How to spend a week in Barbados

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Ah, December 2020. Britain was at one of its peaks of Covid rule stupidity. Drinks in bars could only be served with a ‘substantial meal’. Each county was allocated to a numbered tier which measured its Covid risk, dictating which businesses could operate and how. Travel was restricted unless a destination carried a green rating. (Yes, domestically the government went for a numerical tier system but international travel followed a colour code). Otherwise, travellers had to quarantine for 14 days upon returning home.

I won’t go on about this, but day-to-day enjoyment of life was well and truly a grind in the UK at this time. The story wasn’t much different abroad. My trip home to Canada followed by Mexico had been cancelled for the same reasons. Even still, I had two weeks of vacation to use. There was no chance I was sitting at home in my apartment in the dead of winter for this long. What a waste of life. Fortunately, Sam had the same attitude (or at least humoured me). So we embarked on a mission to find a travel destination 1) that we were allowed to go to in the eyes of the British government, 2) which would have us, as British tourists, and 3) that wouldn’t be completely shut down for the duration of our trip. The pickings were very, very slim.

The Barbados Decision

If memory serves me correctly, there were between nine and fifteen “green” destinations based on the UK rating system at this time. Of those, less than half accepted British tourists. From there it was pretty easy to whittle our sole option down to Barbados, even with the strict entry measures in place. Firstly, we needed a negative PCR test swabbed within 48 hours of departure from the UK. Then, upon landing, we needed to quarantine at a Barbadian government-approved ‘quarantine’ hotel, like lepers, until a second swab, which could only be taken the day after landing, came back negative. If the test came back positive, you’d be shipped off to what was essentially a Covid jail until you tested negative for two consecutive days. If this happened to us, we would miss our return flight, and have a much more miserable time than if we had just stayed home.

Sounds like a reasonable series of tasks and risks for a 10-day beach vacation, right?

Right!

The Barbados Plan

When Virgin Atlantic released a sale, dumping last-minute seats for the cost of taxes, we got ourselves a bargain direct flight to Bridgetown and back for £360. Looking back at the reservation confirmation, the base fare was £29. Fortune favours the brave / those willing to put in a lot of leg work to have a good time.

And so the leg work began. We were flying on a Tuesday, so we needed our PCR tests to be swabbed on a Sunday. This in itself was proving quite difficult to find in the first place, let alone guarantee 24-hour results over the weekend. We managed to find somewhere for £130 a pop. This was well before PCR testing was widespread (hitting lows of £30), and OUCH!

Next, we had to look into all of the Barbadian government-approved quarantine hotels, of which there were maybe 30. I called each of them to find out what the quarantine conditions were like. I’m not sure what we were expecting, but I began to panic after nearly all of them said we’d be quarantining in our rooms, with trays of food brought to us, until our results came back. Oh, and the 48-hour tests which the Barbadian government were providing free of charge were taking upwards of five days to return a result due to backlogs. Whoops!

Enter Sandals…

I had always looked down on Sandals vacations as tacky and lazy. Why would anyone fly eight hours only to stay in an adult version of Disneyland? Eating and drinking at fake restaurants and bars. Swimming in a garishly branded pool. Rather than properly explore the destination they had taken so long to get to? 

But, on this occasion, there was no question. Sandals had two hotels side by side to create some sort of uber resort at the best of times. In this most unusual of circumstances, they were able to fully separate the two hotels so that Sandals Barbados housed the fresh off-the-plane contaminants, who, after the all-clear, would be upgraded to the hotel next door, Sandals Royal Barbados, for the rest of their quarantine-free stay. As a result, all potential infectees had their own mini adult Disneyland. They could freely mingle with each other at the quarantine-only bars and restaurants on the lesser half of the resort. Oh – and you could go to the beach while on quarantine.

Never had an all-inclusive beach vacation sounded so appealing. So we booked a £360/night stay for four nights, thinking that this would be plenty of time to get our results back. Sandals even commissioned a private test provider on-site to move people out of quarantine quickly, another bonus. The plan was to then walk five minutes down the beach to a much cheaper hotel to actually explore the island once receiving our negative test results. We didn’t book this second hotel in advance in the horrendous event that we had to go to the Covid jail. Given there was so much spare capacity on the island, it wasn’t an issue. We would just book once we knew we were free.

Getting Out

So we had booked Sandals, the most expensive accommodation we had ever booked, on a non-cancelable reservation, just under a month before departure. All seemed steady in the UK. All we needed to do was not catch Covid and everything would be just dandy.

Case rates were jumping 20% day on day towards the middle of December. The new ‘Kent’ (later Alpha) coronavirus variant was running rampant in the UK. On December 19th, Boris Johnson moved London and most of the south of England to a new ‘Tier 4’. All bars and restaurants were to be closed. No one was to travel, on public transport, the roads, or abroad, for non-essential reasons.

