Beautiful Barbados
We chose to sample the new addition to Almond Hotels first – The Casuarina Beach. This is a typical Barbados style 280 room hotel and, as many an older hotel that’s been revamped – has a lovely beach location with tropical gardens. We had a renovated beachfront room and ate dinner in each of their three restaurants. Unusually for an all inclusive, breakfast is the only meal that’s buffet style and we were impressed with both their food & service. We also took the opportunity to spend a day at one of their sister hotels, the Almond Beach Village. The Village is a 32 acre family resort with 395 rooms spread across 11 categories. We found that almost all of the 10 pools seemed to have plenty of quiet areas for those who didn’t want to join in their plentiful activities and the beach seems to go on forever!
Our second stay was a complete contrast – The Crane. This is a historic, prestigious 5* resort property consisting mainly of one, two and three bedroomed ‘residences’ & resort apartments. It's situated on the East coast and we hired a car as public transport in that area isn’t frequent.
L’Azure restaurant overlooks Crane Beach which is stunning and has been voted one of the top ten best beaches of the world. This multi award winning restaurant is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner and isn’t overly priced for the quality. It’s also visited by many locals for the ‘Gospel Breakfast’ and the buffet lunch accompanied by live steelpan music.
There are additional residences under construction but it’s very skilfully done and we weren’t aware of any noise during our stay. The property has benefited from the opening of ‘The Crane Village’ which tempts people out at night to shop, drink and dine in a village style atmosphere which is lacking within walking distance of the resort.
Barbados isn’t a big island and getting lost is a given – but the locals are never far away to put you back on track & we were determined to use up our petrol allowance!
You can’t go to Barbados and not come across Mount Gay rum - and having driven past it several times near Bridgetown – we decided to call in and visit. Mount Gay has been producing rum since 1703 and is the oldest brand of rum in the world. The tour isn’t so much of their distillery as their bottling plant - but it’s their only one and they turn out 10,000 bottles a day! The guides are entertaining, the presentation is professional, the rum tasting has enlightened me that not all rums are the same - and some definitely deserve to be drunk ‘on the rocks’.
Andromeda Botanical Gardens, on the other hand, are supremely hidden for a six acre site! Eventually we found them hugging the steep winding roads surrounding Bathsheba. These gardens are over 50 years old, have over 600 plant species and there’s a choice of two self guided walks. We enjoyed it so much that we did them both!
The day before we came home we decide to visit Jack-in the-Box Gully. Who could resist such a place? This is the home of the Aerial Trek Zipline Adventure and is a constructed course of eight platforms that are built around the canopy of the trees within the gully. No level of fitness is required – just a head for heights and a nerves of steel! The first zip is the scary one but after that just sit back and enjoy the experience. It’s early days yet – no shiny gift shop - just a beer afterwards, a chat with the guides and a great sense of achievement for stepping off that first platform!
On our travels we noticed that lots of things have developed – new shopping malls are springing up and the area at the East end of ‘the Gap’ now houses wooden craft rondavels. Oistins seems to have grown in popularity with permanent ‘fish’ lights strung across the road and the Kensington Oval finally got it’s floodlights in 2009. Gentle change doesn’t hurt - it seems all the old favourites have survived and prospered, it’s still beautiful, the people are as friendly as ever and I hope it’s not another ten years before I can visit again!