Caribbean Capers

Day One: Sunday 27th December

The day prior to departure Richard was in bed with the terrible flu bug which gripped London in December 1998. During the plane journey, which was uneventful except for much sneezing and sniffling, Virgin thoughtfully provided lots of surprisingly good (and current) movies to watch and a little gadget on the television screen in front of you which shows a tiny plane creeping across a world map with information on altitude, ground speed, distance to target destination, etc. All good fun. As a result of the entertainments the 8.5 hour flight was quickly despatched and very soon we had arrived at Hewanorra International Airport, in the south of St Lucia.

As we stepped off the plane we were buffeted by the warm, tropical air, moist and humid. It had recently been raining, not unusual in St Lucia as we later discovered, and the ground was wet as we walked from the aeroplane towards the terminal building located at the end of a covered walkway. We walked past a long line of women who were waiting on the walkway holding old-fashioned broomsticks. Judging by the grim looks on their faces I thought at first that they may have been assembling to be airlifted to some kind of witches’ conference but on reflection I guessed that their presence probably had more to do with cleaning the plane, the interior of which after a long-haul flight looks as if an army of Tasmanian devils has been having a bunfight in a newspaper warehouse.

We entered the arrivals hall for the first of a long series of protracted airport delays caused by the irritating Caribbean bureaucracy and obstinate slowness which was to increasingly dog our holiday. The immigration officials seemed to be taking forever with each person or group, asking endless questions, writing everything out longhand, stamping everything in sight about five hundred times and generally being painfully slow. Eventually we had our passports stamped, got through the tedious and unnecessary bureaucracy and headed off to get our baggage from the carousel. Having located it, we grabbed a trolley and headed through Customs.

“Please put all your bags on the bench” said the Customs man, standing behind the bench and a small desk. Now, unbenown to us this is part of a clever conspiracy between the customs men and the so-called porters hovering behind them in the clearance zone. Once you have put all your bags on the desk, the Customs man engages you in conversation and your airport trolley is vaporised by an unseen hand, literally made to disappear with the practised skill of a magician. (I still can’t work out how they managed to do this without my noticing, but then I was suffering from the flu and was not perhaps as observant as I could have been).

“Any fruit?” said the Customs man, and proceeded to confiscate a bunch of bananas and an apple which we had taken on the plane with us in case we got hungry. He carefully stashed the fruit away under a panel on his desk, no doubt to consume some time during his lunch break, and then he let us go on our way.

Now, part 2 of the Great Trolley Trick Rip Off was acted out. By this time we had twigged that our airport trolley had been whisked away and was nowhere to be seen. As we were casting around for a replacement trolley, a porter with a folding two-wheeled contraption grabbed our bags before we could say anything and started wheeling them off at great speed. We trotted along behind and he stopped at the Sandals representative – all of about 25 yards distance – and started hustling for a tip. This had all happened so fast that it took a little while for it to dawn on me that I was being ripped off, the first of many rip-offs for unwary tourists in the Caribbean. I grudgingly gave the man the smallest denomination of note I could find in my little wad of newly acquired bureau-de-change monopoly money, which unfortunately was a crisp green US$5, and he scooted off to find another unsuspecting victim.