One by one, countries started closing their doors to British travellers. At least half of all flights departing from UK airports were cancelled by the 21st to prevent the import of this variant. We were due to depart on the 22nd.

Barbados held its nerve though, and the stars lined up for us. Our PCR tests came back negative and on time. Against the rules (but not the law), we took a very empty tube to Heathrow.

We arrived at the airport and scanned through the gates without any checks. We had a beer at a bar. Outside of the airport, this would have been forbidden. It was only as we were actually boarding the plane that someone asked to see our negative PCR tests. The captain announced that there were 80 people on that 264-capacity flight. 

This was our first Virgin Atlantic flight and we LOVED it. The staff could have been forgiven for being stressed, but they were young, beautiful, and fun. We ordered two drinks at a time and had no other people sitting near us.

Quarantine

We landed and went through an unexpectedly straightforward clearance procedure, and were picked up by a Sandals taxi (they always include airport transfers in their rates). After not much time at all, we were at the resort checking in. We had orange wristbands strapped on to indicate we hadn’t had our second round of tests done, but then we were pretty much free to roam the leper side of the resort.

Another big perk at Sandals is the free scuba diving. As a scuba diver who often forked over £100 per day of diving, this blew my mind. I started asking about signing up at check-in, but no one could give me a straight answer. They stressed that I couldn’t book anything until my test came back negative. I guess we just had to sit on the beach and do nothing but drink from the open bar and stare at the ocean for four days.

Sandals Enlightenment

Then the unexpected – we had the best time ever. After my morning beach run, I would go to the fake coffee shop to get takeaway coffees and bring them back to the room while we got ready.

Then we would get breakfast with mimosas at a beachside restaurant and walk 10 seconds to the beach.

The beach was beautiful, and there were easily accessible sun loungers and umbrellas. It was a 15-second walk to the very well-stocked bar. I started ordering my pineapple mimosas in a pint glass over ice because I wanted to and I could. That first day might have been the most relaxing and fun beach day I have ever had. 

The food was okay. It wasn’t bad but nothing amazing. On the leper side of the resort there weren’t as many options as there were once we were freed from our orange wristbands.

Freedom

We had our private on-site PCR tests administered on our second morning. The results were back by the next evening. We hauled all of our stuff to the other side of the resort, and were free to go to any of the other restaurants. This was on the evening of December 23rd. This also freed us up to make ‘reservations’ at those restaurants which required it. I did find this aspect of unnecessary administration at an all-inclusive resort annoying, but it wasn’t that arduous in the grand scheme of things.

We had the best Christmas Eve and Christmas Day on the beach. The vibe was something really special. Everyone there had taken a major risk to be there. They were elated that they were able to have a good time rather than, say, being forbidden from seeing their family over Christmas back home. It was electric. 

Sandals Bonus Nights

Fair enough, there was no scuba on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, but the next day was our checkout, and they wouldn’t let me book a dive on our checkout day. Word was travelling across the resort that, in these chaotic times, if you made a complaint, management would gift you another two nights to be redeemed in the future. I figured that my complaint wouldn’t be legitimate enough to get an extra two free nights, but I did hope they would allow me to return one day after checkout to go for a dive.

I explained my situation to a Sandals rep. Without even looking up, he called the manager and said I was making a complaint because I hadn’t been able to scuba dive. We were handed two more nights. For free. 

We milked it to the very last minute. Two more days of beachside gluttony. We stayed late for dinner and drinks on the night of our checkout. This had been the beginning of what would become a Sandals guilty pleasure/obsession. The memory of having the best time in perhaps the middle of the worst times, would be forever tattooed in our memories.

The real Barbados

Fatter than four six days earlier we walked to our much less glamorous yet more down-to-earth accommodation next door at Infinity on the Beach.

We paid £110 per night rather than £360. Getting out also made us realise that we actually had excellent value at Sandals. Barbados was an expensive island. However, we couldn’t live in that beautiful bubble for our whole vacation.

If you’re going to follow our plan to begin your stay in Barbados at Sandals, then it makes sense to base yourself in St Lawrence Gap for the rest of your trip. St Lawrence Gap is the best area for restaurants and bars and it just so happens to be on Sandals’ doorstep.

A Barbados Catamaran Cruise

On our first non-Sandals day, we took a catamaran cruise complete with lunch and drinks.

Afterwards, we got food and beers at a shanty town of street food stalls next to our hotel. As we were walking around and exploring, we were summoned by Omar, a guy selling day tours from his taxi. Normally this isn’t something we would consider. We knew a few things we wanted to see but didn’t have any crash course booked, so we took his card. We needed a ride the next day anyway, so we eased ourselves in by booking a taxi journey with him the next morning.

