Go Caribbean: You could lie on a white-sand beach all day in Barbados, but Caroline Walshfound too much history and culture on the tiny Caribbean island for that
LUXURY IS THE ENEMY of observation, according to the travel writer Paul Theroux, but somehow we didn't find this a problem when exploring Barbados from the vantage point of a hotel suite overlooking the Caribbean Sea, blossoms from the nearby orchid tree swaying over its aquamarine water, the only company a hummingbird.
Looking back, I wonder was I deranged in September, when the travel editor proposed a trip to the West Indies for the first week of December and I demurred. Frenetic time at work, busy getting ready for Christmas . . . There seemed something positively illicit about escaping from winter to the sun on the other side of the world - but then, gradually, that same illicitness began to take on a thrilling life of its own.
The world went into economic meltdown, the cold kicked in - but I was reliving castaway films such as Robinson Crusoeand Swiss Family Robinsonand walking down Grafton Street humming "Woah, I'm going to Barbados''.
But unlike the Bajan London bus driver in Typically Tropical's 1970s hit Barbados, who has seen too much of Brixton and is flying home to the pear-shaped coral island to see his girlfriend on Coconut Airways, I was flying British Airways out of London Gatwick.
While he left behind rain, our last view of home en route for our London connection were the serried rows of cars in the long-term car park at Dublin Airport, slumbering just before dawn under their blanket of frost. (There are no direct flights from Ireland to Barbados.) With me was not Man Friday but my husband; if you're going to paradise it helps to be in good company.
WE WERE STAYINGat Treasure Beach, a 35-suite hotel on Paynes Bay, on the snazzy west side of the island, best defined by its general manager, Hamish Watson, who was born at the Gunthorpes Sugar Factory, in Antigua, in the 1940s to an Antiguan mother and Glaswegian father.
His gracious persona infuses the place, and never more so than at the cocktail party he and his wife, Linda, give for guests under the mahogany tree every Tuesday, the freshwater pool to one side, the ocean to the other. Ask him what the tiny birds are that swoop on to your table in the canopied alfresco restaurant at breakfast and he evokes an ornithological wonderland of black skimmers and rainbirds, yellow birds and bullfinches.
Though the majority of the accommodation in this cool, contemporary boutique hotel is less expensive and more modest, we were in one of Treasure Beach's two ultraluxurious beachfront suites. Called Hibiscus, reflecting the tropical gardens in which the hotel is set, it had a double bed larger than Laois.
Designed in Afro-Caribbean and Amerindian style, the suite even had a sugar planter's chair, its extra arms swivelling as footrests. With sliding glass doors opening from the drawing room on to a private balcony complete with sunloungers and a private plunge pool, all overlooking nothing but the beach and wide blue sea, drifting around the cool, gracious rooms of Hibiscus in white hotel bathrobes was a lifestyle we adapted to instantly.
We were on the all-in Treasure Chest package, which includes exceptional meals, fruit kebabs on the beach and delights such as tamarind balls and guava cheese in your room.Whether it was steamed, grilled, blackened or fried, the food was above all fresh, and watching the staff on barbecue night was to see masters in action.
How an island that has centuries of colonisation, slavery and exile behind it can seem to skip so happily to the calypso beat is one of the enigmas of Barbados. Settled by the British in 1627, it has been independent only since 1966, though it remains in the Commonwealth, has the queen of England as its head of state and has English as its language - though there's talk of removing Lord Nelson's statue from his prime spot in the capital, Bridgetown, and running up a local hero instead. And while place names such as Sherbourne and Yorkshire, Oxford and Bath abound, the beat of local legends such as the Mighty Gabby and current soaring star Rihanna are what give the place its rhythm.
Tiny it may be - "21 miles long and wide as a smile" say the Bajans, the smile being 14 miles - but once it became a New World colony Barbados received almost as many enslaved Africans as all of the region that became the United States. The work they did in the sugar-cane fields was literally killing. As the historian James M McPherson puts it, describing slave economies in the Caribbean and South America: "Slave-owners considered it cheaper to import more Africans (two thirds of them males) and work them to death than to create an environment in which slaves could raise families."
Into that ethnic stew went thousands of Irish, transported in the 17th century to work as indentured servants for a plantocracy that needed as much labour as it could get. It's all told in Seán O'Callaghan's To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland(Brandon, £7.99) with its dedication to "the Irish men, women and children who lie in unhallowed ground in the sugar cane fields of Barbados".
Having taken Drogheda, Oliver Cromwell had a game plan for those who survived the massacre: ship them to Barbados. Indentured servants were little more than slaves, but, ironically, when the black slave population was emancipated - slavery was abolished in Barbados in 1834 - and began to move forward, these servants of Scottish and Irish origin remained at the bottom of the barrel, poor whites riven with the problems of intermarriage and alcoholism. Called Red Legs because their legs burned in the sun, their descendants still live in small pockets of the northeast of Barbados, in a region called Scotland that lots of tourists never see. We drove up there to Martins Bay one day and saw them going about their lives, their little enclaves now diminishing as they integrate into a society where more than 90 per cent are black and of African descent.
