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trips to Kauai bored in hotel rooms reading the
Brontë sisters and wishing I were in grey
northern England. I have since come to my
senses and learned to appreciate tropical
vacations, even though I had no intention
of getting on a surfboard on this one.
Later on, we walked down the road from
Sea-U to dinner at De Garage Bar & Grill,
a casual, open-air café. On the way there, we
ran into two local surfers named SeaCat and
Biggie, who chatted with Paul about their
favourite board shapers in San Diego. At the
restaurant, soca music blasted, and we ordered
grilled whole red snapper with rice and peas to
share. The temperature outside was a perfect 80
degrees, and the local Banks beers were ice-cold,
which made the fish taste that much better.
Dessert was a shared sliver of piña-colada-
flavoured cheesecake that we devoured in
90 seconds.
The next morning, I drank coffee on the porch
to fight my hangover while watching a family of
green monkeys jump from tree to tree. I walked
down the hill from Sea-U to the beach, which,
thankfully, took all of five minutes, stopping to
wave hello to Valance, who was driving by in his
taxi. At the bottom of the hill was the main
road—the only road—with beach houses and
rum shacks on one side and the coast on the
other. The beach went on for a couple of miles
and was strewn with massive limestone boulders
that separated it into smaller sections and surf
spots, each with its own name. Soup Bowl, the
most famous break, is one of Kelly Slater’s
favourite waves in the world.
“Have you seen a tall, white American guy
surfing?” I asked a passerby. He hadn’t. Giving
up the search for my father, I stopped at
Parlour, a beach with tide pools the size of small
swimming pools, where an eclectic crowd—
a young couple with a baby, a crew of teen girls,
a group of middle-aged women—was soaking
in the turquoise waters to get a little relief from“Maybe people prefer Bajan, I guess,” Rose
added. She used my curiosity as an excuse to
introduce me to popular local phrases. “There’s
‘cheeseon,’ which is kind of like saying, ‘Jesus,’
and ‘cawblein,’ which is if you’re surprised or
can’t believe it.”A TAXI DRIVER named Valance picked me up
at Rose’s home and drove me the hour or so to
the town of Bathsheba, the epicentre of the surf
scene on the eastern coast. As we passed
mahogany trees, a lighthouse, and a rainbow,
I got a call from my dad, who was meeting me
there and had arrived the night before.
“This place reminds me of Hawaii in the
seventies,” he said. “And I know because I was in
Hawaii in the seventies. I need you to get a bottle of
Mount Gay XO rum. Are you writing this all down?”
I answered in the affirmative.
“I didn’t know I liked rum, but this stuff
is amazing,” he said.
Valance and I stopped at a supermarket
to pick some up. Barbados is, after all, the
birthplace of rum, so I knew it would be good,
but I wasn’t prepared for the smoky elixir that
is Mount Gay, the oldest brand. It’s perhaps even
more delicious when mixed with passion-fruit
juice, bitters, and nutmeg into a punch, which
is the welcome drink the Sea-U Guest House,
in Bathsheba, serves to arriving visitors. Perched
on a hill overlooking the coast, it’s the kind of
small bed-and-breakfast that attracts
adventurous, laid-back guests who don’t mind
the lack of room service and air-conditioning
because they’re more interested in finding the
best surf spot or chasing a recommendation of
a great local yoga instructor.
“I came here twenty years ago as a writer and
thought, Well, I don’t have to travel anymore,”
Uschi Wetzels, the German owner of Sea-U, told
me. “This place is luscious and remote and yet
not that far from civilisation.”
I was staying in the whitewashed main house,
where the six simple rooms have rattan chairs,
Patricia Highsmith novels, and beds draped with
mosquito nets (which I quickly learned were not
entirely decorative and, actually, totally necessary).
That evening, Paul and I sat on our shared balcony
facing the sea, rum punches in hand.
“Did you surf today?” I asked.
“No. I needed a day to observe,” he replied,
somewhat elliptically. My dad has been surfing
since his early teens and still goes out on the
water every week in Santa Cruz, California,
where I grew up. As his only child, I was a real
failure in the outdoorsy department, spendingTHE TEMPERATURE
OUTSIDE WAS
A PERFECT 80
DEGREES, AND THE
LOCAL BANKS BEERS
WERE ICE-COLD.
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