Searching Out Wildness in Paradise

When people think of the Caribbean islands, they think of yellow beaches beside a gentle sea fringed by palm trees. Perhaps they picture impossibly steep tropical mountains rising up from a bright shore lined with welcoming bars and flower-fringed villas and populated by happy people.

The Atlantic coast of Barbados is not like that. Here the viewscape is beautiful only in a primeval way, and much less welcoming. It contains virtually no shade. The heat of the day feels intense and unforgiving. Along much of this shore powerful waves pound across great stretches of open beach. The sands spread far out from seemingly never-ending grass-covered dunes. Sand in several places long ago piled up into conical hillocks of considerable height.

The landscape behind this coast is savannah. The rippling grassland is broken only rarely by small clusters of sea-grape and a tall tree-like native cactus. Beyond the grass loom arid multi-hued sandstone hills. Scored by dry gullies, these rise eventually into the distant heights of the Scotland District, the horse and cattle–raising highlands at the island’s centre.  

The trade-winds blow constantly, sometimes covering everything with fine choking sand they picked up half a world away in the Sahara.  On this Atlantic coast the incoming ocean current has also met no land since flowing the thousands of miles from Mother Africa.  The sea always seethes with energy and, as the undertow can kill, is too dangerous to swim in. Spume often fills the air and clouds the view inland. Coconuts by the thousand lie tumbled about along the sands as far as the eye can see. Many have drifted there over immense distances.

Although down the coast there are a few small bays that shelter fishermen’s boats and homes, much of the east shore is unprotected and empty of human occupation and activity. This is one of the world’s most densely populated islands but its inhabitants nearly all live towards the gentler West and South sides bordered by the Caribbean Sea.

On such a crowded and busy island a unique adventure is to manoeuvre the narrow and sometimes dangerous roads, up vertical hills and down through the dark jungle of the gullies, to come out eventually into the open on a high cliff looking west. There we gaze out through the heat haze at a very different Caribbean picture. We see a landscape where much of the year across empty miles of shimmering rocky hills, dry grass, sand and sea not another human being has ventured.