The ghosts of history swirled around the taxi we were sharing with an English couple and our Bajan driver, all of whom had the last laugh when we got to our next destination, a sugar-cane estate. "Welcome to Sunbury Plantation House, home of Matthew Chapman, one of the first settlers on the island - and an Irishman, who built it in the 1660s," said the guide to hoots of laughter from our fellow travellers. There may have been thousands of Irish victims on the island in the past, but there was the occasional landlord, too.
With its jalousied windows that can be tilted open and shut to control airflow, at Sunbury (open seven days a week, 9am-5pm) you get the idea of just how seductive was the planter's life; and if you want more than just an idea you can hire the place for a private dinner party for 12 at $100 (€72) a head (see www.barbadosgreathouse.com).
While the colonial architecture is fascinating, the profusion of colourful chattel houses that many Bajans live in is even more so. Made of wood for easy dismantling, and painted all the colours of the rainbow, they were what slaves lived in and took with them when moving from plantation to plantation. Locals live with their windows and doors open, giving visitors an open view of their lives. New versions are now sometimes built in cement, but, as our taxi driver said, they're not chattel houses.
EVEN TODAY THEIrish are no strangers to Barbados, chiefly Dermot Desmond and John McManus, who in 1996 bought and then revamped the Sandy Lane hotel, originally opened in 1961 by an Anglo-American named Ronald Tree. Still a magnet for the rich and famous, some of whom live in its adjoining villas, it's got the compound feel the rich and famous seem to need these days, though there's nothing stopping you making a reservation for dinner in the hotel and observing it all - you might spot regulars such as The X Factor'sSimon Cowell.
Walking up there to check out who was lying on Sandy Lane's blue-and-white sunloungers became a ritual every morning. "You can sometimes see him bombing up and down the beach on his mobile phone in his pink shirt," confided an Irish tourist who's a regular to Paynes Bay, giving a graphic image of Desmond in Caribbean mode. In the interests of research I walked the Tom Fazio golf course and pronounced it, with all the confidence of a golf virgin, stupendous. Tiger Woods must have been in golfer's heaven when he got married here, in 2004.
Part of the attraction of that early-morning beach walk was the sense of flirting with danger when walking under the manchineel trees with their terrifying warning signs: don't handle, eat or shelter under - the berries are poisonous.
Barbados is divided into 11 parishes, from Christchurch, in the south, to St Lucy, in the north. The average temperature is 27 degrees, and trade winds bring a balmy breeze. Even in the wet season showers don't last long, and, unlike some of its neighbours, hurricanes usually pass it by.
You could do nothing on this island but lie on pure white sand beaches lapped by aquamarine waters, but there's just too much history and culture to do that - not to mention rum and religion. There are rum shops everywhere, 1,600 of them, and refusing a rum punch in Barbados is the equivalent of refusing Mrs Doyle's cup of tea.
There are even more churches, 2,000 in all. You have Methodist, Pentecostal, Baptist, Catholic and Jewish, but mainly it's Anglican, and the magnificent churches from the plantation era are always worth a stop. The stories their gravestones tell can keep you there all day.
The island, once populated by Amerindians and covered in tropical forest, changed radically when the trees were all cut down to make way for plantation farming. Limes and mangoes grow at will, while banana and breadfruit trees and sugar cane line the roads.
Crop Over, the festival that starts in June and ends in early August, is the traditional celebration of the end of the sugar-cane harvest. Now a hugely colourful affair, a major highlight is the Pic-o-de-Crop calypso competition.
A high point of our trip was visiting the garden of a horticulturalist named Anthony Hunte (entrance 20 Barbadian dollars/ €7) - petal-strewn trays of rum punch appeared at regular intervals as we made our way up and down old stone pathways in the plant-filled amphitheatre that is his home and that of the monkeys that come down from the trees to eat the bananas at first light. Strains of Rachmaninov floated down from his house; it was his wife, he said, whom he kept chained to the piano; but we think it was the stereo.
"Come, Mr Tally Man, tally me banana / Daylight come and we want go home" sings king of calypso Harry Belafonte in Day-O, his Banana Boat Song, and, soaring into the clouds out of Grantley Adams International Airport, we did want to go home - but we wanted to come back, too, and soon.
Go there: British Airways (www.ba.com) flies from Cork, Dublin and Shannon to Barbados via London Gatwick.
• Caroline Walsh was a guest of Treasure Beach hotel, Barbados, and flew courtesy of British Airways
• Barbados Tourism Authority is at 00-44-20-76369448, www.visitbarbados.co.uk