Press & Media
Article April 2007
Go green, enjoy more!
You can pack your conscience and still have a thrilling, adventurous and luxurious holiday. Jane Hayward reveals her pick of “green” getaways.
All of us are becoming more eco-aware and when it comes to travel, the fact is, we’re not going to stop having holidays, but there are more choices available so we can do our bit. Whether you travel by train instead of by car or support a local project, it’s easy to make a difference while still having the holiday you want.
Let us know how you get on – E-mail the Editor at www.womanandhome.com. Look forward to hearing from you.
- YOUR WEEK AWAY: Friendly Tobago is the perfect place to sample a stylish, authentic eco-resort that encourages you to meet your neighbours. And a new project by The Travel Foundation to protect the island’s reefs and turtles and encourage local businesses means you’re in just the right place at the right time.
- WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU? Backed by protected hillside rainforest, Castara Retreats is a group of six wooden lodges and apartments with stunning views and sleeping up to four people. Nearby is a sandy turtle beach while a reef for swimming is a short walk away.
- HOW YOU GIVE BACK: Castara is a small fishing village where you can eat, shop and book everything from rainforest walks to cookery lessons. Forty villagers were involved in building the resort, which is maintained locally.
- ESSENTIAL READ: Caribbean Islands (Footprint Travel Guides, £14.99).
Review in August 2006
Go fishing at Castara Retreats
Few package tourists make it as far as Castara bay, a friendly village with a handful of guesthouses and good eateries. Hang out with the Rasta fishermen over bowls of crab and dumplin’ , helping them haul in their weighty seine nets in a man- vs- marine tug o’ war.
Castara Retreats is the best place to stay - shells tinkle and hammocks sway at these six beautiful wooden stilt houses perched high on the bay. Plump for Fisherman’s Lodge, on which the rest were modelled, and you’ll enjoy ocean views from your bed. Gregarious “Porridge” and his wife Jeanell look after the guests.
Front Page feature by Stephen Bleach
entitled "How Low Can You Go", 21st August 2005
The article picks out places
across the world where you can have a budget holiday but not
sacrifice luxury and good quality. The context is set as
follows:
“We all love a good deal, but
there comes a point when saving that last pound becomes
a bit of an own goal………
The trick is to find the value point, that elusive line
between wasting your money and not spending enough of
it. Below we take six classic trips from a quick hop to
Paris to a week on a tropical beach, and show how to get
the real McCoy for the best price.”
The section on the Caribbean
reads as follows:
“Why the Caribbean? Plenty of
destinations have sunshine, sandy beaches and swaying
palm trees. But there’s something special about the
Windies: the friendly smiles, the languid lifestyle,
the lazy fishing villages, and the beach shacks where you
laze in a hammock, sipping rum punches and watching the
kids play cricket.
Sadly, most budget Caribbean
holidays are nothing like this. You might, for instance, land in a
concrete apartment block in a grubby corner of Barbados, or a monstrous
all-inclusive in “Dom Rep”,
where your fellow guests neck lagers for breakfast.
We’re going to opt for
Tobago. It offers pristine coral beaches, a forested
interior squawking with bird life and pastel-painted
creole restaurants where rotund ladies smile proudly as
they present you with fried plantains and callaloo soup.
The cost of living is cheap (about £15 for dinner at a
decent restaurant), crime is low and there is a weekly
jump-up with steel bands and calypso.
Another good reason to be
cheerful about Tobago: direct flights with BA, Virgin,
and Excel, a charter . Normally the word “charter” would
have us running for the hills, but Excel is as good as
its name suggests, with a better seat pitch than its
scheduled rivals (32in-33in, against 31 on BA and
Virgin)……………….
As for hotels, you can forget
about the five-stars: they’re pricey and surprisingly
characterless. Instead try Seahorse Inn on…… lovely
Stonehaven Bay, a restaurant with four rooms that cost
£88 per night, B&B.
Better still, head up the
coast to Castara, a delightful village with friendly
bars and more fishing boats than sunbathers. Overlooking
the white sand beach, Castara Retreats has four wooden apartments built
among the mango trees that cost £65 per
night. It’s self catering – buy snapper direct from the
fishermen and pick your own mangoes. Less than £650 buys
you a genuine slice of paradise.”
The price quoted above was per
person and based on two sharing accommodation for one week
with flights included.
Reviewed by Editors Steve & Jill Wooler, January 2005
myTobago is a highly influential website
featuring a wide range of first rate information on Tobago. It
is highly regarded by both visitors to the island and by local
Tobagonians and is a “must visit” site if you are thinking of
Tobago as a holiday destination. It features comprehensive and
objective information and comment on just about every topic
of relevance to travellers and includes a widely used forum
for people to ask questions, exchange information and make
comment.
