Amsterdam?

17 December 2007

Bridgetown, Barbados

Bridgetown is a bustling little town. Its Monday now, I’ve just gotten back from a walk around the Barbadian capital and it was a place on the move. I don’t know exactly where it was moving to but if you are looking for a laid back island style then downtown is not the place to look.

The morning started with my now familiar ritual of breakfast in the Lido restaurant, which both fuels the tank and gives me my first glimpse of the port. In this case I had a nice view of the Crown Princess which was moored beside us. The Crown is of a similar size to the ship I was on last time and it already seems huge compared to the Amsterdam. Just looking at it laying there across the way made me realise just why it had taken me so long to find my way around compared to what is essentially just a couple of decks of passenger activity areas on this ship.

As I sat with my French toast, ham, muesli and fruit (not all on one plate I hasten add, I haven’t become that American) another ship came slowly in to dock behind us, accompanied in careful attendance by a port tug. It was a Club Med ship and was essentially a small cruise ship or a large sailing ship. A lady passenger who noticed me watching said that it would probably cost twice as much to sail on it as it would ours and that she didn’t really fancy the idea of crossing the ocean in something that small. For myself I just looked at it, the tall mast giving it a look of old, and thought that a world cruise in something like that would be right up my alley. I wonder if they have casinos on ships like that.

Breakfast over I went for a walk around the ship. Unfortunately I didn’t sleep too well last night and found myself awake at 7am (with breakfast conveniently starting at 7.30) after getting to sleep at about 1am. I think that I overdid the amount of sleep I got yesterday. Having port manning there wasn’t much else to do and I just kept rolling over and going back to sleep every time I woke up.

I had a some training scheduled for 9.30am this morning so, with about an hour and a half to kill, I simply wandered the passenger areas trying to familiarise myself with the ship. The training was to do with directing passengers in case of emergency and luckily I have no set duties in that regard and am expected to just be able to fill in positions if required. To be honest I think that evacuating this ship would be a much simpler proposition than it was on my last contract purely because of the size and the much smaller number of passengers. The training was fast, simple, easy to understand and left me with a much more confident feeling, much earlier, than I had had on Princess. The Princess evacuation was something that had to be seen and practiced to really be understood and luckily it was done on a regular basis but up until I’d seen it done the first time I had found myself a little unsure how the whole thing would work.

But let’s move on to more interesting things. This ship is a completely different kettle of fish to the Princess one. I know I keep going on about how much smaller it is but the difference is so marked to me. I find myself walking from the front to the rear of the ship before I know it and as I wander through the various little bars and lounges I wonder how everyone must fit in before remembering that there is less than half the number of passengers.

My first impression of the ship was of the black hull as we drove up the first day. I have to say that I am not a fan of the colour choice. The white hulled ships seem to me to look much neater and nautical and the black almost seems to be there in an effort to cover something up. I also notice that all the little irregularities in the surface of the hull seem to be accentuated by the black much more than by white. I guess lots of money went into deciding the colour choice and there would be just as many people saying that it looks smarter and better than the myriad of white ships but that’s just my opinion.

Once past that black hull and inside the ship I was very impressed. The changes in decor I’ve experienced from my first week on a Carnival ship to 6 months on a Princess ship and now to a Holland America Line ship have certainly been ones of an upward progression. I guess the different lines are all geared and marketed towards different types of cruisers and the different decors will reflect that. The Amsterdam has an interior that is all timber, gold, leather and rich upholstery. There is a sumptuousness to all of the fittings that seemed a little dark to me when I first saw them but has quickly grown on me and the leather chairs in the lounges, marble table tops and variety of original art works, give the settings a touch of class that would make it a very regal way to spend a world cruise or even just a 10 day jaunt around the Caribbean.

There are a number of different lounges and rooms spread around deck 5 as well as a few shops and the casino. Rather than walking down an outer boulevard and having the lounges and restaurants appear one after the other as they did on the Caribbean Princess you find yourself following a slightly more twisting path here with a piano lounge tucked away on one side and then, as you round a corner admiring the 400 year old Chinese sculptures, another small bar with a slightly different decor appears. Walk a little further and there is a café selling coffee and pastries which invites you into one of the most impressively decorated libraries I have ever seen.

