College . 04/14/2008 03:05 AM . Tim Raveling

Water pooled on the plane’s windows, running in rivulets on the glass, nothing outside but cold gray mist. Not exactly my idea of the tropics, I thought, wondering for a moment if the five hundred bucks was worth it. The seat belt lights were lit, the trays were in their upright and locked position, and Stewart, Lily, Max and I watched the rain on the windows and waited for landing. Through a patch in the clouds I caught a brief, clear glimpse of slate-gray waves. All right, I thought. Just like Seattle.

Then, abruptly, the color shifted from slate to iridescent blue, brilliant even under the rain and overcast skies. A series of rocky islets broke the waves and then we were gliding in over the island itself, a long rocky coast lined with fir trees, crowded, brightly-colored houses inland; we flashed briefly over the bay and an incongruous junkyard and then touched down, tires squealing on wet tarmac. Unbelievable, I thought, we’ve gone and done it.

Above: Tim, Stewart and Lily wait at the airport

Less than a month earlier: Stewart, Lily and I are hiking on the Appalachian Trail in northern Virginia, an eighteen mile journey ending in a gentle downhill into Harper’s Ferry. We’re talking, joking about different impossible spring break trips—“Yeah,” Stewart laughs, “maybe we should just go to Ethiopia for spring break.”

There is a moment of silence.

“You know,” I say, “we actually could.”

There is another moment of silence.

All three of us start laughing.

We tell Max that night; over the next few weeks, the plan evolves. Ethiopia is too expensive; England is more affordable. Ten days of exploring London sounds pretty good too, especially since we could stay with Stewart’s family there—all right, we say, London it is.

Our plan is to show up at Dulles on the day we plan to leave and ask for a few extra seats on the next plane to London. Surely, we reason, after the post-9-11 crash in the airline markets, they must have a few empty seats left over.

“Sorry,” the woman behind the first counter we visit says, “we book all of our flights at fifty percent over capacity. Even if somebody canceled at the last minute, we wouldn’t have room for you.”

Hmm. Perhaps we’ve found a flaw in our plan.

We try airline after airline, but they all come up with the same answer: no room, and no deal. Finally, a woman at the JetBlue counter gives us some options and tells us to call their 1-800 number. So, from Dulles airport, we call.

“Hi,” I say. “I want to go somewhere for spring break. What’s your cheapest international flight?”

When the representative on the other end of the line finally stops laughing, she tells us that the cheapest tickets are to Bermuda – five hundred dollars.

Bermuda, I think. Isn’t that in the Caribbean? It’s definitely an island.

“Great!” I say. “I’ll take four!”

Bermuda is actually in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a twenty square mile patch of sand and limestone six hundred and fifty miles off the coast of South Carolina. It’s also, we find out after buying our tickets, very rich: the highest GDP per capita in the world, and the greatest concentration of golf courses per square mile on Earth. The Bermuda Stock Exchange is the largest electronic offshore securities market in existence, and the cheapest hotels start at over two hundred dollars per night.

Above: Map of Bermuda

We are four poor college students, each with a backpack and three hundred dollars in cash.

It’ll work out, I thought, as I stepped off the plane to overcast skies and a cold drizzle of rain. We hurried across the tarmac into the main airport building. Stewart was grinning like a maniac.

“We,” he said, “are actually here.” He paused, then tried a different emphasis: “We are,” he said, “actually here.” He grinned, and Max started laughing, and then we all were—despite the rain, despite not having a clue how we’d survive ten days here without going bankrupt.

Loud island music was playing inside the airport. “Welcome to Bermuda,” the customs agent said, with a perfunctory glance at my blue import slip. “Enjoy your stay.”

And then we were out, past customs, through the airport. A taxi pulled up, a white minibus driven by an old black man. He glanced back at us as we stepped inside. “Where to?”

Stewart gave the first name that came to mind. “Saint George.”

“Saint George’s Club?”

“Sure.” Stewart shrugged. “Why not?”

“Little rainy now, it was a beautiful day yesterday,” the taxi driver said as we crossed the bridge. “Supposed to clear up later, though.” He spoke with the Bermudian accent, unique to the island, a mix of low British and Caribbean, with a bit of Scottish brogue thrown in for flavor. Brightly colored houses flashed past, separated by impossibly dense patches of greenery and fallen stone walls three centuries old. A farm passed in an instant, a narrow strip carved out of the jungle, warm brown earth under dark gray skies.

The taxi let us off in front of the Saint George’s Club. It was Easter Sunday, and the town was quiet. Drivers of passing cars stared at us as they passed—four young people with packs, walking in the rain on the side of the road and grinning like fools.

Above: Traipsing along the road

Bermuda has been an English colony for almost four hundred years now. The English first landed when a storm drove Sir George Somers’ flagship off course en route to resupply Jamestown in 1609, and drove it into the reefs off Saint George Island. Miraculously, no one died, and Somers was able to repair his fleet and continue his mission; his supplies saved Jamestown. Permanent settlement of Bermuda began three years later.

