Costa Rica-Coo Coo For Coconuts
Barbados · Caribbean Field Note
TrialsAn Embarrassment of Coconuts
The Caribbean still sings paradise—but cruise tourism can turn the port into a six-hour shopping simulation. The test is learning to see what survives the script.
If St. Maarten is the Mitt Romney of vacation destinations—self-restraint in an age of rage—then Barbados is the Keith Richards of the Caribbean.
Field Note 01 · Paradise Can Still Belt the Hits
Over the Hill. Still on Stage.
Barbados shows signs of age, but it can still belt out the karaoke hits of the paradise it once sang. A sort of life goes on, beating with a reasonable version of a pulse—but much of that life consists of travelers like me.
The very unspoiledness we come to experience still appears in unexpected ways: coconuts, flowers, and the details that have not yet learned how to perform for the brochure.
Cruising the open sea is a virtue. Shopping the ports of call, a deadly sin.
Field Note 02 · Caribbean Roadkill
What Am I Doing Here?
The newly refurbished Fairmont Royal Pavilion is beautiful. Yet I always end up in that part of the Caribbean—the zone made almost exactly the same as everywhere else for cruise ships that have come all this way to “inhabit” a port for six hours.
To become a cruise-ship tourist is to escape accountability. Quirks and flaws do not stick to you the way they do back home. You drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought.
Field Note 03 · The Army of Fools
Tourism Is the March of Stupidity
You are expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host port is engineered around cruisers acting stupidly. We are economically significant and, at our worst, existentially loathsome.
We walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out port and shopping maps. We do not know how to speak with the locals, get anywhere, understand the money, read the time, or eat what is in front of us. This temporary stupidity becomes the mold, the level, and the norm.
Together with a thousand other passengers, we are granted immunities and broad freedoms: an army of fools in bright polyester, riding scooters, four-by-fours, and Jet Skis; photographing one another; bloated, drunk, still thirsty.
The shopping map is not the territory. Find the detail that has not been franchised.
The tourist machine works because the traveler accepts the role it assigns.
Sunshine, sand, and indifference cannot be purchased as permanent escape.
The Elixir · What Survives the Script
The Coconuts and the Flowers
Alien, ignorant, and greedy for something we can never permanently possess, we move toward the next shapeless event: sunshine, sand, and temporary indifference to the treadmill of consumption and stuff.
Yet Barbados keeps interrupting the simulation. A coconut appears. A flower refuses the shopping guide. A pulse remains beneath the port.
The trial is not to escape tourism entirely. It is to wake up inside it.