If I ever have the space and the money then I want a library in my house like this one. I don’t know if I could do it justice in words but the timber, the leather, the fabrics, the books, the alcoves for just sitting and reading with a view of the ocean outside, the fittings and decorations. I want it, and my first thought was, how do I get a job working in the library on this ship?

After the training I got off the ship for the second time this contract, my reason for being here after all even if I could spend all my time in that library, and added another country to my list.

In order to get from the ship to the town it is necessary to pass through the port building. I guess it’s there to ostensibly act as a customs portal but that was pretty perfunctory and the building seemed mostly to act as a gauntlet of duty free shops that you had to weave your way past to get outside. Having almost reached the outside I bypassed the doors that were sorting tour X onto bus Y and walked through another set, squeezing between a small bar selling beer and rum drinks and a stand selling flowery clothing. Now all I had to do was figure out where I was and where the town was. A couple of brochures and maps grabbed from a tourist information stand on my way through showed me the direction of downtown and I headed off, camera in hand.

It is not a very long walk from the port into town and it was mostly along a well kept path that hugged the shore. The English influence was apparent in the way that they drove on the left hand side of the street and the billboard at the exit to the port area extolling the heroes of Barbados cricket; names like Sobers, Garner and Greenidge certainly rang familiar with me.

The first order of business was to have a local beer and I managed to find a bar in a somewhat seedy shopping mall where half the stores were empty and the others seemed to be barely hanging on. I sat happily on my bar stool, drinking my beer and watching snooker on ESPN with a couple of surprised looking locals before moving on.

There is no shortage of taxis in Bridgetown and if you should ever find yourself downtown, and wishing to do an island tour, then simply raise a hand to have any number of drivers offering you the best of the best. Unfortunately I don’t get paid enough to be able to afford things like that so I had to constantly decline the offers of rides and kept walking. My map showed where the major duty free shopping area was so I carefully skirted it and headed a bit further back into the streets.

Bridgetown reminded me of Surfers Paradise in the early 80s. There are a large number of tourists wandering around but the majority of the stores still seem to cater mostly to the locals. Streets are narrow, people are plentiful and the stores sell masses of consumer goods that all seem to have come from giant warehouses in China.

Fruit and vegetables are sold on street corners and little barbeque stands seem to set up wherever they can find a wide enough piece of footpath. The smells coming from them are amazing though and I had a hamburger and coke from one small stand, sharing a small wooden stool beside the stand while I ate. When I was given the options of what I wanted on the hamburger I went for the mustard and cheese combination, the mustard being squeezed from the standard plastic bottle and the cheese being some mystery powder sprinkled on from a can. Tasted okay, though I still have no idea exactly what the cheese was.

The main feature of Bridgetown, or at least the part that I had time to see, is the Careenage, so named because this is where ships where careened or laid on their side to be cleaned. Now it is almost a canal running through the centre of town and is actually the mouth of a river that starts inland and empties into the sea here. With a timber boardwalk along one side and a few brightly coloured and renovated left over wharf buildings on the other bank it almost felt like a view of Amsterdam or another similar European city. Even the bridge over the river rises to let boats through and the number of expensive looking boats moored showed that the eateries on the far side must have had a certain upmarket appeal.

I sat for a while in independence Square and had a pineapple flavoured shaved ice while I watched the people go past. I wandered through the streets of the town, from the backstreets where the shops sold more mundane things to the area pointed out as the shopping district on the ships “what to do in port guide”. A few big name duty free stores nestled among a myriad of smaller stores selling goods not really high on the list of cruise ship tourists.

The impression I got was that Bridgetown has a life and vibrancy of its own and those big name duty free stores will try, and eventually succeed, in driving out the smaller, local traders in favour of larger, flashier, more expensive establishments.

I liked Bridgetown. The locals are friendly, there is plenty of charm to the place as well as a genuine island hustle and bustle and I think that if it was a port I was to return to on a regular basis I would easily find my local hangouts that I would return to for the food and the atmosphere. I just wish I had the time and the money to come back and explore the rest of the island.