The Online Beach Bar

08/06/2023

What's on my mind? (facebook asks) Aruba - and the fact that it has a new British Airways flight twice a week, inaugurated in March. And it was an unexpected pleasure to return after several years. It has a dual character - very Americanised in some ways, but reliable European and distinctly Dutch in others. Here's what the Telegraph ran recently - Go Dutch in the Caribbean, a look at Aruba

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/caribbean/aruba/aruba-curious-caribbean-island-that-just-got-closer/

25/01/2023

Where would you find Sting, Shaggy, Buju Banton and Barrington Levy in one line-up. In St Lucia this May - the St Lucia Jazz (and Arts) Festival have just announced some of their performers for 2023, 5th-14th May

featuring STING • SHAGGY • REMA • Ayra Starr Ckay Kizzi • KES • LUTHER FRANCOIS • BUJU BANTON • BARRINGTON LEVY • BUNJI GARLIN & FAY-ANN LYONS • GUSTAVO • SPECIAL BLEND & more… Location: Pigeon Island National LandmarkHome of Saint Lucia Jazz & Arts Festival Wednesday – 10th ...

06/05/2022

Any fans of Jamaica, have a quick look at this video about the small town of Cousins Cove, scene of the funniest book about Jamaica, Guy Kennaway's One People.

Set in Western Jamaica ONE PEOPLE highlights the cost to a local community of the exclusive tourism promoted by All-Inclusive hotels.Short film produced by T...

15/11/2021

After you've chosen your island you'll need to know where to go out to eat... Looking for authentic Caribbean cuisine transformed for a traveller's palate

Here we show you how to find authentic culinary experiences on every Caribbean island, with chefs, both local and from overseas, determined to raise the region's gastronomic game.

12/10/2021

Looking for what's new in the (top end) Caribbean for this coming winter season? The Mail on Sunday's October 10th 'Caribbean Comeback' has been published in the Mail Online.

Here, in the first part of a new series, we reveal how the Caribbean islands are getting ready to welcome back eager tourists after the pandemic.

06/09/2021

Magical Caribbean Moments - The Smell of Bitter Chocolate on the Air

I am assured that it is impossible, but equally I know it occurred. It was one of my most alluring Caribbean experiences. Unexpected, and magical in its way.

It was in… was it Grenada? Or St Lucia? Perhaps Trinidad? Certainly it was in the Caribbean, in about 1995, before the resurgence of interest in growing cocoa and making chocolate. It happened one afternoon, while I was ambling through the ‘cocoa walks’ of an estate, rough tracks through mixed forest. Cocoa trees, which grow to around 30 feet, need partial shade, so other trees soared from among them and burst into canopy overhead. The most famous shade-tree is gliricidia sepium, locally called ‘madre de cacao’ (mother of cocoa), which stands at 80 feet and in January bursts into orange blooms like flames. While we’re on Latin names, it’s probably worth adding that the cocoa tree’s botanical name is theobroma cacao, meaning ‘food of the gods’.

Around us the cocoa trees stood in silent convocation, crowns of lustrous green leaves with a network of bare trunks and branches within. And there sprouted their fruits – themselves alluring and intriguing: pods, nearly a foot long - yellow, green, brown and even scarlet - hanging indiscriminately from trunk and branches. With a deftly aimed thwack of a machete, my companion cut one off a branch and caught it, then sliced it open. (See cocoa pods being hulled at Belmont Estate in Grenada.) The top of the hull came away, revealing a tower of neatly packed beans in a slimy flesh, looking a bit brain-like, sectioned and white. I twisted off some beans and sucked away the pith, a succulent mesh of unexpectedly sweet slime. Delicious.

Discarding the pod and beans we walked on, through patched sunlight where views flashed to the sea. And then I walked into it, as distinct as a slap across the cheek. I sniffed again. Definitely. I could smell bitter chocolate on the air. Like a Bendicks Bittermint, or a Bath Oliver biscuit. Ach, catching an aroma in words is impossible, but I could feel the exotic oils swirling in the air, momentarily smooth and luxurious, smoky, dry, almost powdery somehow – how is that possible? It was even a little earthy – or was that the smell of the fertile soil all around?

For years people have ventured explanations as to how this happened - natural fermentation, beans dried in the sun and mistakenly crushed – but just as quickly they shake their heads and say it just doesn’t happen. However, I will never forget the rich and aromatic flavour of roasted dark chocolate hanging on the humid air.