The town of Saint George was the result. Its buildings are the oldest on the island; we passed a beautiful Anglican church as old as the colony and perfectly maintained, surrounded by a graveyard of crumbling white limestone crypts.

Walking up onto the hill north of town we came across the ruins of another church, a gothic stone skeleton with no roof—never finished, according to the sign on the entrance.

We passed a number of buildings in Saint George that were boarded up and covered with graffiti. Even on the occupied buildings, the paint was peeling and windows were chipped, especially when we’d moved beyond the tourist-heavy downtown sector. In 1995, as part of the demilitarization in the wake of the Cold War, the American, British, and Canadian military bases on the island shut down; since then, tourism has been declining rapidly, and parts of the island are beginning to show the strain.

We crossed a golf course, the first of many, and arrived at last at the coast of the Atlantic. The water was an almost unbelievable shade of bright blue fading into the deeps further out, and we found a rocky overhang to sit under as the rain misted down on the ocean and the island behind us.

We sat back and, finally, relaxed. We had arrived, and whatever else happened, we wouldn’t be going back until our flight left a week and a half later.

Of course, there were still a few things to consider.

“I guess we could sleep here,” Max said, eying the narrow patch of dry sand under the overhang doubtfully. It was littered with beer bottle caps, and a few old pizza boxes were stuffed into a nearby crevice—definitely a popular hangout among the local teenagers. We had planned to sleep in Bermuda’s “national parks”—glorified nature preserves rarely more than half a mile across—but at the moment the rain showed no sign of stopping.

Above: Avoiding the rain

Fortunately, we had a backup plan: Aunt Nea’s Inn, in downtown Saint George, and the cheapest lodging we could find in the area at just under two hundred a night. It’s an old building—the Irish poet Thomas Moore stayed there during his visit to Bermuda in the first few years of the nineteenth century—and looked like a reasonable enough place to stay for the two nights the storm was predicted to last.

The rain slowed to a light drizzle and we decided to explore some more before finding the Aunt Nea’s, and headed north to the northernmost tip of Bermuda: Fort St. Catherine’s, a large stone fortress built to defend the island from the Spanish. An enormous derelict hotel stood sentinel on a hill overlooking the town as we followed the coast toward the fort, dark and boarded over, another testament to the decline of the tourist industry on the island.

The fort itself was massive, with forty-foot stone walls built into the sea cliffs, its sharp angles designed to deflect shells fired from attacking ships off the coast. Immense cannons the size of SUVs lay on the rocks below the fortress walls from which they’d been pushed, rusting, mouths housing crabs and other sea life. Portuguese men o’ war were strewn across the rocks, livid blue with drooping crests, each the size of my fist.

“Their stingers stay potent for weeks after washing up,” Stewart said. “Supposed to make for excruciating pain and sometimes death.”

We gave them wide berth and kept our shoes on.

Above: The Beach

The rain and wind began to pick up again, so we headed back into town and found Aunt Nea’s Inn, with the help of a man in an orange poncho and skin the color of coal. He not only told us where it was but actually went a few blocks out of his way to take us there—one of our first examples of the Bermudian hospitality we would become accustomed to seeing in much of the island.

Aunt Nea’s was a beautiful old building, two stories with an expansive walled garden in front. Stewart and Max went in to ask about rooms, and came out a few minutes later shaking their heads.

“No one’s home,” Max said. “Some guy who was staying there says he hasn’t seen management for three days.”

“I guess we could try the Saint George’s Club,” I said, reluctantly, thinking that anyplace with the word “club” tacked on the end couldn’t possibly be cheap.

Not cheap, it turned out—nothing in Bermuda really is—but not bad. $200 a night for a time-share apartment—meaning a full living room, bedroom, and kitchen. We strung a makeshift clothesline for all of our wet clothes across the room and went to sleep early.

Morning dawned sunny and warm, heavy with the smell of evaporating rain. Lily and I walked down to the local supermarket to buy some ingredients for breakfast; it was small, crowded, and expensive, and we noticed the first case of what would be true for every grocery store we would see in Bermuda—hard liquor, whiskey and rum and vodka, sold right next to the beer and the energy drinks. Alcoholism is a fairly common problem on the island—there are only twenty square miles of land on this island, and the nearest place to visit is the United States, six hundred and fifty miles away.

Above: Stewart, Max and Tim inspect the map

“Bermuda is pretty and all,” one girl we met later said, “but it’s so boring. There’s the beaches in the summer and the clubs in Hamilton on Fridays and Saturdays, but there’s nothing else to do!”

We spent the day walking the back roads of Saint George Parish. The houses were painted in painfully bright pinks, blues, yellows, and oranges, each with a matching waist high wall adorned with everything from golf balls to water bottles to old glass telephone line insulators. Roosters were strutting about everywhere—even in the courtyard of the Saint George’s Club, where their crowing could be heard every morning as the sun rose.

Our plan was to walk the entire island, to see as much of it from foot as possible, but as the day wore on the clouds came back and it started to rain again, sparsely at first and then heavier, and we returned to our hotel and paid for a second night, hoping it would be clear enough to start walking into the rest of the island the next day.

…to be continued.

Tim Raveling is a freelance writer.


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