Spielwarenmesse in the snow

We’ve completed another whirlwind week in Nuremberg. It’s hard to believe this is the ninth time we’ve attended the Spielwarenmesse tradeshow. The highlight of this year’s event was the weather. The city experienced a near-record snowfall last Sunday, just two days before the show opened. It's hard to believe that two days earlier we'd been snorkelling in the Caribbean Sea.

Depending on who you asked, it was either the heaviest fall in two decades or the heaviest in three decades. Regardless, we arrived in Nuremberg to find almost 30 centimetres of snow on the ground. We’ve never enjoyed permanent snow cover in all the years we’ve been visiting Nuremberg.

This year, we flew Mitchell to Germany to join us for the first time.  It was an opportunity for him to explore the industry and meet our suppliers in person. We flew him into Nuremberg on Saturday afternoon so that he’d have at least two full days to acclimatise and recover from jet lag. He’s never seen snow before. As a result, he was delighted when it began falling on Sunday morning and didn't stop until the following morning. 

As happens every year, our suppliers wined and dined us again. Mitch got to experience the decadence of the Contiki Bar on Tuesday evening, followed by Cucina Italiana on Wednesday, and the infamous Pork Knuckle Dungeon on Thursday (Tucher Mautkeller Cellar is the official name). He was then invited to a European league football match on Friday night, another bucket list moment for him. I guess we’re now his favourite uncles for another month.

This evening we flew into London. Our final hours in Germany involved another hair raising close call with our flight. More about that adventure another time. We have more business meetings over the next week before we head for home. It’s been a long time on the road. 

A week of 10,000 daily steps and endless nights on the town in Nuremberg has definitely taken its toll. I’ve got a nasty chest infection, and it looks like Garry has finally caught it as well. I got my flu and COVID shots before we left Sydney, so hopefully that’s helped with some of the Northern Hemisphere’s winter ailments.

Barbados in a day

We’ve finished our time in the Caribbean on a high note. Several months ago, I booked a private tour of Barbados with Mike’s Maxi Taxi Tours. Michael met us outside the cruise ship terminal at about 9:45am. For the next 7.5 hours, he took us from one end of Barbados to the other and back again while telling the story of his family and their African slave heritage.

We traced a clockwise circuit around the tear-shaped island, travelling up the resort-friendly west coast to its rocky northern tip from Bridgetown, then back down the stormy Atlantic east coast. To complete the circuit, we crossed the island's hilly interior to the international airport on the southern coast. We spent very little time in Bridgetown, the nation's capital, beyond a quick stop outside its cricket stadium and a visit to popstar Rihana's childhood home.

 

Rihanna’s childhood home was a curious sight. Her original home felt more like a shrine to royalty than a real house. This is definitely one island nation that's enormously proud of its greatest cultural export.  Our photo stop at the Grammy-winning singer’s first home was followed by a drive-by of her fancy new digs at One Sandy Lane, a gated community on the island's east coast. 

One Sandy Lane is run like a private, five-star boutique hotel. There is a staff of 34, including gardeners and security personnel, who are always on hand to keep everything running like clockwork. In addition, each of its eight palatial villas has its own private staff, such as a chauffeur, housekeeper, butler, and chef.

It's easy to see why the island's west coast, with its upscale luxury resorts, plush private villas, white-sand beaches and calm, clear waters, is known as "the Platinum Coast." Tiger Woods was married here, and Concorde once flew in celebrities on a scheduled weekly flight. I was surprised to discover that a Concorde retired here in November 2003. Unfortunately, for us, this popular tourist attraction is now closed to the public.

As we've travelled through the Caribbean, we've learned that former British colonies are typically divided into districts called parishes. Barbados is no different. It consists of eleven such districts, each with its own head church. The island’s oldest parish is St. James Parish in Holetown. It was established in 1628 near the site where English settlers first landed. 

Today, a magnificent parish church stands on the site of the island's first church. The original building was a wooden structure built in 1675, while the current stone building dates back to 1874. However, some of its stonework comes from an earlier stone structure built in the 1690s. We caught a brief glimpse inside but couldn't enter as a Sunday service was in progress.