Mount Gay and Rihanna Drive

For our second non-Sandals day we booked a morning tour of the Mount Gay rum distillery. Mount Gay in Barbados was (allegedly) the birthplace of rum back in 1703. After all of the many rum punches we had at Sandals, we were looking forward to exploring the source. Omar dropped us off for a tour and tasting which included many rums and a rum punch. Then we went to explore the neighbourhood by foot.

It was New Year’s Eve during a pandemic, and there wasn’t a whole lot going on. The few restaurants/bars we wanted to visit were closed, and after a visit to the front yard of Rihanna’s childhood home, we stumbled across a ‘restaurant’ which was serving takeaway food out of a small hatch in a residential home.

It was heavy, delicious, and cost nothing. We called Omar again to come pick us up and take us back home after that. We had an afternoon on the beach and another dinner at the shanty town, where roosters stood proudly in trees.

The plan was to take a bottle of champagne to the beach for midnight, but I may have fallen asleep before the grand New Year’s show. Oops. Sam said he tried to wake me but failed. I’m officially old. There was a strict 00:01 curfew in place on New Year’s anyway.

Barbados Superspreaders

Throughout the few days preceding New Year’s Eve, there was a lot of talk and fear over a Covid outbreak on the island as a result of a ‘superspreader event.’ Said event was actually a civil service staff Christmas pub crawl. When we first landed in Barbados, there were maybe 6-10 cases per day registered on the island. These were almost exclusively tourists who tested positive on their day two PCR tests. However by New Year’s Eve, there were maybe 30-40 cases per day, including locals who contracted from fellow locals on the island. On New Year’s Day, there was a front-page headlining 45 cases. (This is laugh out loud next to the headlines coming out of the UK coming in at a record-shattering at the time 50k cases per day). 

The most fascinating piece of news that came out over those few days was that Sandals’ government-approved quarantine hotel status had been revoked. Apparently, they were being too lax about people going out of their rooms and onto the public beach..! Good thing we had checked out three days earlier!

Oistins Fish Fry

On New Year’s Day, we chilled on the beach and then went to Oistins Fish Fry in the evening. Oistins is an open-air food market that exclusively serves fish alongside Barbadian sides.

We walked around with beers in hand checking out the kitchens, but had been advised by my scuba diving instructor that we HAD to go to Pat’s.

This was excellent advice and we had a damn good flame-grilled piece of fish with ‘macaroni pie’ (an even unhealthier version of mac & cheese) and grilled potato.

We went to a second place whose name I can’t even remember. It paled in comparison. It was such a fun and delicious evening. But only eat at Pat’s.

We took a taxi home to the hotel on our last night in Barbados. We were so happy that Oistins wasn’t closed due to New Year’s Day or the Covid outbreak. But it felt like the next morning, on January 2nd 2021, people were just straight up anxious. This was our last day on the island and Omar was going to take us on a tour. 

A tour of Barbados island

There were originally six or seven stops on the tour, not all of which I can remember.

Out of all of them, I was most excited about making the monkey feeding at the Barbados Wildlife Reserve. We were meant to make a few stops along the way, but every time we pulled up to an attraction, it was closed/closing due to the Covid outbreak.

Fortunately, we did make it to the Wildlife Reserve and we did see the monkey feeding.

We probably spent over an hour watching the monkeys eating old fruit.

There were also peacocks, tortoises, and baby deer. This was one of my favourite things to do on the island.

Omar took us on a nice tour of the island but everything was very obviously closed. We happened to drive past his mom at a street stall who we waved at, but then she immediately proceeded to call him to yell at him for being in a car with tourists. He was pretty eager to drop us off.

As we got closer to the hotel the Prime Minister came on the car radio and announced a new lockdown.

The end of a week in Barbados

It felt like throughout the whole trip a series of dominoes had been flicked and we had managed to be in the front of the set and escaped being knocked over. But we were running out of momentum and needed to get back on the plane home before that lost domino toppled over on us.

We landed back in Covid-infested England, without any need to test upon arrival. That requirement would come maybe one week after we landed. And we took public transport back to our apartment in East London. We did it, we made it. We jumped through all of the nonsensical hoops and had one of our most fun Christmases to date. It was worth all of the stress and work and we would do it all over again (as we did for the next 18 months of the pandemic!). 

Covid chaos aside, Barbados is a beautiful island and full of fun things to do. It’s a shame we missed out on a few of these, but I knew this wouldn’t be our last trip to the island. And certainly, it wouldn’t be our last Sandals…

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