The myTobago review of Castara
Retreats totals some 5000 words and
offers detailed commentary on our accommodation, the village and local services, and the beaches.
To read the full review, please
click here.
Below are a few excerpts taken from the full review.
Introduction
In March 2003, posts started appearing in the myTobago
forum about a new holiday accommodation property in Castara. It
had only been open since the start of the year and we were
rather puzzled that the public not only knew about it, but were
already posting highly favourable comment.
We suspected that myTobago was being
manipulated. Why should this new property be getting so much
exposure when well-established accommodation in the village was
seldom mentioned? We studied each post for clues and ran
Internet traces on the computer from which they were posted.
There was no pattern. Everything checked out. We had to accept
that it was probably genuine comment. The praise continued.
Castara Retreats had arrived; and obviously
arrived in a big way. The property was patently finding clear
public approval. The reports indicated that the property offered
the best accommodation in Castara, and at a realistic price, in
stark comparison to some property in the village. Most
importantly, Castara Retreats still offered the essential
‘village experience’ that so many visitors seek.
We decided to make it the starting point of our
2005 tour of Tobago.
Garden and grounds
Because Castara Retreats is built on an acre of
steep hillside, the lush gardens are spread across many tiers.
Much of the land is too steep to be accessible, but there are
numerous little spots where you can place one of the half dozen
sun loungers that are spread judiciously around the property.
The gardens are full of mango trees and banana palms and the
fruit from these trees is available to guests when in season.
The mangoes, in particular, are a wonderful way of attracting
birds to your balcony or terrace.
The gardens and terraces are illuminated by
spotlights. Dimmer controls allow soft romantic lighting effects
to be created, while avoiding the tropical insects attracted to
bright light. The new concrete path from the road is illuminated
by low intensity lights with photo-sensitive control that turn
the lights on and off when darkness falls.
Just below Fisherman’s Lodge, a wonderful wooden
viewing deck juts out over the hillside. Since our visit, a
wooden roof has been added to the deck. The beach and sea are
125 feet or so below and the turquoise waters so crystal-clear
that you can see sting rays feeding on the sandy bottom. The
deck is a truly wonderful spot to sunbathe or lime.
The grounds of Castara Retreats are home to an
abundance of wildlife, including a huge bright green 1.5m iguana
and rare agouti. The agouti are reddish brown creatures, the
size of a large rabbit. They are actually members of the guinea
pig family and allegedly make very tasty eating. Sadly they have
almost been hunted to extinction on the island.
Conclusion
I was highly impressed by the professionalism
shown by Castara Retreats owners, Steve and Sue, in the
marketing of their property and by the amount of detailed
information they provide to prospective guests to help them
decide whether the property is ‘right’ for them. They have
obviously gone to very great trouble to ensure that guests get
the most out of their holiday.
Having visited the property, I am highly impressed by the
honesty of Steve and Sue's marketing. They have portrayed the
property accurately and without marketing hype. They obviously
recognise that Castara Retreats will not be everyone’s cup of
tea – but then neither would be the Coco Reef Resort or the
Hilton. Their determination to paint a full and truthful picture
to prospective guests is refreshing. They appreciate that it
makes no sense to sell Castara Retreats to holidaymakers who
wouldn't appreciate the property. Their approach is refreshing
in this day and age and will inevitably lead to a very high
repeat rate.
It is no wonder that the property is proving so
popular and in such demand. We no longer view the rave reviews
of Castara Retreats with any suspicion. Having stayed at the
property, I share the enthusiasm of the authors of all those
positive reports. What more can I say?
Article by Jim Perrin, Saturday 4th
December 2004
Paradise Conserved
Maybe not everyone would
agree that the rainy season is a good time to visit Tobago, but
what’s a frantic and spectacular hour of warm, splashy rain
every afternoon in the scheme of things, when the rest is
brilliant sunshine, the towerings and layerings of Caribbean
cloudscapes, temperatures in the eighties and as relaxed a
milieu as you’re ever likely to find? After a week of these
afternoon downpours, the stream that winds down from the
rainforest into Castara Bay was in brown and frothing spate. I
followed it out of the village, past waterfalls jetting into
pools where children swam and women washed clothes. Beyond where
all signs of habitation ceased, the path by now no more than a
vague flattening of underbrush, the stream had cut deep into
soft, almost clay-like sandstone of the island’s northern scarp,
and its gully was lushly vegetated. All around, the coconut
palms, papaya and mango trees, castor oil plants and giant
spleenworts of the world’s oldest forest reserve crowded in,
promising that the mile or so to the crest of the island would
be an intense experience of nature.
