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Goats’ milk and other vices
If the daily newspaper, The Nation, is to be believed there is barely a decent man left in Barbados, but no end of silly or gullible women. Each day a full page is devoted to the trials and tribulations (titillations?) of everyday life through letters to an agony aunt who goes by the name of Christine. On her days off Miss Reid steps in to fill the breach such is the demand for advice and counseling, and then, at the weekend, Sanka Price deals with relationship issues by the page-full in The Saturday Sun. Dr Ruth answers sexual health questions and a column called Pudding & Souse deals with all the gossip under the hot Bajan sun. Typically the requests for help come from women seeking advice on such things as what to do after falling pregnant to a man who then denies paternity or wants nothing more to do with the woman and impending child, and generally the woman will have been in the same situation before. One writer this week had four previous children to four different fathers and found herself unhappily pregnant again with the fifth. The other common situation is where, after promising her the world, a man cheats his way to all of a woman’s hard-earned money and then disappears without trace. Each hard luck letter is followed by a deluge of "I told you so" replies, a few sympathetic ones and further expressions and examples of the failings of men.
It must be one of the great contradictions of a conservative Christian country that there are so many human failings on displaay. While young men are jailed for riding bicycles without lights or for possessing camouflage clothing and where it is completely illegal to sunbathe in the nude, the per capita rate of HIV infection is the highest in the world anywhere outside of Africa, teenage pregnancy among the highest in the world and it seems that almost the entire female population has become unwittingly pregnant or ripped off by predatory men at some stage.
In this weekend’s paper alone, headlines and major features included: “GT girls” horn each other too, Hurt by dad’s cheating ways, Don’t judge without the facts, Sex not what we thought it would be, Why men have sex (“Men can and do engage in sex out of a husbandry duty. There is the fear of being charged with dereliction of duty or that if they don’t do it, then somebody else may”), Saved from a lesbian’s life, 8-hour shift of hot love, and Dumped lover still pimping. Somewhere in there was a reference to President Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
But we do not concern ourselves with such maatters. We are tourists and our next excursion was to the northern tip of the island, to the Animal Flower Cave. This is the only sea cave on Barbados, thought to be some 500,000 years old in parts with the coral floor a mere 126,000 years. After going down steep steps, visitors are treated to spectacular views out through various cave mouths onto the Atlantic Ocean and, within the cave, boulder-like formations where the coral rocks have been eroded by waves over the years. In those rocks are shapes which look like such things as a lizard, turtle and a human hand, hence the animal part of the cave’s name. The flower name derives from displays, at the right times of the year, of anemones which bloom in the seawater pools on the cave floor.
If the cave was spectacular, then so too was the drive to get there and back, the road so rough in one section we thought we had become lost and strayed onto the road to hell. It was down to 5 kilometers per hour and even that was bone shaking. We passed a couple of the island's big churches and went into one at St Thomas’s, and then down towards the east coast with the intention of going into St Nicholas Abby, another plantation house (not a church as the name suggests) and billed as the likely last remaining authentic house of the 17th century in the “New World” and potentially a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our intention to go in remained just that, at $30 a head even to get inside the grounds we carried on to a lookout giving a (free) panorama down the coast. This part of the Atlantic coast could be mistaken for somewhere like Piha in New Zealand such is the similarly of the shoreline and warnings about the dangers of its strong currents and rips. We journeyed down the coast to St Martin’s Bay, through banana plantations and palm trees, through the grounds of Fleur’s school (The Codrington School) then past the big house, Her Majesty’s Prison Dodds, and back to Bridgetown for another intended visit, this time to the Jewish Museum. Careful again with our money, we thought the $25 per person entry fee a little steep for what seemed a small museum.
In other news, the Prime Minister has declared that there is no place for politics in solving the problems facing West Indies cricket and our columnist friend Richard Hoad is extolling the benefits of goats’ milk which he says has aphrodisiac powers ("our lawyer is insisting on a health warning: If after consuming this product you have an erection lasting more than four hours, call the Guinness Book of World Records") and tattoo removal ("Any young ladies wishing to have a tattoo removed in a private place should give me a shout"). Somehow we don’t think Richard’s columns would quite cut the mustard in the New Zealand press.