in for $10 a night through all this, but such a place does not exist. There are two other budget options, however, at slightly different definitions of “budget option.” The Intimate Hotels of Barbados site offers loads of hotels for under $100 a night, one of which was the Pirate’s Inn. The price listed on the Web site is 167.44 Barbadian dollars ($83.72) plus taxes, but when I called to reserve by phone and asked for their cheapest possible price, they offered me the Caricom rate (given to Caribbean residents), a discount of about 10 percent.

But two days in, I moved to a guesthouse recommended by fellow bearers of the JetBlue All-You-Can-Jet pass, Saska and Paul, whom I met on the bus to the famous Oistins Friday night fish-fry. Over immense plates of marlin, macaroni pie and salad (17 Barbadian dollars, or $8.50) from one of the endless stands serving huge crowds of Bajans and tourists, they shared their find: a guesthouse called Cleverdale, where they were staying for $32 for in double room. I moved in the next day, even though the owner chose to charge me $40.

Cleverdale was far from luxurious – it had no air-conditioning and a shared kitchen, for example – but it was perfectly clean and friendly and had a beach view. It was also a 30-second walk away from the object that view, Worthing Beach, a pretty white stretch of sand popular with local families on weekends. Forming a cluster with Cleverdale were two other guest houses that travelers staying there suggested might even be better: Rydal Waters Apartments, and Maraval Guest House.

All also had the advantage of being within short walking distance of the St. Lawrence Gap, saving late-night money on cabs home and increasing the odds, however slight, of bumping into the Brazilian women’s boxing team.

From http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/barbados-for-hikes-beaches-and-a-brazilian-boxers-t-shirt/