I find that having not paid an ‘all-inclusive’ rate, I am charged $BB 40 (about £13) nullifying any feelings that I had found a bargain hotel in Barbados.
I have to check in for my flight two hours in advance, though the airtime to St Vincent is only forty minutes. In the waiting room, our flight time comes and passes as various small to medium passenger planes rest on the runway. This is Caribbean time after all, but the relaxed attitude is countered by the fact that LIAT (Leeward Islands Air Transport) is the first airline in the seven flights I have taken on my round the world trip so far to charge me extra for carrying my guitar. Eventually, about an hour after the planned departure time, we are asked to board.
The plane is a Bombadier Dash 8 Q300, a propeller powered aircraft that carries about fifty passengers. Being a nervous flyer, I am not that keen on these old fashioned looking engines, though the interior is comfortable and clean. However, the smiling and languid lone stewardess somehow makes me feel more relaxed, though there are several turns in the air on the way to St Vincent. How many times should a plane need to deviate from its course on a forty minute flight?
After a taxi ride to the ferry port, a couple of hours wait and a heavily oscillating ferry ride of an hour or so, again under grey wet skies, I arrive in Bequia after the last of the sunlight has disappeared. I ask a taxi driver to take me to ‘the new house by Jack’s Bar’ and he knows exactly where to go. A quick five minutes over roads more potholes than tarmac or concrete, I arrive at the gates of my parents house. Darkness has descended by now and when the taxi driver shouts up to the house ‘I have a guest for you’, my own mother fails to recognise me. ‘Oh, whoever it is, he’s brought a guitar....’
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| arriving at Bequia on the ferry |
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