"Barbados - Culture and Nature" a Barbados Travel Page by FreeCloud

This is only a temporary info. Refined one will come later.

Barbados is a wonderful place. We loved it very much. It has culture, interesting history and SPECTACULAR natural landscapes, together with tropical gardens, smooth torquois color beaches with white sand (Carribean Sea) on the southwest and rugged dark blue coastlines the east side (Atlantic) of the island.

Barbados is large enough (in terms of the things you can do there) to keep you busy for 7-10 days, and it is small enough that you can travel to any part of it with bus (taxi is very expensive, so as driving). The longest trip requires only one bus transfer. The lodging could be from very cheap to several thousand dollars a night. (The local people are very proud of it having Concord flight 3 times a week in season, and one off-season, to indicate its capabilities accomodating clitentile wanting luxury.) We stayed in a small apartment hotel, quiet, oceanfront, every night you sleep in the surfing sound. The ocean-facing wall of our living room/dining room is a louvre door, it can widely open to the ocean. We enjoyed our breakfast with tropical fruit with the fresh ocean breeze every morning.

Barbados is very clean, people are very friendly and well mannered. We walked through villages, the local people waved and talked to us. It is a highly educated population, top industries are no long concentrated in only tourist, but data processing, offshore-banking etc.

We walked along the magnificent coastlines (east is the Atlantic, very ruggy, all cliffs, and you see great splashes) for whole afternoon for miles, and no one else was there! You hear the soaring ocean rolling over towards the cliff, sounds like tens of thousands of army charging onwards. The west coast is lined with wonderful beaches and resorts. Great place for body surfing. Every segments of its coastline has very different view/sceneries - that is the interesting part of Barbados.

The Barbados people proudly claim that their water is the cleanest in the world (fitered with natural coral, the whole island is not vocanic but coral).

Barbados has several few beautiful plantations, such as the Sunbury Plantation.

Barbados has world class restaurants, talking about these ocean front restaurants, where the ocean is right next to your table, and you are served by a 'team' of waiting staff: everyone has a particular role and only: takes order, brings the drink, brings the appitizer, brings your entree, takes the order of desserts, and last brings the desserts. Of course one passes onto you the bill.

In Barbados, you can hike, bike, swim, scuba dive, snorkel, parachute, parasail, or even get onto the sea with a glass-buttom boat (goes to 30-40 feet deep) or even a submarine for about 50 meters (150 feet deep) (only 5 of those serving for tourist purpose in the world!)

We took an island-tour the first day to have a general idea where we like the most, then we went to each place for the details ourselves in the rest of days.

We also walked a lot on the island just to see the local people and architecture and culture.

We simply loved our time there. With all that, the top thing is that it is not as touristy as other carribean countries.

The Barbados Tourist Authority official website has lot of info (where to stay, to dine, what to do/see/shop, event, calendar, etc):
http://www.barbados.org/do.htm

Enjoy!