16/07/2021

I was lucky enough to get to Barbados as soon as the (UK) green light was issued - those Bajans are pretty quick off the mark, and was pleased to see - despite Hurricane Elsa - the island was in good form for a summer visit.

The waiting and the false hopes have been cruel, writes James Henderson. But with the Green List extended to the Caribbean, we can enjoy the shock of the exotic once more in Barbados.

09/06/2021

Magical Caribbean Moments - Green Calm amid the storm

There was a moment, in the early 2000s, when bottle green glass came into vogue. It appeared, translucent on your balcony, and frosted around your shower (along with a rainforest shower-head, de rigueur, that season). Suddenly whole interior walls appeared in green glass brick. But these architectural conceits were nothing next to the glassy green wall I enjoyed at Carambola restaurant on the west coast of Barbados one evening…

I was shown to a waterfront table, with just a balustrade between me and the cliff edge, beneath which the sea would habitually play, lapping the bedrock, eight feet below. Hefty underwater floodlights threw a glow into the sea, turning it the same glassy green as the island’s most chic bathrooms. It was just after Thanksgiving, before the season got into gear in December. Which, as any West Indian will tell you, is also the time that storms rage in the Atlantic up north, casting off spiral arms that lash the islands. The odd thing being, on this occasion, that for all the turmoil off Newfoundland, the islands had been left balmy and serenely unaffected. The first sign of the storm appeared three days later, when the rough water rolled into the Caribbean: a six-foot swell that slapped the cliffs and whipped around the coasts.

On Barbados the humid autumn air was utterly still; palm fronds, exhausted, hung limp, without even a breeze to perk them up. But offshore the sea was roiling, and every 15 seconds - as I tucked into my kingfish in a lemon and mango salsa – there came a reverberating thump on the coral rock beneath me. A moment later I found myself sitting next to a ten foot wall of water, as sheer as glass, and as green as the shade of the season… Its vertical core was lit from beneath, so inside I could see streaming shreds of seaweed, chunks of sponge and – was that a tiny fish? The wall of green glass went straight up… and, utterly unaffected in the still air… straight down. Nairy a droplet fell out of place, not even a tang of sea salt hit my plate. The green glass wall simply disappeared as cleanly as it had arrived.

19/05/2021

Magical Caribbean Moments - Irie FM and the Doppler Effect

Surely this is one of the finest Caribbean moments ever… unexpected, a touch weird and utterly, unutterably beguiling – and with its combination of loud music, eccentricity and an outdoor life - so ‘essentially’ Caribbean that it probably just wouldn’t occur anywhere else. Like the Green Flash at sunset, it has happened to me twice in 30 years of travelling to the islands, first in Puerto Rico and then in Jamaica. Jamaica was my favourite, so I will describe it as it happened there.

I was driving along the old north coast road, somewhere short of Falmouth I think, windows open, salt sea air rolling in and breaking the sweltering summer heat, and Irie FM (back to back culture reggae) on the car stereo. I have no idea what the song was (for the purposes of this, choose one you like), but let’s say it was Luciano’s - Lord, Give me Strength - upbeat, melodic and, hey, righteous. Ahead, in the middle of nowhere particular, a single rum shop stood at the roadside, facing the sea and some mangroves on the right. And there the magic began. As I approached, the tinny music in the car stereo started to swell inexplicably, expanding around me in the car. Momentarily this was uncomfortable - I had no idea what was going on - but the song continued to gather around me, louder and louder, filling the car to bursting – and 50 yards from the rum shop, it did. It literally exploded, soundwaves all over the road. It was like driving into a vortex of music. Then I noticed the rum shop was flanked either side by a stack of massive black speakers, twelve foot high, taller than the rum shop itself. For five seconds the noise was physical, so loud it battered the car: the shift and crack of the high hat and snare blasting into every corner of the car, Luciano’s voice rolling around the interior, and the bass reverberating through the chassis. As I drove on, the intensity waned – just as the Doppler effect on approach had made the tempo slightly more upbeat, compulsive somehow, so the loosening gave his voice more soul. As I drove away, so the song gradually slid back into the car, where it swirled around me for a couple of seconds. And then it simply re-boxed itself into the car radio…

Only in Jamaica (and Puerto Rico).

06/04/2021

Who knew - the Rocher du Diamant / HMS Diamond Rock, between St Lucia and Martinique - invested by the Royal Navy from 1804 for 18 months, as an irritant to the French in Martinique.