Mike then drove us to the island's northernmost tip for a tour of the Animal Flower Caves. These coastal caverns were carved by wild seas relentlessly pounding the island’s northern and eastern coast. A steep staircase takes you into a surprisingly spacious cavern with filled shallow rock pools, while a second cavern features a natural swimming hole. 

The animal flowers they’re named after are actually delicate sea anemones living in the cave's tidal waters. We considered taking a dip in the cave pool. However, the sea along the Atlantic coast isn’t particularly warm, so we gave it a miss. As you can see from the opening image, the view from the caves is pretty spectacular.

We drove through the island’s sugar cane fields past chattel homes that once housed the emancipated slaves. While Jim Crow Laws never took hold here, an equally oppressive local landowner ordinance required plantation workers to move their homes every three years. Hence, these early structures were both small and cleverly segmented for easy transportation.

These modest homes stand in stark contrast to those built by the island's wealthy plantation owners. At my request, we visited St Nicholas Abbey, one of the island’s lovingly restored plantation homesteads. Curiously, despite the name, it’s never been a religious facility. It was built around the year 1660. At its peak, it was considered to be one of the most successful sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean. 

These days, most of the Abbey’s income is derived from tourism and rum. According to Mike, it’s the only plantation homestead currently open to the public. It’s been distilling and bottling its own prestigious brand of rum since 1750. Much to our delight, visitors are welcome to wander through the estate’s warehouse filled with precious barrels of ageing rum. We also stumbled upon a staff member diligently filling and capping its fancy bottles in a repurposed building next door.

I'm so glad we added this attraction to our itinerary. The Abbey wasn't included in the tour I originally booked, but Mike agreed to slot it in for us. The old homestead gave a good sense of colonial life during the island's colonial plantation era, offering a stark contrast to the numerous demountable homes we'd driven past. 

The Abbey’s story is in many respects the story of Barbados. Take, for example, the island’s landscape dominated by open fields. Until 1660, Barbados was clad largely in thick forest, remnants of which still cover its inland hills. In less than a decade, the forests were gone, replaced by sugarcane fields. 

The ownership of these fields was highly concentrated. In 1667, records show that 745 families owned most of the island’s land, and from 1680, more than half of the land and its many plantations were owned by less than 100 families for the next 100 years.

Conversely, in 1644, there were only about 800 people of African descent, but this shifted rapidly to 27,000 by 1660 and 50,000 by 1700. Barbados was the Caribbean’s first "sugar island" and thus developed the model for plantation-based slavery across the region. It’s no surprise to learn that it acted as a major hub for the British slave trade. Historians estimate that up to 400,000 people were brought to Barbados from Africa.

I asked Mike about his black heritage. He explained that he could trace his ancestry back to a forebearer documented in records made shortly after emancipation in 1834. However, before the date, his family lineage is impossible to trace. Slaves were sold without family records, and families were regularly separated by these sales.

Furthermore, as Mike noted, it’s impossible to trace his ancestors from Africa. Modern DNA testing might yield a few clues, but beyond the limitations of modern science, there’s no way of knowing where on the continent they once lived. It’s mind-blowing to think that entire populations across the Caribbean are unable to trace their ancestry to an area of the world no smaller than a continent. 

Mike made a stop at Cherry Hill for a stunning view of the island’s stormy east coast, and again at the Morgan Lewis Windmill. Since 2013, the Morgan Lewis Sugar Mill has featured on the reverse of the Barbados two-dollar banknote. It’s the last of 506 windmills that once crushed cane around the island. Unfortunately, it was closed during our visit, so we had to satisfy ourselves with a view from the car park.

According to Mike, there's only one sugar mill still processing cane in Barbados. In 1721, a survey by William Mayo recorded 320 windmills and 870 sugar estates. By 1895, the industry was rapidly modernising, with 102 steam-driven mills supplementing around 338 remaining windmills.

Lunch was a simple affair, just fish and chips. That is, Flying Fish and chips. Yes, read that correctly. Flying Fish is a rather delicate fish and tastes a lot like sole or flounder. Another first for me.

Our tour finished with a wander along the beach in Bathsheba, a location renowned for its eye-catching “mushroom rocks”. Our flight to Heathrow departed on time (although a brief but intense rainstorm delayed our walk across the tarmac to board our plane).

