Thursday, April 14
We pre-booked dinner reservations at the highly recommended Tides restaurant for 6 tonight and in the meantime decided to get a cab out to the Barbados Animal Reservation to see the turtles and the monkeys.
After getting some questionable feedback about the Reserve, it turned out to be a lovely place. It’s designed with rugged, brick paths that seem to meander around aimlessly in a peaceful, relaxing sort of way. As we walked around, we saw turtles (tons of turtles!), a couple of deer hiding in the trees, peacocks, roosters & chickens, caimans (in a pen, thankfully), turkeys, and dove-sized grey birds that looked like characters from GoT which turned out to be scaly-naped pigeons. In cages or aquariums they had snakes, lizards, rabbits, and exotic birds. Dave tried to attract the peacocks by using his phone to play the call of female peahens but that didn’t work, so he tried the call of male peacocks. This, alarmingly, actually caused one of the peacocks to charge us! Meanwhile, what we didn’t see were monkeys, and after the peacock, we weren’t about to let Dave try to male monkey call!
As we were leaving, we were told the monkey were “on the other side” so we wandered through another large and hilly forest area without seeing anything at all, except a cave. We went back to the entrance and would you know it, there were three monkeys hanging around waiting for the worker to hand out food. Dave fed a couple, but the rest of us stayed safely back.
We walked over to see the ocean on the east side of the island and came across an old signal tower that has been restored and turned into an aging little museum of sorts, explaining the development and decline of the Barbados signal towers. There were 6, built in 1816 or 1818, and we were at Grenade Hall. At the top of the tower, we could look down and see the ocean and the Barbados east coast.
Grenade Hall 
The signal towers of Barbados
If you are planning to visit the reserve, feeding time is 2:00 and apparently that’s when ALL the animals come out and “swarm” the feeding area. We didn’t stay for this, so can’t report on how much swarming went on.
The Tides dinner was fantastic, and if you come to Barbados it’s highly recommended. We had a table right by an ocean-view window where we could watch the sunset. It was a cloudy day, so we didn’t expect much and besides, we’d already seen a spectacular sunset yesterday. But the ocean was lovely, and Andi and I saw a furry little animal slink between the rocks along the walkway outside. There was a lot of debate about what it was – it was like a mink, but we googled stoats, weasels, and badgers trying to figure it out. Our waiter settled things – apparently it was a mongoose!
As for the disappointing sunset due to clouds, well I’ll let you judge for yourself.
