Travel Guides: All Countries / Caribbean / Antigua
 |  | Travel Reviews : Antigua |
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| | | | Review by Joanna Campbell from London
Great destination for a holiday
Who needs a tan?
From the Mail on Sunday
On my previous visits to the Caribbean, the nearest I've got to the local culture is a proposition from a Rent-a-Rasta. On my Leeward Island tour round St Kitts, Nevis and Antigua I was deluged with history and local colour, as well as all the banana daiquiris a girl can drink.
I flew into St Kitts, then took a seven-minute flight to sister island Nevis. The plane was surely first used by Amelia Earhart. My pilot had a limp and a cataract but seemed calm. This was, after all, the local taxi service. The Nevis airport is a large hut.
'St Kitts is bigger, so they get the lion's share of the money,' explained English expat Margaret Carson, steering her jeep around potholes and donkeys. 'That's why we might split. We'll be the world's smallest country. Only 8,000 people.'
Margaret took on Old Manor, a former sugar plantation, five years ago. Most hotels in St Kitts-Nevis are the old houses of British slave-owners. My palatial suite was once occupied by Chanel model Stella Tennant, although she probably didn't make as big a dent in the bed as I did. From my veranda I could see Mount Nevis. The hotel is in the hills, where it benefits from a cooling breeze.
Margaret runs a shuttle service to the beach, but that wasn't on my itinerary. My days were spent imbibing the island's historical past, my nights imbibing G&Ts with its expat present. I lunched at the Montpelier Inn, made famous by Princess Diana when she stayed here in 1992. Two hundred years previously, it was the site of Nelson's wedding to governor's daughter Fanny Nisbet.
There's not much in the capital, Charlestown, apart from a smelly fish market, a few shops full of tourist tat and some stalls selling breadfruit and yams. The locals shop in St Kitts. Earla, a guide who is writing a book about local plants, took me on a nature trail round Gingerland. Virtually every plant on Nevis can be used in tea or dumplings. 'Soursop is good for men,' she said. 'Calms them down.'
Once a week Margaret holds a plantation dinner, where locals and tourists come to eat and dance to a steel band. Here I met former Guardsman Nigel, a handsome 72-year-old straight from a Jilly Cooper novel. Twice divorced, he still takes a keen interest in the opposite sex.
My next social event was dinner down the hill at The Hermitage Inn. Here, Maureen and Richard from Philadelphia, who have lived on the island for 30 years, have created a sophisticated family atmosphere.
The island has two night-time bars, Eddies and Tequila Sheila's. The daytime bar is Sunshine's, on the beach. Here I drank a Crazy Bee cocktail and listened to reggae artiste Bankie Banks playing as part of his world tour. The sting of a Crazy Bee is sharp. Half a glass had me ready to lie down on the sand and die.
Travel guide: Antigua
The joys of Jumby
From the Daily Mail
A trade wind caressed the pink oleander trees and carried the birdsong of the Antillean crested hummingbird across to Hawkshill Bay, where the endangered sea turtle has bred in peace for centuries. All is tranquil on Jumby Bay Island, a 300-acre paradise retreat, shaped like a horse's head, two miles north-east of Antigua in the Caribbean.
Today there is nothing to endanger the life of man or God's animals. No cars are allowed - transport is by golf buggy - and until recently, bringing children under 14 was discouraged. And in high dudgeon while looking for an extra buck, the previous owners of the resort, a couple of Italian-American vintners, once threatened to cut off the water and electricity supplies to the 18 local homeowners.
They included supermarket grocer Lord Sainsbury, who has colonnaded Candover House, and thriller writer Ken Follett. Thanks to a millionaire's co-op including the above and Robin Leach (American TV's Rich And Famous interlocutor) the island was bought lock, stock and ferry for a rumoured £20 million two years ago.
Its time-stands-still ambience has attracted celebrities such as ex-Beatle George Harrison, model Claudia Schiffer and actor Liam Neeson. Across the scalpel-trimmed lawns, as smooth as a tee approach at St Andrews, to the detergent-white arc of the beaches, the sun-blessed scene is of gently swaying palms with scarlet and yellow hibiscus lighting up the green undergrowth.
Jumby Bay has been British since King Charles I granted it to the present Earl of Carlisle's ancestor in 1627. The gift was made three years before the British settled in Antigua, ushering out the Spanish and French. Christopher Columbus did not land on the Antiguan mainland on his second voyage to the New World, but on passing, and a trifle arrogantly, christened it after the Virgin in Seville Cathedral, Santa Maria de la Antigua.
I remember coming to the Antiguan independence ceremony nearly 20 years ago when Princess Margaret handed over independence on behalf of the Queen in a borrowed tiara (on loan from Lord Glenconner's family). It is still in the Commonwealth with the Queen as Head of State.
And its enormous support by British tourists (it has 40 hotels with 4,500 beds to fill) testifies to its safety, lushness and the beauty of its beaches (one for every day of the year).
Some 28 miles across the turquoise sea, joined by a submarine platform (millions of years ago it was one island), is the 14-mile by eight-mile sister island of Barbuda.
