Notes from Barbados: The Reggae Bus

No direct bus route passed my hotel in Barbados. “You have to take the yellow stripe bus to Oistins,” the woman in the airport tourist information window told me. “Then take the zedar back to Silver Sands.”

By zedar she meant the popular white minivans whose license plate numbers were prefixed by the letters “ZR.” Like the government buses, these private taxis also charged a $1.50 fare, however they were faithless to the former's assigned routes. The zedar still wouldn't deliver me to the hotel entrance, but close enough to walk. I figured, what better way than this to initiate my first visit here? So I followed a passerby’s vague wave toward the bus stop across the road from the arrivals terminal.

The bus shelter was a shed-like structure made of corrugated tin, painted red. The scalloped metal exterior gleamed fiercely under the midday sun like something being forged; it cupped around an interior whose cool blue paint job did nothing to deflect the heat as a few of us waited. At long last the bus arrived, crammed thick with passengers. All the window panels had been slid back to admit whatever little gasps of sultry wind the bus’s velocity could muster between stops that would hopefully cool against our moist flesh.

At Oistins the driver pointed me to the bus stop on the opposite side of the street. I hesitated, eyed the unfamiliar flow of traffic, then dashed across the street with my wheeled suitcase, small valise and backpack just in time to halt a zedar that was about to pull off. Or maybe not. The zedar drivers are not known for bypassing a fare opportunity staring through its windshield. Behind this particular windshield was stuffed a hand-drawn cardboard sign on which the destination, “Silver Sands,” was crayoned in red letters.

It was a white van, but filmy with road dust that obscured all but the silhouette of passengers’ heads inside. A side door of the vehicle promptly slid open, and out hopped a wiry young man. He wore a plain wine-colored t-shirt that hung limply over his slim frame. His taut, raisin dark face seemed almost to tug against the pull of his dredlocks that were yanked back into an unruly knot. The van’s open door also released an effusion of pulsing music to which these conveyances owed their other popular name: “the reggae bus.” The young man stood aside for me to climb in, but it was full as far as I could see.

“You sit right there,” he ordered, not with brusqueness, but rather with the dispassionate confidence of a technician who knows the yields and limits of his tools by rote. Yes, in fact, there was a space—how had I not noticed it? “Put you bag there,” he directed, his voice echoing my grandmother’s Bajan brogue in a way that I found both imperious and comforting. I bundled into the van hugging my valises and backpack to me as we seemed to pull off before the door had even slid shut.

I looked furtively at the other passengers crowded into the van. Their faces showed only wan interest in each new rider the van stopped to take on or let out before it burst forward again through the narrow streets. There were few sidewalks, and the traffic lanes flowed inversely from where I was from, like coat sleeves worn capriciously inside-out. Each turn threatened to toss me out as clumsily as I’d got in. I steadied myself against the loose sliding door and adjusted my luggage which shifted constantly between my legs and upon my lap like restive, unwieldy children.

I thought of Dad's flight, due just a couple of hours after mine. First I'll check in to the hotel, I thought, then go back to the airport to pick him up. And I thought, too, as we sped along the picturesque landscape of potholed roads, motley houses, Dad's gonna hate this. I was sure it was just going to confirm all his apprehensions about this dowdy place. All those flight changes would exhaust him, and he'll just want to sleep, just want to go home...

I was suddenly anxious. But then the scrabble of busted roads mingled with the infectious counterpoint of Collie Buddz singing “Tomorrow’s Another Day.” The authority of the music, rhythmic but soft, seemed to take the edge off the awful heat. And soon the vista, surpassingly beautiful and strange, rushed past my window. I was charged with the elation of having arrived.