2021 Caribbean Cruise: Bridgetown, Barbados

I can’t say enough about how much I loved visiting Barbados. The people are so welcoming and the island so beautiful! It is hard not to love this amazing island.

Barbados has some of the most extensive and exacting protocols for visitors during the Pandemic. All guests must arrive with not only proof of Covid-19 Vaccination, but also a 72 Hour PCR test. That PCR test must be a full PCR test, not the rapid one, so I had to do a little checking around to find a place that could turn around the results in 48 hours or less, and I found one near the Phoenix airport that does the expedited test for $150 pp. The Visit Barbados web site spells it all out pretty clearly, so if you are interested in cruising out of Barbados or just visiting the island at a resort or hotel, I suggest checking it out. They have an app called BIM-Safe to which you can upload your tests and vaccination cards ahead of time, but you still have to have the printed documents as well

https://www.visitbarbados.org/covid-19-travel-guidelines-2021

Once we arrived in Barbados, we had show proof of vaccination and our negative test results. Then, we took another test at the airport, with results emailed to us the next morning. We had to stay only on the hotel property until the negative results were back, but once we got those tests we were good to go anywhere in Barbados.

For our two night stay, we chose to stay at the Hilton Barbados, which is a very nice resort hotel, but not all inclusive. We very much enjoyed the beachfront bar and grill, and the main dining room. Both of those restaurant were open air, which even with vaccinations and testing, felt a little safer than eating indoors in a crowded restaurant. Nothing over the top at this hotel, but a very friendly and welcoming staff, lovely pool, and located right on the beach. The hotel features a spa and a convention center also.

For our first two days at the resort the water was sargassum (seaweed) free, but on the third day, the south beach at the resort has some wash up. Sargassum has plague beaches in the Caribbean over the last 7 to 8 years, as it ruins the appearance and the the smell of the beach. With the Hilton being located right on Needham’s Point, one of the beaches faces south, and the other beach faces West. The west beaches were unaffected. The pictures below are of the south beach before the sargassum rolled in the morning of our third day. I don’t thing these beaches are heavily affected like the beaches we saw on the East coast on the day we disembarked the ship.

Just north of the hotel, is Carlsisle Bay, which features a long crescent shaped series of public beaches: Brown’s Beach, Pebbles Beach, and Bayshore Beach. This is the area where I took a quick snorkel excursion on the second day of the visit. These are beautiful clear waters and we saw lots of pretty fish and a couple of turtles. My new friend Jules was on the same tour with me as a certified diver, and she took these beautiful pictures with her underwater camera.

South of the resort is Drill Hall beach, which is popular with surfers and I got see a few ride the waves during my Saturday afternoon post excursion beach walk.

There are many All Inclusive Resorts located in Barbados as well as excellent restaurants located not far from the resort hotels. We met a couple from the UK who enjoyed the Champers Restaurant,. They went there the Saturday night after I joined them on the Snorkel excursions. Here is what they had to say: “Having had Champers restaurant recommended so many times we decided to make it the last evening meal of our holiday. It did not disappoint. No wonder it gets the reviews it does. For anyone visiting Barbados we would highly recommend a visit”. We ate at the little cafe by the pool for lunch one day, and they had a fabulous jerked chicken.

Our last morning in Barbados was a chance to sleep in a bit and head to the cruise ship. I would return to Barbados again in a heartbeat.

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