Barbados

---

Bridgetown, Barbados
Our last day and we decide on one final coach trip. Well, it's better than sitting around on the ship in our trravelling clothes for a couple of hours.

Or so we thought.

We do the obligatory tour of the island, which doesn’t take up much time since it is only 21 miles by 14 miles. The highlight is a few hours spent at Sunbury House, the former palatial home of a sugar plantation owner and now a museum.


Here for the first time we get to see the murky history behind these islands, the slave trade on which the wealth of so many countries, including our own, participated.

It all makes very uncomfortable reading.

How white men treated their slaves worse than their animals, as mere cogs in their money - spinning machines.
So many died when they were brought over from Africa in appalling conditions. Those that were not bought by slave owners because they were too sick were just left to die by the roadside.
It is a sobering experience and a reminder of man's inhumanity to man.

Today Barbados is one of the most affluent of the islands, very different from Jamaica, something our guide attributes to the fact that it is still run by Europeans. True or false? we don't know.

At 1.30 we are taken to the airport.
That's when I discover we have a five-hour wait before take-off. I am speechless. Did Malcolm know? He is cagey. Finally he admits it. Yes he did know. He learnt that last night when he checked the departure times on the flight ticket. I had not bothered to look.

"Then why the h.... are we spending five hours sitting in this airport?"

We have, what is known in Scotland as, " a wee domestic."

No we can't take a taxi to a beach for the very good reason, the guide assures us, that it is not safe. Also, the taxi driver would have us over a barrel demanding an extortionate rate to bring us back to the airport in time no matter what had been negotiated beforehand.

The situation is saved by the presence of the nearby Concorde museum.
We dive in there for the next five hours. I have fond memories of Concorde. Once, years ago, I flew in one back from Nice after a journalist assignment to the south of France where British Airways had taken a group of writers for the official launch of their new uniform.
We didn't know we would be coming home by Concorde until we boarded the bus to the airport and found a Concorde flight ticket on each of our seats. Now that's what I call style.

---

Photos

Concorde simulator
Ann at the controls....

Concorde simulator
Glider pilot Malcolm tries out Concorde controls

Sunbury House
life inside a Sugar Plantation owner's house