Antigua - Friendly Faces

The people of Antigua are universally friendly and very proud of their small island. They are happy to assist the lost tourist and a little effort goes a long way. We made sure to interact with people wherever we could, both at our resort and out on the island.

One of the first things we noticed about our resort, besides the seclusion, and water, and rum punch, was the effort that many of the staff made to introduce themselves and to also learn our names. It was nice to be something other than merely a room number.

Vanda in our resort restaurant The Bay @ Nonsuch always made an effort and had great suggestions on food options, while Tim and David made some fabulous cocktails.  Terita, Zoe and Donika at the concierge were so great in helping us to sort out our rental car and tour options and were so patient with our questions, especially once we helped Terita get rid of a flying cockroach on her late shift!  

The guys and gal at watersports took great care of us, especially Akeem who gave us an extra long tour of the mangroves and Shakimba who took us to Little Bird Island for a truly deserted island feel. Really there were too many wonderful people there to list them all.

We came across plenty of other wonderful people outside the resort as well. Xabier owns the catamaran company Wadadli Cats. Half Spanish, half Trinidadian he has lived in Antigua for more than thirty years. Captain Sheldon skippered our catamaran and had a quick wit, expansive knowledge of local history and ready smile. The rest of the crew were always happy to point out something during snorkelling or pour a refreshing rum punch and made the whole day that much more special. 

Dennis worked for twenty five years to buy the magnificent point of land above Ffryes Beach where his restaurant Dennis Cocktail and Bar Restaurant sits.  He had loads of stories about how he built the place by hand, locals and the environment and how easy it is to bribe his dogs with some chicken!  Marianna at the All Things Local shop at Nelson's Dockyard made jewellery entirely from local shells and beans and showed us how to darken up our new Warri board made from Antiguan mahogany. 

On our way back from our catamaran tour we came across a woman who asked for a ride to St John's.  Two other women then also jumped in and we served as a local taxi for the day.  They were such fun to be crammed in the back seat with, and had stories aplenty about their jobs and home countries Jamaica and Dominica.

The people of Antigua were so warm and so friendly. We don't doubt that life is difficult there and certainly the over dependence on tourism probably stifles some people's opportunities, but it was wonderful interacting with people who smiled, laughed and engaged.  A little effort from our side always went a long way, and once we made a connection they were all truly beautiful and welcoming people.

For more images of Antigua visit our Antigua Gallery.

Antigua - Water and Sand

Being on an island with 365 beaches means you are rather spoilt for choice. The beaches really are spectacular with many having the light soft sand and turquoise waters that you expect from the Caribbean. Many of the beaches are completely secluded and some can only be reached by boat. One thing we appreciated was that many of the beaches are not built up at all - maybe a lunch shack or a small resort - but nothing that really detracted from the natural beauty. 

Our biggest interest in this holiday was snorkelling and that was a big reason for our choice of resort. At the mouth of Nonsuch Bay sits Green Island which is pretty much ringed by coral reefs. We went out to Green Island four times, though the two trips early in the week weren't great due to the sea being churned up by Sandy. We still saw amazing varieties of sea life including a stunning school of Blue Tangs, a barracuda, an octopus suctioning up food from the coral, jelly fish (Cora's favourite), a huge lobster, a gazillion conch shells and some very curious needle nose fish.The conch shells were truly in the thousands along one stretch of the island and people come from all over Antigua to collect them for food.

One of the best things about going to Green Island was the seclusion. There were several different beaches you could be be dropped off at, but the best one for snorkelling was Ten Pound Beach which was home to a couple of palm trees and not much else for that proper deserted island feel! The only problem with this beach is that the tour companies often stopped there for snorkelling and lunch whilst doing a circumnavigation of Antigua. So on one visit we had a couple of hours of about 30 people visiting our little beach and the peace and seclusion it offered but soon they were on their merry way. We went back to that beach two more times at the end of the week, including the last morning we were there, and the visibility had improved markedly and we had some amazing fish experiences.

There is another tiny island out in the bay - Little Bird Island - which doesn't have any beaches or visitors but Shakimba from watersports was kind enough to get us close enough to spend a few hours snorkelling around the reefs there. There we saw a couple of moray eels, the octopus and more spectacular fish, including a Porcupine fish. We also had the interest of a few resident pelicans every time we popped our heads up.  It was great being able to snorkel around the island in an hour just kind of drifting with the currents. 

We had heard really good things about Cades Reef off the southwest side of Antigua, so we were keen to explore it for a change of scenery from Green Island. The only way to get there is via boat, so we took an all day catamaran tour which sailed along the whole western, or Caribbean, side of the island. It was a really relaxed day and if you want to get away from it all, there are few better places to do that than from the netting at the front of a catamaran as it sails across the turquoise waters of the Caribbean. 

The snorkelling itself was good and the visibility was top rate. We saw a whole host of different fish than we had seen at Green Island and also a reef shark! That was a bit of a highlight, though Cora wasn't quite sure how to get CW's attention without taking her eyes off the shark! The current was fairly strong so after an hour of snorkelling we returned to the boat for a well deserved lunch before spending an hour moored on Turners Beach.  We had been there the day before and had a delicious curried goat, a local speciality, but it was nice to explore it again and experience it diving off the back of the boat.  It was a great way to see the island and to spend a day truly relaxing.

In the course of exploring the island we came across several other beaches, with the best two being Ffryes Beach and Half Moon Bay. Ffryes Beach is on the Caribbean coast and was recommended to us by one of the employees at the resort. It is off the beaten track, though still very accessible. We arrived to find a catamaran tour having a full on beach BBQ, complete with steel drum band, but they left within an hour of us arriving and the rest of the afternoon we had the quarter mile long stretch of beach to ourselves.

