I went to Barbados with a camera – #3

Part 3. This might be a 3-parter; we’ll see.

Barbados is pretty British, and one reflection of that is Bridgetown. I don’t know what it is that the British have against grids, but they seem to hate ‘em. While the Spaniards gave Port of Spain a nice orderly arrangement, in Bridgetown, the streets meet at odd angles and generally seem to lead nowhere in particular. Makes for a more interesting walking (and driving) experience. The picture above shows Broad Steet, the main shopping strip, looking towards Parliament and “National Heroes Square” (formerly known as Trafalgar Square; I told you they were British). Also, The Cave Shepherd in this picture was one of my favourite places in Barbados as a child. I think I really liked the in-store cafeteria.

I went to Barbados with a camera – #2

Part 2 of a series of indefinite length

Back when I would visit Barbados a couple times a year, I feel like you didn’t have to spend half your beach trip asking vendors to leave you alone. On the other hand, maybe it’s just that when I was a kid, we avoided the tourist beaches. Well, don’t tell anyone I told you, but Brownes Beach, pictured above, is just south of the capital, filled with the white sand and turquoise waters of tourism ads, and vendor-free. It’s where I spent many a school vacation years ago, and it continues to be a locals’ beach today. Check it out if you get sick of being offered “ganja” (they are so brazen about it, I swear it must be oregano).

We have xenophobes too!

I’m waiting around for my flight to Barbados right now, and I’m looking forward to a restful week (and a new passport that lets me travel through Europe visa-free after June). Fortunately for me, I am a Barbadian citizen, as apparently other CARICOM nationals are now seen as a threat by the DLP, and they are being threatened with deportation:

Illegal immigrants from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) will have six months to regularize their status in Barbados, or face deportation.

This was announced in parliament today by Prime Minister and Minister of National Security, the Hon. David Thompson.

The move follows a series of recommendations from a cabinet subcommittee on immigration, which convened in June 2008 and concluded that the current level of immigrants is unacceptably high, difficult to control and poses a significant challenge to socioeconomic development in Barbados.

If we weren’t talking about CARICOM nationals, I would applaud the amensty and the effort to get folks to regularize status. But the fact that after 30-something years of CARICOM and CSMEs and whatever else you still have Bajans kicking Vincentians and Guyanese out is just demoralizing. We can’t even welcome each other in anymore? What an embarrassment. This is almost as bad as the fishing chaos of the 90s.

And a Trini more cynical than I might point out that Trinidad has hosted many an “illegal” Bajan in the past, and perhaps Thompson and his government should be careful in that glass house over there.

In other Barbados news, this is kind of crazy, but also kind of great. I hope the powers that be have stocked up on weather derivatives.

Competition = scary!

I’ve spoken before about the reluctance of Caribbean governments to allow their citizens to benefit from airline competition, and here we have another example:

The Government has, for the time being, rejected Caribbean low-cost carrier Airone’s formal application to the Civil Aviation Authority for a licence to operate in Jamaica.

Airone, the brainchild of a group of Irish entrepreneurs, including Digicel’s vice-chairman Leslie Buckley, is seeking to establish a Low-Cost Carrier (LCC) with the Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston serving as its hub.

Ostensibly, though, this time there’s a “good” excuse:

However, last Thursday, the minister without portfolio in the Ministry of Finance, Don Wehby, and a team of Government officials took the decision not to grant the new airline a licence now, essentially because the Government is in the process of divesting the loss-making Air Jamaica and it was felt that a decision to grant another carrier a licence at this time would adversely effect the divestment of the national carrier.

Now, I guess they have a point here. The government does need to weigh the potential cash windfall to the taxpayers (assuming the proceeds are used to the taxpayers’ benefit) against the benefits of a low cost competitor. On the other hand, the article makes clear that the government claims that they’d be willing to issue a license after AJ is divested, which… wouldn’t that also affect the value of AJ for potential buyers? One could imagine the eventual AJ investors lobbying against a license, and then, of course, the excuse would be some bullshit about how AJ represents Jamaican national character, or whatever. All this is to say nothing of the fact that the competition (and extra seats to a tourism dependent island) almost certainly outweighs the likely money from divesting AJ, especially given the tortured history of Caribbean airline privatization (see, also, BWIA).

But there’s a silver lining to all this:

“If we are unsuccessful in Jamaica we will set up operations in Barbados. If Air Jamaica is not divested in 12 months’ time, then Jamaica would have missed out on having an affordable, reliable carrier that would have been a boon to the tourism industry and Jamaicans living around the world.”

PLEASE oh PLEASE come to the Eastern Caribbean instead! I’d love to have another competitor to the horrible planes and service from BWIA Caribbean Airlines available.

Unrelated: As of this post, I am switching to using tags, rather than categories. In case you care.