 

Garry and I slept like babies on the flight to London. We’re now resting in the lounge before boarding our flight to Frankfurt this afternoon. The Caribbean was everything we’d hoped for and then some. The colonial history alone was genuinely eye-opening. 

It’s hard to imagine the great powers of Europe that now drive the European Union were once bitter rivals constantly doing battle throughout the Caribbean. Our guide reminded us today that St Lucia changed hands seven times between the French and the British before gaining independence in 1979.

A final dip in the Caribbean

Our penultimate island is done and dusted. Tomorrow morning, we’ll disembark in Barbados. Today we’ve been exploring St Vincent, the largest island in the St Vincent and the Grenadines archipelago. Our cruise boat docked in Kingston, the nation’s capital, shortly after 7:00am.

For our final excursion, I booked a catamaran snorkelling tour up the island’s west coast. I had a vision of us sailing silently through blue sapphire water and swimming among coral-fringed reefs. However, the reality was somewhat different. There were no sails or an internal cabin to be seen. Instead, our boat was a massive fibreglass structure carrying somewhere close to 80 people in rows of moulded white fibreglass seating.

We spent the morning cruising along the coast as far as the fishing village of Keartons. The village is famous for the film, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). In the film, Jack Sparrow docks at the village wharf after passing a rock arch offshore near the northern entrance of Wallilabou Bay. For movie buffs, you can spot the natural sea arch nine minutes into the film. Three corpses are seen hanging from it during a gruesome establishing shot. I've also posted a couple of screenshots here.

I was disappointed that we didn't dock briefly at Keartons. It would've been nice to take a stroll along its compact palm-shaded waterfront and soak up its atmosphere. We've learned that these large group tours keep their formal stops to a bare minimum. No doubt it's a convenient, but rather lazy, form of crowd control. This limitation has proven to be one of the unexpected downfalls of booking an all-inclusive cruise. Many of the complementary options have tended towards large-group formats.

After viewing the arch from both sides, our catamaran backtracked down the coast in search of a sheltered snorkelling spot. The beach that the boat normally visits was plagued by swarms of tiny translucent white jellyfish. As a result, we ended up anchoring in a small bay called Byahaut. Sections of this bay were also filled with tiny white jellyfish, which we did our best to avoid.

Sadly, the snorkelling was rather naff. Mainly barren rocks with a few colourful parrot fish feasting in their crevices. However, the water was warm and staying afloat was effortless thanks to the buoyancy vests we were given. I eventually gave up snorkelling and flipped onto my back to relax and enjoy the warm tropical sun. It was a wonderful way to finish my last swim in the Caribbean.

Generous portions and refills of more local rum punch were doled out for an hour-long journey back to the wharf. Garry and I spent our time with a drink in hand, leaning against the railing, with the wind in our hair and the sun on our faces. It was bliss.

After lunch onboard our cruise ship, we ventured back into town to soak in the “colourful” atmosphere of Kingston’s weekend markets. These were easily the largest markets we’ve encountered on our cruise. Every man, woman and child had their stall set up in the street, including a few “umbrella bars” selling cold beers.

At times, there appeared to be no designated market zone. People set up shop on any footpath anywhere in town. Some merchants simply swung open a side door on their minivan, mounted a few shelves and waited for shoppers to arrive. We’ve come to appreciate that these chaotic streetscapes have a beauty all their own. And, as Garry discovered, there’s some great BBQ meat on offer.

During our walk through town, we passed St Mary’s Cathedral and its neighbouring cream-coloured Kingstown Anglican Church. I’ve seen photos of St Mary’s online. The black-stone building bears more than passing resemblance to a Gothic castle, while inside, a dramatic altar features a statue of Christ on the cross framed by a radiant baby-blue arch. Unfortunately, the church was locked. However, I successfully captured a glimpse of its stunning altar through a crack in the front door.

This evening, we’ve capped off two incredible weeks hosting a farewell dinner with friends we’ve made on board. Eric and Veronica come from Minneapolis (on the left below), while Paul and Wendy are from regional Ontario, Canada. Garry and I have met them most nights for a nightcap before bed and have dined with each couple on other occasions. I think they’ve become our role models for making the best of our retirement.