The sea was wonderful and the sand extremely soft, but what made the experience for us was the seclusion, wonderful sunset and Dennis' restaurant. Dennis is a local and for the last seven years he has been running a restaurant on a point at the far end of the beach. We didn't know it was there, but had seen some people wandering up the hill around lunchtime and thought it might be a bit of a beach bar. We went up mid-afternoon and found a spectacular view out over the next bay to the north, as well as some lovely rum punch! We came back later for dinner and had some lovely Caribbean food.

Half Moon Bay was only about ten minutes from our resort and gets its name from the rather distinctive shape of the cove. As it faces the Atlantic, there are some nice breakers rolling in, and if you walk all the way out to the rocks at the edge of the bay you can see exactly how powerful water is.  We went to this beach once at sunset and once in the morning and both times really enjoyed the experience. It was a bit of a shame we couldn't spend a full day there, but we had limited time with our little 4wd car so had to pick and choose.

We went to about ten beaches overall and had the chance to snorkel on five of our days there, so we had plenty of opportunities to truly experience the beautiful water and sand of this lovely little island of Antigua.

For more images of Antigua visit our Antigua Gallery.

Antigua - Land of Sea and Sun

You could call it a very delayed honeymoon or a much needed break or a mixture of both, but the reality was that we desperately needed to get away for a while. A long and wide ranging search across the globe for sun, warmth and snorkelling brought us to the wonderful little island Antigua in the Caribbean. We had not been looking at the Caribbean as an option because of the fear of hurricanes, but booking the holiday five days before we flew out meant we had a pretty good idea of what the weather would be like and the forecast was good.

Antigua is a fantastic place - very friendly people, wonderful food, excellent rum and 365 beaches - one beach for every day of the year they say.  The island of Antigua is only 108 square miles with a population of 88,000 people.  Antigua was once a British colony until their independence in 1981 and Queen Elizabeth II remains their Head of State.  English is the spoken language, but there is definitely a strong Antiguan accent and dialect which is often incomprehensible to the foreign visitor. Together with its sister island Barbuda and the numerous uninhabited islands, this small country might not be as well known as some of its neighbours, but it is a great place to visit - we just wish we had more time there.

It takes no more than an hour to drive anywhere on Antigua, though many natives don't seem to venture far from their villages. Our resort was on the far eastern side of the island and many Antiguans would exclaim how far that was from St John's, the capital on the western side.  Nestled in a sheltered bay facing the Atlantic, Nonsuch Bay Resort was the perfect home away from home for a week.  Craving peace, quiet and seclusion, this little resort was exactly what we were looking for.

Arriving at VC Bird airport, we were greeted by some island music, rum punch and oppressive heat and humidity. We had left the UK that morning wearing winter hats in the freezing cold and walked off the plane to temperatures almost thirty degrees Celsius warmer! You are greeted by what we imagine to be classic Caribbean attitudes towards bureaucratic formalities and driving - but that just helped us to get into the island mentality needed for the week.

Once we got settled, we spent the week relaxing and exploring this beautiful place, venturing from one side of the island to the other through lush rolling mountains, banana tree lined roads, a beautiful little rain forest and breathtaking coastal beaches. 

We spent our first couple of days between the resort and Green Island, a little uninhabited island just ten minutes on a zodiac across the bay. The resort takes you out there and will even deliver lunch from the restaurant and you usually have a beach and cove for snorkelling all to yourself. We met a really nice couple from Boston in the beautiful infinity pool at the bar on Saturday afternoon and agreed to go together to the weekly party at Shirley Heights on Sunday evening. 

Shirley Heights is named for the governor of Antigua who fortified the military defences in 1781 and commands a fantastic viewpoint overlooking the south coast of the island, including English Harbour, Nelson's Dockyard and the island of Montserrat. The sunsets are wonderful, famous for exhibiting the 'green flash', though we didn't see it. There was a very good local steel band playing music, some wonderful BBQ food and then a live band doing a mixture of reggae, pop and rock covers. It was quite touristy, but there were enough locals there to give it a very slight veneer of respectability. We had a really good time with Matt and Susie and thoroughly enjoyed seeing the island from that elevated viewpoint.

After a couple of days lying low, we rented a little 4wd and took to the roads. The driving in Antigua isn't too bad if like us you have experience driving on the left side of the road and on narrow country lanes. The road quality is a little rough, hence the 4wd, though the worst road was actually the unpaved one that leads to the resort. 

We drove to St John's and had a small poke around.  St John's is not a big place and blissfully it was free of cruise ships the day we went, because otherwise it would have been mobbed. After a nice lunch of Caribbean specialties, we crossed to the south side of the island and explored English Harbour and Nelson's Dockyard. The Antiguans wanted a name to entice tourists, so they named the old English fort and dockyards after the saviour of England, Admiral Horatio Nelson. Nelson was posted in Antigua early in his career, but ironically he hated it!

There were very few things we were determined to do this holiday, snorkelling being the main thing, but when we read about the Canopy Tour in the rainforest that quickly became a must do activity. This involved getting into complicated harnesses before flinging ourselves out into the open expanses between the trees on zip lines. We did a total of eleven lines, with the longest being 328 feet long over the gorge. It was great living out Tarzan-esque fantasies in this very natural setting.  

Most of our other land based activities surrounded beaches, so read our next post Antigua - Water and Sand for those adventures.

Antigua really was a phenomenal place and the perfect opportunity to slow down, relax and yet still have some good adventures. The only real regret was that we didn't have longer to enjoy it all!

For more images of Antigua visit our Antigua Gallery.