Day 355: 22 July 2010 - Home

Just ten days short of a year after I left England, I fly back on an overnight flight from Barbados. As the plane flies over the green pastures of the southwest counties in the dawn hours of the morning, I feel a sense of excitement about arriving back home and catching up with friends.

However, this sense quickly dissipates on the taxi ride home. Over the past year, almost everyday has offered a new experience, and I feel that my world has completely changed, but as the taxi turns into the high street of the village where I spent my formative years and where my parents still live, it seems odd to me that everything should look exactly as I left it. It was like a time warp, as if the past year had never happened, and I realised then that my re-integration into a ‘normal’ life would not be an easy one.

Days 343 to 354: 10 July to 21 July 2010: Bequia, and places Mick Jagger has been

Peak season in Bequia is during the winter months, so the island is fairly quiet at this time of year. This being the tropics, this is not so much because it is too hot, but because it is the rainy season, when the houses in Bequia collect rain in their tanks that serve as the year round water supply. This is not to say that my stay here was marred by the weather, and I had a couple of glorious days taking boat rides and snorkelling the reef at the end of Princess Margaret Beach below the house.

The Friendship Rose is a Bequia built schooner that is captained by one of the brothers that built the boat about fourty years ago. It takes me and about twenty other passengers on a day cruise to Tobago Quays, a serene uninhabited archipelago of fantastical beaches and perfect snorkelling. There are Reef Sharks here, though I don’t see any, but I do get to swim along with a couple of large sea turtles – if these were around Bequia they would probably end up on somebody’s dinner table.

During my stay, my mother takes me on a tour of the local bars and restaurants, and in most of she tells me of the time it was visited by Mick Jagger, who lives on the nearby Mustique. The story always seems to end with him leaving after being approached by autograph hunters. A couple we meet in one of the restaurants tells us of the time they once had dinner with Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston there, when they were the Hollywood couple de jour.

So Bequia is a bit of an unknown getaway for the rich and famous on yachts. This is not to say that the local people are wealthy, but it is a community where everybody knows everyone else and people seem generally happy. Willie, who can be found most days on Princess Margaret Beach selling trinkets and offering beach BBQs of fresh lobster, has an eight foot row boat which he takes to the harbour each morning and which he says he wouldn’t sell for a million dollars.

Once upon a time, Bequia used have a whaling station. Indeed whales are sometimes hunted still, the capture of one being a cause of great excitement among the local population. Bequia’s other main product was Bananas, but this faded away with the advent of ‘fair trade’ - Bequia’s banana farms did not qualify for some reason. Most of the Banana growers decided they were better off growing marijuana instead.

the view from 'A Shade of Blues'

 

on the Friendship Rose

Tobago Quays

lunch?

 

whale bones...

Bequia in Pictures (click)

Day 342 – Laid Back LIAT

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....’

arriving at Bequia on the ferry