Caribbean Capers

Day Six: Friday 1st January

On Friday Richard was feeling much better. We had an enjoyable breakfast (fruit, toast, bacon, egg, potato pancakes) and made arrangements for our departure from Sandals and onto the next stage of our holiday. The plan was to fly from the small airport in the north of St Lucia (St Lucia Airport, Castries) near Sandals to San Juan, and then on from San Juan to Beef Island in the British Virgin Islands.

The flight, in an American Eagle turboprop plane, was a bit cramped and slightly uncomfortable but relatively uneventful. The cabin staff seemed terminally bored with their jobs, and kept putting out strange and incomprehensible announcements. "Laze and jairman, plea efferdu the carin your sea porr for informasha onna securyexir innyevennof an errgency." They mumbled their way through the safety and the inexplicably daft "don't even think about breaking our smoke detector or we'll put you in prison, honest" announcements as if they were talking in their sleep, before dispensing "snacks" in the shape of several pieces of suspicious cardboard of varying thickness dyed in interesting and amusing colours and cunningly assembled to resemble a ham and cheese sandwich. Inedible joke food evidently a growth enterprise in San Juan.

At least the crisps were edible. Very soon we were at San Juan, sans baggage, which was being conveniently ported ahead without our involvement. San Juan was a nightmare. We had to stand in a ridiculous queue and fill out endless stupid green "US Department of Justice" forms, declaring that we were not Nazi war criminals, drug dealers, or that we were suffering from moral turpitude, whatever that may be. After the obligatory irritating discussion with fatuous US-immigration official and passport-stamping – all this and we weren't even putting a foot outside the airport! – we continued to another part of San Juan International Airport and waited for the flight to Beef Island.

The plane touched down in Beef Island at around 8pm, and the plan was to get to Maria’s Hotel by the Sea (in Road Town, Tortola, about 8 miles from Beef Island) at which establishment we had a room pre-booked. The Customs people at Beef Island were really nosy and officious. We spent ages in the queue as the customs people really went to town, looking in everyone’s bag – insisting on opening everything and asking loads of questions. Oddly, they didn’t touch anything of ours, which is most unusual because Richard almost always gets his stuff searched where there is any likelihood of this happening. Quite what they were looking for is anyone’s guess.

As soon as we set foot outside the airport we were accosted by a taxi driver with a large air-conditioned American van. He looked pleasant enough, so we asked him how much it would be to Road Town ($18) and jumped aboard. On the journey he told us a few things about the BVI and pretty soon we were in Road Town, outside Maria’s Hotel by the Sea. This hotel is situated on a part of the main bay and is in a very good location. The hotel itself is clean and tidy enough but everything seems permeated with the Caribbean slowness and lackadaisical approach to life. Everyone seems to do things incredibly slowly as if moving in a vat of syrup, which includes speaking, checking in, serving drinks, etc. We checked in and after a beer in the bar decided to have a look at what Road Town had to offer. Almost directly opposite was Pusser’s Pub drawing us in like a beacon, and as we were both hungry and in need of a sit down and some food, we headed inside.

Pusser’s Pub in Road Town is a delightful place because it is exactly like a pub in, well, anywhere in Britain. Lots of dark wood, tacky Victoriana trinkets, Battle-of-Trafalgar prints and ancient adverts proclaiming questionable health benefits for poisonous long-forgotten tobacco products. And, perhaps more significantly, beer on tap. Shame then, that the Newcastle Brown Ale (draught) was absolutely terrible! Sugary, sloppy flat stuff, which was the right colour but little else. I left it and ordered a bottled (imported) Guinness instead, which was more reliable. This imported Guinness is great because they still use the old “Guinness is Good For You” slogan on the bottle. This peculiarly quaint British inducement to imbibe was, of course, exorcised against the national interest many moons ago by the health-and-safety Nazis and political correctness lobby.

In the pub we enjoyed a very worthy supper of fish and chips (claimed to be cooked in a Courage ale batter) and a rather bland but nonetheless stodgily-enjoyable chewy pizza, which emerged about twice the size we had been expecting.

Thus stuffed we relaxed a little in the pub before returning to Maria’s Hotel to sleep. The room, which had seemed pleasant enough at first, contained various hidden horrors. One of these, we discovered, was a toilet that blocked itself up at the slightest provocation, and was damned difficult to unblock, leading to a few of those uncomfortable “will it, won’t it” potential overflow moments on tiptoes grimacing and gesturing at the toilet wondering whether to make a run for it or whether it would emit the mighty swirl-gulp-and-swallow which is the preferred conclusion to events of this nature. But worse, a new bar or some kind of café/disco was celebrating their new opening (or the New Year) just over the road from Maria’s, and they insisted on playing reggae music until 3.30am, turning up the volume occasionally just in case anybody within a five mile radius was in danger of nodding off. Richard managed to fall asleep through it, but Samantha was very distressed and to her despair was woken by a cockerel crowing at 4am just as she was falling asleep after silence had descended. Unfortunately it continued to crow throughout the rest of the night, and Samantha, normally an animal lover would have happily wrung its neck by 7am.