This heavenly spot is where wild pigs and deer outnumber the human population of 1,500. For us, our daily bread came from Tilly's Bakery, a lean-to of a shack in the capital Codrington, where slaves once lived semi-free in their own cottages which still stand.
Travel guide: Antigua
Truly paradise
Sounds "cheesy" but this island really is paradise, especially Galley Bay resort.
It's a beautiful area with beautiful people.
Travel guide: Antigua
It's five star
I went there in November 2002 for a 40th birthday party. The people were really friendly and helpful. A community that are genuinely glad to welcome you to their magical island.
It was five star and I'm going again in 2003.
Travel guide: Antigua
Intoxicating and laid-back
Antigua is one of the most charming of the Caribbean islands. The weather is obviously magnificent and the people have a laid-back air, unhurried but always helpful.
If accosted by a person hawking T-shirts or coconuts, for example, you can politely decline and will not be aggressively pestered, as is perhaps the case in some other Caribbean countries.
Generally the islanders' homes look as if they are about to collapse. Compact and humble, they are obviously satisfactory for the dwellers, but would not be able to withstand a hurricane.
Sunday nights one can visit the highest point, Shirley Heights and enjoy a barbecue, drink beer and dance to the local musicians. And be prepared, loads of people cram into a small place, enjoying the local colour and atmosphere. It's intoxicating - a bit like being in Camden Town at the weekend.
There is little in the way of upmarket or sophisticated shops, but then you're not there for them. You're there to swim in that beautifully clear blue sea and to lounge on the beach and get a suntan. Antigua delivers, with full marks.
Travel guide: Antigua
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| | | | Spying on Eric Clapton
After four days, it was time to move on. So, in another terrifyingly tiny plane, I flew to Antigua, largest of the Leeward Islands and the most heavily developed for tourism.
My tour took in the capital St John's, with its arcades of duty-free shops, and the cricket ground, scene of many Test matches. On the other side of the island I stopped for a drink in English Harbour, centre of the expat community. Shirley Heights has the best view, taking in the sea, the harbour and Eric Clapton's house.
Antigua has more sophisticated places to eat than Nevis. In St John's I went to Julian's, a French restaurant run by a man from Essex. I dined with Julian's business partner Patty, who is married to the former leader of Antigua's opposition party and lives near Eric Clapton. 'I sometimes get the binoculars out to see what's going on in there,' she admitted.
After dinner we went to the bar upstairs and danced the night away with any locals who could be prised from the pool table. Patrick the barman, from south-east London, showed us some line-dancing moves and kept us supplied with gin and tonics.
Back in St Kitts, Seamoss Man, my driver, met me at the airport in a minibus decorated with suggestive stickers. Seamoss has a sideline selling seamoss, a homemade aphrodisiac drink. It must work: he has five children by three different women.
I stayed at American-run Ottley's Plantation Inn, literally something out of a Bacardi advertisement. A family business, it's a 10-minute drive from the capital, Basseterre, a small town of white wooden houses. On my last night I went to the St Kitts music festival. In a muddy field thousands sang along to gospel hits.
Sadly, I had to leave at 2am, as the party was just beginning. Seamoss drove me to the airport, hot sauce and reggae records in my hand luggage. Pallid compared with the tangerine hordes fresh from the beach, I envied them not at all.
Unspoiled serenity
As for the airport, if you can call it that, it's more like arriving at a large garden shed after the 15 minute flight from Antigua. Even today, the fiercely independent locals treat all change with fear and loathing. A rebel throng collected in orderly but belligerent fashion at the idyllic Spanish Point a couple of years ago when a British developer planned to build a hotel on the inhabitants' favourite beach. They tipped both his containers into the sea and herded him off their foreshore.
The common sport among the cognoscenti at Princess Diana's old hideaway, the white and turquoise K Club (its private plane has the same chic livery), is sorting out the mistresses from the wives as both drip in equal measure with diamonds at night.
Nearly three centuries ago, when a British planter from Barbados, Sir Christopher Codrington, was the local sugar daddy and employed 500 slaves on his plantation (he had a lease from the British Crown for 'one fat sheep per year') locals were paid 500lb of sugar for capturing a runaway slave and 200lb for delivering a dead one.
When slavery was outlawed in 1834, Jumby Bay in the north-east of Antigua was leased to emancipated slaves to grow vegetables for selling in the markets of Antigua.
Barbuda now has an edge-of-the-world feeling and an unspoiled serenity with its stunning white beaches which enjoy a tinge of pinkness from the coral reefs off shore. In the thick mangroves of Codrington lagoon is a unique sanctuary for the extraordinary frigate bird which paradoxically detests water and can fly high above the clouds.
Unlike at the K Club, in the mating season you can observe their courtship close up - the tame male puffs up a large red balloon beneath its hooked beak and for some unfathomable reason the female finds this prehistoric fertility rite enthralling and soon finds herself the breadwinner while the male nest-sits the chicks.
On Barbuda life is as emancipated as it gets. There are no TVs, shopping malls, cinemas, theatres, noisy parties or crowded beaches. Crickets chirp, tree frogs croak and yacht bows churn white foam from the pale green waters. No hedonist could ask for more.
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| | Available rental properties in Antigua |
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