Barbados is quite remote - almost four hours by plane even from Miami, the designated hop-stop for the Caribbean. It is the most easterly located island in a chain of tiny bits of land sprinkled in a half circle just north of South America. Barbados comprises only 116 sq miles and houses 350,000 people ("Bajans"), making it one of the most densely populated countries in the world.Yet there were two good reasons for going there: Barbados has world-class windsurfing at its southern tip and excellent surfing on the east coast, and secondly offers some tax incentives. As windsurfing is one of my favorite sports and cannot be done extensively in neither Miami nor the Bahamas, Barbados was much more to my taste for an official residency. If I had to spend a few weeks per year there, I could at least use the time to come up to speed windsurfing. Unfortunately the tax situation is not quite that simple: there is a 40% income tax unless you are a so-called non-domiciled resident (similar to the UK), and becoming such a resident is more difficult than the Bahamas' show-me-the-money way.On the other hand, windsurfing conditions are genuinely excellent: The Silver Sands beaches attract pros from all over the world, who will find winds and waves elsewhere only available in Hawaii. (Which, by the way, were almost too excellent for me this time, as I am not quite at the level yet where I can boast salto jumps off the waves). The area is comparable to Kanaha Beach on Maui (constant sideshore winds with a similar surf out on the reef), but even more complicated for the unexperienced waveriders as the surf is quite strong close to the beach, especially at high tide. There is also an area for beginners and intermediates nearby, just a few miles west in Oistins; located in a shielding bay, the wind conditions can however be irritating close to the shore (= turning gusts). Both areas are just 10-15 minutes from the airport; Silver Sands has two resort hotels (Silver Sands and Silver Rocks) right on the beach, the other spot is right in front of the cheaper "Windsurf Beach Hotel", but with accommodations of different categories around. All three of them have well-sorted equipment rental (Club Mistral) directly on the hotel grounds. Silver Rocks is the nicest hotel of the three, just reopened after renovation; still the kitchen and services are of poor Bajan standards. And the Silver Rocks windsurfing rental does not offer optional
insurance for board and sails, which can prove valuable for the powerful surf offshore.

In general, Barbados is extremely expensive: a chocolate in the supermarket can cost eight Barbados Dollars (= US $4), and room rates go up to US-$1,000 for a double room. On the contrary, the service level is far below any industrialized nation, so that the value proposition is often times so bad that only the word "rip-off" can adequately describe the customer experience. We tried the "Turtle Beach Resort", the most expensive hotel on the South Coast, for one night - and were shocked with the worst price/service relation ever perceived in a hotel: $750 for a double room with the standards of a middle-class hotel (not even clean rooms), no minibar, a most modest lunch buffet only featuring one fish and one meat dish of doubtable quality. Three beginner sails and boards made up their windsurfing section, and the beach and pool area had the dimensions of a backyard installation.

Even the Silver Rocks Resort, where the appearance of refurbished rooms and common areas were better matching its more reasonable prices, had an incredibly bad kitchen and service level, so that I would have certainly gone crazy had I taken the all-inclusive package with breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the hotel's only restaurant. In which you better get the menus from the unoccupied welcome desk yourself (otherwise count at least 15 minutes until somebody brings them over). Every appearance of a waitress is a welcoming sight, even if she does only serve the table next to you, and not even looks over. Still, all of them seem to be proud of the very least of services, even for short-worded communication with the guest:

Why would you normally thank somebody upon telling you that your mediocre meal has still not arrived? And why would this person then be excited about her outstanding service of telling you?

There is a whole lot of other examples, and perhaps the best way to cope with this defunct service society is to emotionlessly accept its existence and discover the underlying British humor in its nature. For instance, when complaining about malfunction of appliances, a justifiable answer is:

Requests for unheard-of demands will be rejected squarely:

Maybe the experience is better in the luxury hotels of the calmer west coast, centered around the city of Holetown, where the motionless sea rolls out a red carpet for dreamy sunsets. At least, one hotel even made it into the "Leading Hotels" directory - the Sandy Lane Hotel - but it is currently closed for renovation and will not reopen before October 2000 (so we could not test it). The one that looked best from the outside to me was The Regent - but better be safe than sorry and check out rooms & rates and their relation first. Obviously there are too many tourists who have booked everything in advance and cannot change once stuck on the island, so even the most outrageous rates are accepted.

Still overproportionally expensive, the quality of one particular restaurant is however impressive: The Cliff, located romanticly at the seaside above some minor natural stone walls (hardly a "cliff"), serves excellent international cuisine. The same is said about "La Mer" further north, in the luxury beachfront condo development Port St Charles - where the former chef of famous Sandy Lane Hotel opened his own gourmet temple. Unfortunately, both places are booked a few nights in advance, especially on weekends, and La Mer is also closed on Sundays and Mondays, so that we did not get a chance to try the latter. If you only stay for a week in high season, it is definitely recommended to make all reservations in advance on the day of arrival. The Sandy Lane Restaurant, voted "one of the top 50 tables around the world" by Conde Nast traveler, has obviously lost some of its quality when its original chef (now at La Mer) left; it is still a decent place with a nice outdoor terrace ambience on the upper floor of the golf course club house, but not up to gourmet standards that would justify the received award (although the service is still outstanding).

Renting a car is another procedure that requires a Bajan state of mind: Filling out multiple forms takes half an hour easily, and rental prices for rusty lemons are heftier than for a sparkling new sedan in the US or Europe. If you can get a car at all, that is - most car rentals are solidly booked during wintertime. Also the island traffic needs a little getting used to: Frequent buses stop even more frequently, about every 50 yards, blocking all traffic in their direction, as of course there are no bus stop lanes. Bajans have developed an action pattern to bypass those buses without caring about the upcoming traffic. So do pedestrians, which walk even at night (where black skin is especially hard to see) in the middle of the street. It can even happen that you'll find a man washing his car in the middle of the street, so that all cars in his direction have to wait to pass by. (When we returned three hours later, the car was still there. He had finished washing, and obviously parked it in the same spot - still in the middle of the street.)

The best reaction to this traffic situation is to slow down to speeds where unforeseen conditions still leave time for reaction, but even at those speeds the island can be crossed in an hour. South Coast (Silver Rock) to West Coast (Holetown) takes 30-60 minutes, dependent on rush-hour traffic jams, and also all sights of the island can easily be covered in one day:

A remote place not necessarily worth seeing is "The Crane", a turn-of-the-century luxury hotel which is currently expanding and adding expensive condos, presenting itself as the ultra-exclusive seclusion solution on the lonely south-eastern coast. The Crane Hotel charges $5 per person to enter the premises (which is reimbursed if you eat at its restaurant). As the view from the restaurant terrace overlooks what is said to be "one of the 10 best beaches in the world", we tried breakfast there - and made the experience of

The other "worst of my life" experience, by the way, was a dessert at the Silver Rocks resort:

A stay at the Crane is something I would definitely not recommend - the integrated restaurant is the only one in the region.

My overall impression of Barbados is still better than the Bahamas, mainly because of its additional water sport options. But if you have to live there, either cook on your own or visit the expensive west-coast restaurants, and do not depend on services of any kind - it is too Caribbean in that regard.