Hilton Tobago

Sitting in the lobby of the Hilton Tobago, watching hotel guests arriving and checking out and young staff members putting up Christmas decorations, I wondered if they had any idea what this place was like thirty years ago? When my children were small, we — my husband, son Alex and daughter Penny — spent almost every August holiday in what used to be the under-manager’s bungalow on the De Nobriga Estate, Lowlands, the estate that is now Tobago Plantations. A hundred or more years ago sea island cotton was grown on the Lowlands plantation; when, in the course of time, the cotton crop failed, it became a sugar plantation. Finally, the degraded, exhausted soil was only fit for growing coconuts that shaded the cattle and horses grazing on coarse pasture beneath the palm trees.

The bungalow is no more, only the concrete foundation remains to remind me of many happy holidays. The Hilton Tobago has replaced the Estate House and offices, and the farmyard that was a magnet for our children with its heaps of coconut shells, pigsties, pens for the sheep, and stables for the horses that used to race at Shirvan Park, is now the dramatic sweep of an entrance and the car parks of the hotel. Sheep once grazed where, today, hotel guests relax on king-sized beds, or luxuriate in a jacuzzi in rooms of the North or South Wings of the hotel. Rough grass, poor pasture and aging coconut palms have been replaced by the golf course and the eight man-made lakes designed to capture water to irrigate the fairways and carefully-tended greens of the golf course.

Drive slowly from the pillared main entrance of Tobago Plantations on the Claude Noel Highway, through the golf course and past the lakes  and you may see, as I did, cattle egrets, Southern Lapwings, a blue heron and  a Great Blue Heron; if I had more time in Tobago I might have seen snake birds (anhingas), whistling ducks and striated herons, too.  I was glad to see that the rough cart track that led from the Milford Road past the under manager’s bungalow to the Estate House has been preserved — and paved — for those who prefer the scenic route from the hotel to Scarborough. Yet... no longer do racehorses take their morning and evening exercise racing the length of Little Rockley Bay beach and back. The thunder of hooves on sand used to warn us to get off the beach and out of the way — or risk being run down by the herd of racehorses. The sound of the surf never ceases, rarely do the Trade Winds fail to cool those who stay on the Atlantic coast of Tobago. As it was in the bungalow, long, long ago, so it is today in the Hilton Tobago where all guest rooms face the sea; those rooms have air-conditioning but many guests find it’s only needed when they shut the sliding doors to the gallery and close the drapes for complete privacy. In the Plantation Room, blackbirds (better known to bird watchers as Carib Grackles) helped themselves to scraps from my breakfast table — just as they used to do in the bungalow.

For evening entertainment in the long-ago we had to drive to hotels on the other side of the island. Today the air-conditioned Robinson Crusoe pub in the Hilton Tobago (complete with Man Friday footprints in the sand) is the place to be in Tobago on Friday nights. The gods of the weather didn’t take kindly to my lightning, 24-hour visit to the upside-down Hilton Tobago (and “Naked Walls” art exhibition in The Art Gallery in Lowlands) on November 28-9.  (You didn’t know the Hilton Tobago is also upside down? It is — I admit, it confused me at first.) The 2003 wet season wasn’t as wet as usual but carried a sting in the tail with a tropical wave lashing both islands in the early hours of the morning. I hoped to photograph the boardwalk in the mangrove by the Hilton, to take pictures of guests sunning themselves by the Hilton Tobago’s pools (there are three). I could do neither. However, a walk along the bay under grey skies brought back memories of other tropical waves; of the day after a storm when we woke to find all the sand on the beach had disappeared: that to reach the sea we had to negotiate a slimy tangle of trunks of fallen coconut trees — and (an added excitement) there was a yacht wrecked on the reef. Four days later the sand was back, the racehorses resumed their daily exercise; the yacht was still stuck on the reef, watched, with near despair, by the owner who had swum and waded ashore and was waiting and hoping for someone and some means to salvage his home.

On this trip down memory lane, was I sorry, did I weep to see the changes man had made to the environment of Lowlands? Not at all.  I prefer the fairways and greens of the golf course to the rough pasture, the healthy young coconut and “naked indian” trees to the sickly palms of thirty years ago. My accommodation in the Hilton Tobago was a hundred times more comfortable than the bungalow — in fact it was almost sinfully luxurious complete with mini-bar and toiletries I can’t afford at home. I never knew there was a sugar mill on the property for my children to explore; today you can walk to the mill and climb the spiral staircase for a bird’s eye view of Lowlands and the gracious, colonial-style buildings of the Hilton Tobago that blend so well with the landscape in this once neglected corner of Tobago.