We checked in with the Sandals rep and shortly afterwards we were bundled into a taxi with half a dozen other travellers bound for Sandals for the long ride (about 45 miles which took about 1hr 15min) up to the very north of the island, through Castries and onto Sandals Halcyon Beach which is situated on the north east coast. Taxis in St Lucia tend to be either Japanese saloon cars or, more predominantly, Japanese small vans fitted with benches to carry about 7-8 people. The ride was scary, to put it mildly. St Lucians’ approach to potential road hazards is to honk wildly and accelerate hard, always driving with one hand clutching an inappropriate part of the steering apparatus while waving the other hand and arm out of the window. St Lucians are the worst drivers I have ever seen. They lurch all over the road, never use their mirrors, and seem to have only two modes of operating their hazardous vehicular missiles: either accelerate hard or brake hard; there’s no inbetweening. Anyone driving normally – i.e. safely, steadily, within their stopping distance and not fishtailing all over the road – can expect a menacing taxi or a wide-bodied pickup truck with the rear deck stuffed full of joyriders, engine screaming, about two centimetres from their rear bumper, weaving from side to side looking for a blind bend or a blind crest on which to perform the St Lucian Overtaking Manouevre. Overtaking in St Lucia involves accelerating at full pelt until about an inch from the rear bumper of the guy in front, then waiting until there is zero visibility of oncoming traffic, before lurching out, thereby upsetting the balance of the vehicle, accelerate more until the engine sounds as if it’s about to go pop and then, honking erratically, lurch back in front of the overtakee, who by this time probably has one wheel in the ditch in order not to get flattened by the honking oncoming Mack cement truck now careering towards him in an attempt to avoid the swerving taxi. At any given point expect to see at least one vehicle occupying the invisible Middle Third Lane (there are no road markings in St Lucia, so anything is possible with a little imagination) sandwiched between honking overtakees and honking oncoming traffic. What makes it all even more fun is that the coastal roads tend to have little or nothing in the way of crash containment (armco) and more often than not a sheer drop into a valley or onto coastal rocks awaits any vehicle leaving the road, which itself consists of stretches of pockmarked tarmac scattered sporadically with sharp-edged rocks as big as footballs and potholes you could paddle in. It’s not a calming experience, especially as most taxis are not fitted with seatbelts for the passengers. Add to this the people who appear from nowhere for the sole purpose of wandering vacantly into the road, the ubiquitous chickens which dart out haphazardly from unseen hiding places by the roadside, and the dogs, sheep and cows which just hang around waiting for something interesting to happen (a multi-car pile-up, perhaps?).

Following repeated entreaties from passengers to the driver to slow down we arrived without incident at Sandals just as it was getting dark, around 5.30pm. They gave us a small glass of champagne and got us to fill out some more tedious, pointless bureaucratic forms to glean information they could easily have had faxed from the travel agents. Then we were led off to our rooms by a courteous smiling man with a trolley.

Above: A view of the landscaped gardens at Sandals

The room was delightful: it had a proper-size bed for a start. How any couple (other than perhaps a pair of smurfs) can exist sleeping in a so-called “normal” size double bed without having their sanity – not to mention their friendship – challenged through sleep-deprivation beats me. Maybe it’s the answer to the staggering divorce rate: introduce government subsidies for every couple to buy king-size beds, make the production of any double bed smaller than 7 feet wide a criminal offence and the world would be a happier, safer place. But I digress. We knew we were going to get a decent sized bed because we’d already checked with the travel agent as a condition of booking. Where there is any doubt we always choose twin beds in order to get a good night’s sleep in establishments run by misguided hoteliers (and there are lots of them) who haven’t woken up to the fact that the world is not, after all, populated by smurfs and that the average human being needs a minimum of three feet by seven to sleep comfortably. Sandals, being a “couples only” resort, doesn’t have any twin beds but they are to be applauded on their sensible policy of uniformly providing king-size items.

Below: The balcony of our room
The room was tastefully decorated in pastel and russet colours with earthenware tiles on the floor. Our room was on the first floor (i.e. up one flight of stairs); part of a two-storey block of chalet-style rooms all of a uniform good size, with good quality sanitary ware and plumbing which worked efficiently without clanking, gulping and spitting like it does in some places. There was a balcony overlooking a lawn surrounded by palm trees and colourful tropical plants.

The vaulted ceiling was of a good height with a totally silent multispeed electric fan, helping air to circulate. The room did not tend to get very hot, so we just left the fan on and after a couple of days decided to switch off the Panasonic air conditioning unit situated beneath the windowframe. When in use, the air conditioning unit hardly seem to make much difference to the temperature anyway, and was noisy. At this point let me quickly insert INPIF1 (Interesting, Notable and Possibly Irrelevant Fact No.1): the rooms all have three-pronged, UK-type electrical sockets. This is most odd, as everything else (bedside lamp units, plumbing, bedsheets etc) was made in America. Curious, given that St Lucia’s links with the UK would seem tenuous at best. Pondering this cultural anomaly we had a little walk around the resort (such as we could see of it in the dark) and returned to the room for a brief wash and a change of clothes.

Fairly soon we felt hungry and decided to go to dinner. We wanted to eat at The Pier restaurant (supposedly the best restaurant in the resort), but were told that this was reservations only which obviously we didn’t have, not having been forewarned that this was the situation. So we resolved to make reservations the next day for The Pier, and ate at the main restaurant, the Bay Garden. This is the main eating area for breakfast and lunch (both served as buffets) and is more casual (and perhaps not as good quality) as The Pier and Mario’s, an Italian-style restaurant (also requiring bookings in advance). A cynic might suggest that having this complex reservations system would keep people away from the “good” restaurants, thereby saving the resort money by having to provide less of the higher quality produce and service. Another cynic might suggest that having to make the bookings in person at a reservations desk only open between 9am and 5pm might provide a further barrier to the resort’s better offerings being more readily available to all.