I arrived on a gravelly knoll, spreading boughs of a mango tree
stretching out towards it and the stream jetting into a pool
under the falls below. Two movements caught my eye: a bird
landing on a branch scarcely two feet away from me; an old black
man, grey-haired and in stained singlet and shorts, emptying a
catch of small, trout-like fish from a net into a creel. The
bird, it seemed to me in the instant of viewing it, was one of
the most extravagantly beautiful creatures I had ever seen. It
was the size of a small hawk, its plumage the richest palette of
carmine, turquoise, blue, black and irridescent green. Its black
skull-cap was circled with a glittering, perfect, turquoise
diadem, and its long tail ended in an extraordinary blue
heart-shaped design. It perched confidently on its branch,
darting quick glances of its bright eye between the fisherman
and myself. I must have been open-mouthed, because when I
glanced across at the old man again he was smiling at me: “Him
mot-mot,” he told me, in explanation, “King of the Woods!”
I like to immerse myself in a landscape, to steep myself in
sense of place. Tobago has places as good for doing that as
anywhere in the bright world. Sometimes you arrive, and want
nothing more than to stay put. Two-thirds of the visitors to
this island are accommodated by its five main hotels, all of
them within a brief radius of the airport - international in
name, very local in character - at Crown Point, which is the
southwestern most tip of the narrow, 28-mile-long island,
southernmost in the Caribbean. Perhaps they’ll venture out on a
day-trip along winding roads as pot-holed as those of Connemara
twenty years ago, through densely-forested hills of the main
north-eastern mass; certainly they’ll take a glass-bottomed
boat-trip out to the visitor-feet-decimated coral reef of
Buccoo, snorkel in bath-temperature, clear water, see manta and
sting-rays at close quarters; will they experience much of the
singular character and beauty of Tobago?
They may. But it seems to me that they would stand a better
chance if they came to rest not in a fortified resort-complex
where dire warnings are issued about the dangers of straying
outside the guarded stockade, but instead in a Tobagonian
community: Charlotteville, for example, cascading down the
hillside to its two exquisite bays two hours’ distant from the
island’s tourism hot-spots; absurdly pretty Parlatuvier perhaps;
or best of all to my mind - heartstone in the necklace of
jewelled bays along the north-west coast - Castara.
It’s a west-facing, turquoise-watered, red-cliffed,
forest-backed, surf-rimmed bite of a bay, beach-cafe’d, reefed
and knolled and blue-roof-churched; a dozen rakish,
indigo-canopied fishing pirogues, rods on either side like the
antennae of some strange tropical insect, loll at their moorings
ready for the village fishermen to swim out at their leisure. In
the mornings, shadows of tall palms stretch across the beach and
village children race across the sand to hurl themselves into
the waves. Four pelicans perched on a rock squabble and stab as
another attempts to join them. Boobies plunge and come up with
beaks full of wriggling fish. Frigate birds, fork-tailed and
spectacular, spiral ever higher on thermals. We stay at Castara
Retreats in a simple, comfortable hut on a secluded bluff above
the bay. Groups of apple-green parrots with rich and raucous
calls fly by. One side of our lodge is balustraded, open to the
elements, facing into the sunset from among lush gardens where
three-foot-long lizards sun themselves, agoutis scuttle, and
every tree is an aviary, a scene of constant activity and source
of ornothological surprise and delight. Want a list? There’s not
the space in this article...
And anyway, the people of the village are just as busy and
interesting. We watch from our terrace above the beach as the
fishermen pull the seine nets into the beach, all silver flash
and heave and the men throwing the small ones back into the sea,
or the waves licking kindly in to reclaim them. We trip down to
the village to buy limes that taste sweeter and more piquant
than ever they did in Britain, or mangoes, ginger, garlic,
paw-paws, dasheen (a strange root vegetable, also called
bluefood); and bread baked in banana leaves in the village’s
communal clay oven near the beach behind the school, that the
old women take out on long wooden paddles and scrape clean of
charcoaled leaf before inviting you to choose your texture and
complexion.
As the day eases down towards sudden tropical twilight, boats
having returned, the fishermen’s co-operative lays out its wares
on the beach-stall. Can you buy any? If the catch is good, and
there’s enough for the villagers and the proprietors of the
beach cafes, and you wait your turn, and then point insistently
and assertively enough at what you’d like, then yes - at which
point it will be cleaned and filleted: whitefish, kingfish,
grouper, tuna, all delicious.
Later, back at Castara Retreats, silver-filigreed moths each
wing of which is the size of my hand flit in; the geckos blink
and stalk staccato across the ceiling; intermittent trajectories
of fireflies, like sparks from a bonfire, traverse the night;
sheet lightning flickers along the horizon, and a steel band
takes its snare from the susurrus of the waves, each glassy back
of which in the moment before its collapse reflects the
moonlight as a thin and wavering line along the shore, delicate
as the balance struck in this place between beauty and its
exploitation. Long may it be held...
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