Trial And Error

There's a saga going on in the sleepy village of St. John's, the capital of the Caribbean island of Antigua. Some people pronounce it an-TEE-Gwa. Those people are wrong. Forget that there's a "U" in the name - the U is silent and it's pronounced an-TEE-Ga by the locals, and anyone in-the-know. The ongoing saga stems from an incident involving a handful of cruise ship passengers, who instead of taking the organized ship's tours decided they could do it cheaper and better on their own. Those people were wrong, too. They thought they had made a verbal agreement with a cab driver, to take them to the beach and bring them back again. When they got back to the ship, though, the passengers found out the dollar figure he had quoted them was "each way" and not round-trip. Words and unpleasantries were exchanged, and the cab driver, with passengers still in tow, sped away from the pier to what was supposedly a back entrance to the Police Station. Here's where the story gets grainy. The local Police claim that when they came out to confront the situation, the passengers started fighting them, and things quickly spiraled out of control. The passengers claim the Constables and Policemen were all dressed in plain clothes, and because they couldn't see the front of the Police Station, they thought they were just being taken to an alley and mugged, so they fought back to defend themselves. Needless to say, it's not solely on the island of Antigua where fisticuffs with the local Police will land you in a heap of hot water! All of the cruise passengers involved were arrested, and brought to trial. The actual incident happened weeks ago, but the trial drags on daily, with continuous testimony of he-said, she-said, with no end currently in sight. The nature of this confrontation and ensuing political theater has spooked other cruise passengers, and even the biggest cruise line in the world, Carnival. They just announced they are dropping Antigua as a port of call starting in January, replacing it with the half-Dutch, half-French island of St. Maarten. While there are clearly no winners here, there are definitely some major losers:

> The cruise passengers involved, some of whom have lost their jobs back home and are being eaten alive by judicial expenses. Not to mention whatever crawls on the floor of an Antiguan prison cell.

> The Police and government of Antigua, for allowing things to get to this point and the mis-handling of foreign visitors, if in fact the Policemen were plain-clothes and failed to properly identify themselves during the confrontation (as is claimed by the defendants).

> Local businesses and the innocent people of Antigua, who stand to lose hundreds of thousands if not millions of tourism dollars. Once cruise ships pull out over this type of thing, they're not coming back in 6 months. It may be 6 years, or it might not happen again for decades.

I can think of a number of Caribbean islands who, from a combination of greed, attitude and failure to provide safety to foreign visitors, have bitten the bullet for a very long time. Martinique flies to the forefront. Used to be a constant cruise ship favorite, and now has fallen off the radar. There are others who served a multi-year penance, and are slowly climbing back into favor. St. Croix is an example - even though it's part of the US and the largest of the US Virgin Islands, they went for 7+ years with no stops. Lovely Trinidad has had enough political upheaval to last it for a couple of centuries, and the major cruise lines have stayed away in droves because of it. Even a super-popular island such as Jamaica has its issues. Cruise lines stop on the Northern shore, in either Ocho Rios or Montego Bay, but nobody wants to tread anywhere near the capital city of Kingston. Burn me once, burn me twice. With the lawsuit-happy traveling public, it's simply not worth the risk for publicly-traded companies like the cruise lines to risk their reputations.

The other day I posted about those wacky Brits, and now they're at it again! Seems they are just as scared of the H1N1 virus, a.k.a. swine flu, as the rest of the world. They're even trying to look out for the prisoners in their penal system, by replacing the soap dispensers in the prison and giving the inmates bottles of hand sanitizer, such as "Purell" to avoid catching the disease. Well, if you know anything about hand sanitizers, it's not the floral scent in them that kills the germs - it's alcohol. Prison officials are now having to re-think their priorities, when guards found numerous inmates drunk and disorderly, after drinking their bottles of hand wash. I guess their thoughts were "Hey - the germs are tryin' to get IN me, not ON me!!"