Think Caribbean. It brings you to glamour, peace, beauty, wealth. Right?
Wrong.
There I was with not a penny more than 50 us dollars and my beautiful sailor knife. First person I ran into was a rastafari, who took me to a very simple pension, and yet, it cost me more than I could afford. Poor gentle willing man - if he expected to obtain some advantage from the European looking girl, he ended up buying my knife with a sorry look on his face.
There's no way to ignore the history of those islands: their fierce original people, the caribes, where totally decimated upon the arrival of the Europeans. Afterwards, they brought along slaves, whose descendants still remain there and have developed quite an oppressed culture.
Their wooden houses are built to break down and cause only minor damage when a hurricane comes by desolating the islands once more, and making a point of reminding those people how hard life can be.
This, right beside the wealthiest yachts... is embarrassing. And very familiar to a Brazilian.
The next day I returned to the pontoon in Bridgetown to try to embark on a new sailing boat. When 3 posh young Brits questioned my nationality, I was immediately asked 'do you know how to make caipirinhas!?'
So thanks to my expertise in that area, I got 3 days of sleep and food aboard in exchange for large amounts of drink, prepared in bucket proportion. The pestle used was the winch handle. And the cachaça was substituted by the famous Barbados rum.
After all, port hoppers are kind of water babies: sweet-water ones, salt-water ones and no-bird-will-drink-that-water ones.
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