In Search of Pico Tenerife

Road to Bathsheba, Barbados. All photos and videos by Llanor Alleyne.

We set off, sugar rushed and full, the rain no more a deterrent than vaguely knowing where this place, this hidden beauty spot, is. And we slow ride up hills that crest and dip on to cow-filled pastures, asking directions from truck drivers so full of curiosity about these two women cheerfully lost.

Of the lone, tall pre-teen black girl sitting on the edge of a narrow dusty road combing out her long, curled hair, an entire verdant field her back drop, we ask: where is this place? She squints at us, a "who wunna?" rising in her eyes, but instead, softly, "I don't know" and a shrug, the comb now coming up to resume its unraveling. And we too resume our ramble, asking of liming old men and sweating labourers, "where is this place?" 

They point south, west, east and north. We spill on to the land of a man so hungry for strangers he immediately tells us of his bulls and his brothers and his daughters. We nod, grateful that he has allowed us to stand on the edge of his cliff to watch the storm roll in across the Atlantic, and still we ask, "how do we get to this place?" for, just there, steep down by rock and broached by the ocean is the jutting place.

We leave the farmer, now speaking of his mother, to get there. Past former slave huts, through narrow roads policed by barking dogs, we zig zag hoping this one leads to that place. And so we come to a little bay, the storm now kicking up twenty-foot waves against the hem of a stoic cliff and my friend runs through the pelting rain, down the soggy dune to lay hands on the water's edge. This is not the place, but we arrive.