Whether it’s fiery ‘goat water’, lobster with hot pepper sauce, curried yam or Killer Bee rum cocktails, Nevis offers the simple pleasures and a taste of the Caribbean with a serious kick.
One handwritten sign says 'Hot soup sells here' while another offers up 'Live rabbits, ducks, local drinks, noni (fruit) juice'. I’m drawn not so much by today’s bull foot broth, but by the bright aqua colours of the shack and the smile of a little boy I later learn goes by the name of J’Kingley. This is the roadside shop, pop-up cafe and petting zoo of the Liburd family, a joyous ramshackle place at the edge of the New River Estate on the Caribbean island of Nevis. My guava juice is not only cold and sweet, but freshly squeezed and delightfully cheap.
Once a sugar plantation, the New River Estate presides on the south east of this little island measuring just six by eight miles. Most of the stone edifices of the mills and boiling and curing houses that dominated the place during the slave trade remain; in 1655 sugar was the most important export crop from Nevis, the oldest British colony in the Caribbean. Some of these old plantations lie in decay, while others have been converted into hotels, residences and restaurants. In spite of the blood and toil upon which they were built, they’re still stoically beautiful.
It’s at the foot of one such mill in the Maddens area that I meet up with Alfred ‘Baba’ Tyson, a former police officer who leads nature tours of the verdant island. As we walk through the rainforest, he stops to pick up various herbs, squashes them in his hand to release the scent and asks me to guess what it is. I can’t and he tells me this one with the spicy overtones may smell like curry leaves but is actually mint basil.
“We boil and make tea with it when we have a cold,” he says.
This story is from the September 2016 edition of National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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This story is from the September 2016 edition of National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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