Below: Richard in the Bay Garden Restaurant

The food on the first night (in the Bay Garden restaurant) was very disappointing. A starter consisting of a terrine of strangely-coloured vegetables tasted flat, cold and reminded me faintly of compressed algae. Pumpkin soup was thin and bland, with the occasional piece of interesting garlic, but with little else to recommend it. Bread was uniformly white and stodgy. A main course of kingfish was very dry as if it had been cooked a long time previously and reheated; furthermore it tasted bland and the portions were absolutely tiny: a small slice of fish, one small potato, one floret of broccoli, a tiny slice of courgette and that’s your lot! It looked like a starter and barely enough to feed a bumblebee on a diet. Oh, did I forget to mention the small dollop of sauce?

Sandals is an all-inclusive resort which means that everything – food; drink; snacks; alcoholic drinks; entertainments; water sports – is included in one (very expensive) price – on a par with costly five star hotels. My main bone of contention on our first evening was (among other things) the quality of the wine. Absolutely diabolical, thin, watery, pale acidic stuff which probably cost about tuppence a bottle, or whatever it costs to procure the sulphurous urination of elderly pachyderms and package it into convincing receptacles. This was very disappointing, considering that some very tasty and pleasant wines can be had for as little as US$4-5 (Ernest & Julio Gallo do a very cheap and highly drinkable Dry Reserve, for example) so why they had to serve us this tainted piss when we’d given them such an enormous sackful of cash in trust that they would take care of us in a way in keeping with the five-star cost was quite beyond reasoning.

Also, I was disgruntled when I politely asked the waiter to leave the water jug on our table and his response was a curt: “That’s not allowed.” I don’t think that I’ve had anyone speak to me in that way during a mealtime since I was in school. It’s quite mind-boggling, when paying around £300 a day to stay somewhere, to be treated so rudely and to be snubbed by staff about such petty things particularly when parting with your funds in advance in the expectation of being looked after and – dare I suggest – even pampered the tiniest bit. It’s not as if you can get up, walk out, and not pay as one might in an ordinary restaurant! As it was, I had the water jug man running around a fair bit as I was doing my utmost to keep my fluid levels up to help combat the flu bug. Having consumed our measly repast we had little interest for dessert as all the desserts were very sticky-looking cakes, for which neither of us were in the mood in such a hot climate.

I began to suspect that my worst fears about “All Inclusive” were being realised: that once they’ve got your money, they are intent on keeping as much of it as possible, and fobbing the guests off with as little and cheapest as they can get away with, treating them en masse like a group of farm animals or at best prisoners, and doing the absolute minimum rather than respecting the trust that they have been given by the guests who are basically handing over complete control to the resort in the justified expectation that a service appropriate to the price will follow. At this point I was beginning to harbour burdensome doubts about the wisdom of having booked at Sandals.

Having never tried this All Inclusive system before, and being totally naïve about how wonderful everything would be (I admit it, I’m a sad sucker for brochure puff) my belief now is that things can go either of two ways with “All Inclusive”.

One way, the way it should be, is that you feel relaxed, looked after, and that what you’re getting is consistent with what you have paid for. This is called value for money, and it’s a good feeling parting with cash well spent, regardless of the amount, if it provides good value. To get a good feeling is what holidays, and disposable money, are basically for, in this philosophy. There should also be some comfort in the removal of the risks and pitfalls involved in trying out strange and new restaurants in foreign places, and there are many benefits of everything being on site. This is how it should be.

The second way, when it doesn’t go according to plan, you feel cheated, out of control of a bad and totally one-sided situation, and when you’re not in control of your immediate environment and feel that people are squeezing and shafting you and you can’t do anything about it this can be quite maddening. You feel that you are being ripped off, abused and your trust is violated. It is very difficult to seek redress when faced with a substandard level of service in this situation, because where quality and value is concerned things can be very subjective, and therefore quite difficult to make substantive enough to launch a claim for compensation or redress in a situation other than one in which it can be conclusively shown and proven that one has suffered actual loss. This is when things turn sour. Although things did improve a great deal during our stay, I was feeling particularly sour at the end of the first evening.

My faith in human nature thus creaking at the seams, we retired to bed, tired but not particularly happy.

Right/below; Around the grounds of the resort