31/03/2021

Magical Caribbean Moments – TROPICAL RAIN 2

So I was walking through the outskirts of St John’s in Antigua, as is my traveller’s wont - you see more by walking – when the sky ahead turned an angry purple grey and rent open with an ear-splitting crack, and a deluge of rain made its way up the street towards me… What to do? Well, I looked around and… only one thing for it, I tried the handle of the pick-up parked right there… and hopped in to the front passenger seat. Phew! Saved from a soaking…. but also, as I discovered on looking around… Spotted. Crumbs, trouble now, I thought, as the vehicle owner and his family peered at me from the veranda of their house, just 15 yards away. Yes, this was an invasion of their privacy, and they started to gesticulate and remonstrate to prove it. I wound down the window and hand-signalled frantically (the rain was too noisy to shout) palms open in apology: “Do you mind…?” There was a pause. And soon the youngest member was despatched under an umbrella to talk to me. Was he going to order me out of the car, into the rain? No, of course not. He led me up to the veranda, where I was given a seat and spent an hour chatting with them, over a rum punch and some crisps. Friends I would never have made if I hadn’t taken a slightly dodgy risk.

25/03/2021

Magical Caribbean Moments – TROPICAL RAIN 1

As someone brought up on European weather, specifically British weather, I have never thought of rain as having any defined ‘edge’, or beginning and end. British rain insinuates itself around you as an amorphous wet, presence: first it’s grey and the air fizzes with damp, then it spits and occasionally it gathers into something more meaningfully liquid. But in the Caribbean you can actually see rain. It tracks across the sky – clouds literally drag rainstorms like a man o’ war jelly-fish with 5000ft tentacles – and of course it can drench you in a nano-second… As it nearly did one afternoon as I was walking back from a hotel in a tiny cove on the west coast of St Vincent. I climbed up to the main road and turned right towards Kingstown, intent on walking to the next bus stop. Soon I came to a straight stretch of light grey tarmac that climbed a slope planted either side with bananas.

My first warning of something odd was a strange thrumming, like a stadium full of people tapping and crumpling cardboard …. ? Weird. Then there were shrieks. I turned to see people running, pursued up the road by a curtain of rain; it was moving at a metre per second, turning the tarmac black with in a distinct, visible line, like an oil slick rolling up towards me… Beyond it, the sharp afternoon sunlight was dissolved into a silvery mist. I understood : the thrumming noise was thousands of gallons of water hitting the banana leaves. I turned and ran with everyone else, up the road, to the shelter of the bus shelter - phew! - where we all squeezed in, as the rainstorm rolled on over us, roaring, clanging on the tin roof and spattering the road.

18/03/2021

Magical Caribbean Moments – Fish Fry in Anguilla

Fish fry? In garlic and lemon? No, this isn’t a story about a starter in one of Anguilla’s many excellent restaurants… It’s an unexpected moment that occurred on a dawn stroll along Meads Bay. If you’ve been to Mead’s Bay then you’ll know that just walking there can be aerobic exercise (the sand is that sumptuous), but it was the breaking waves that caught my attention. The swell was rising gradually and the water clear enough that each gathering wave face became marbled by the sun over my right shoulder. But then, just before it rolled, the glassy perfection became smudged, by a skittering of tiny darts. And I realised what they were: 20… 30… 50… tiny fish were sewing their way in and out of the liquid wall, alternately flashing silver and racing like shadows through the water. It was simply scintillating… I asked myself if there might be some evolutionary benefit to behaviour like this. Or were these tiny creatures, like we do, just swimming and surfing for sheer joy?

16/03/2021

Magical Caribbean Moments - A Mango on the loose...

Few fruits that talk of the Caribbean as much as a mango. Oh, limes perhaps, or the coconuts on the beaches… But what about this for a strange, magical moment? I was driving down a steep and extremely windy road in the backwoods of St Lucia, when a mango bounced off the verge and rolled onto the tarmac. And kept rolling, end over wobbly end, in no particular hurry, meandering into the middle on the short straights and speeding up into the bends where it was steepest. It almost veered into the gutter, but then righted itself and just kept rolling on, for more than 100 yards, drawn beautifully by its own weight and shape, plump yellow and pink against the brand new, smooth black tarmac. I said there was no hurry, but in the end there was, as another car appeared on my tail. I had to drive on. I never saw how far the mango got...