Little England

Pasta night at the Barbados Hilton is a little bizarre. The pasta dish is designed and cooked to order. The guest chooses ingredients (fish, chicken, onions, prawns, beef, a variety of vegetables) and the chef puts them all into a pan in the manner of a stir-fry. Ready cooked pasta, chosen from three varieties, is then added to the mix, with a choice of cream or tomato sauce. Because this takes a long time, and the queue is building, the assortment is not fully hot by the time it is turned out on to the plate. Diva was not very impressed.

The Little England tour seemed to be the best leaving on Sunday morning and it turned out to be an excellent choice. Only four passengers in a minibus with an informative local guide. The tour covered a large part of the island, including the coral Caribbean side and the shale, sand and clay Atlantic side. There are sugar plantations, sweet potatoes and a field of pigeon peas. Northern English readers might remember that back in the 1950s when there were travelling fairs, everyone used to eat black peas. No-one from anywhere else has ever heard of them (they are fairly disgusting, by the way). Well, black peas are reputed to be pigeon peas and Diva has seen them growing!!

Highlights included Hunte’s garden, dense tropical undergrowth in a collapsed cave. Very beautiful but a bit of a nightmare for Diva when the owner described the pack of Rottweilers and rescue c*ts he keeps on the premises. Mr Hunte’s family owned several plantations and now, at the age of 78, he spends his time developing this one as a garden.  Bathsheba is so called because the sea has so many white horses it is like the milk she used to bathe in. At St Nicholas Abbey, TSH and Diva watched a fascinating 1935 film about the plantations and tasted rum punch and rum. Passed the golf club where Simon Cowell used to stay before we bought him a Barbados home of his own.

The charming guide had a notice in the vehicle suggesting he was carrying a Glock pistol, so perhaps Diva’s fears about the crime rate are reasonable.

Animals spotted include several mongoose, large millipedes, large snail and lizards. Black bellied sheep were bred in Africa and carry no wool. Traditional British sheep die of heat exhaustion. The early indefinite sighting has now been put down as a monkey. Another monkey was seen today but it was captive and posing for pics so probably does not count.