Today we did a land tour along with the crews on three other yachts around the Island of Barbuda. There was Melisa and Dan off Slow Dancing, Janice and Dave off Livin’ Life and Izzy and Jeff off Izzy R.
The day started with the landing of the dinghy on the beach and with a nasty little shore break just to make life a little interesting, we did manage to do so without dumping any of the crew in the water.
We met our tour guide George and our driver Cliff at the gateway to the Coco Bay Resort. Cliff drove us through Codrington the only town on the Island of Barbuda to the ruins of the Codrington estate, up on the highlands.
We had a look at what was left of the ruins and as George pointed out it was a location where they could see any ships traveling past. The Codrington’s ran a very good salvage (piracy) operation over two hundred years ago, where they would capture any ship that was sailing past to relieve it of its cargo. From there we hiked through the scrub to a beautiful sink hole (pictured) where, after a very tricky climb down we were in a very different world, I called it Jurasic Park This was almost the same as the as the sink holes we have in and around Mount Gambier in South Australia.
After we hiked back to the cars we had a look at the location of where the slaves were bought ashore, it would have been their first landfall after crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Africa. We then hiked up through the caves to the top of the highlands.
Our land tour finished with a beautiful lobster lunch complete with all of the trimmings.
Some days life can be amazing on Annecam.