Swimming with cows

Antigua, 1977 (Don Dale photo)

Yes, that's a photograph of a cow, on a beach, in Antigua.

(And, yes, it's a lousy photograph. On our first day at sea aboard QEII in 1977, the shutter-spring snapped on my Pentax Spotmatic and I was reduced to using a backup Polaroid camera for the rest of the two-week trip.)

Antigua (pronounced An-TI-guh) is in the Leeward Islands in the eastern Caribbean, about 17 degrees north of the equator. The tourism bureau boasts that the island has 365 beaches, one for each day of the year. Many are isolated, offering total privacy.

Walter, my traveling companion, and I had a plan. On the morning we arrived in the port of St. John's, we found a taxi driver and asked him to take us to a secluded beach where we could go skinny-dipping. The driver said he knew of just the spot. After a ride over increasingly rough roads, we arrived. The driver agreed to return in a few hours to fetch us, and then he left.

The beach was beautiful, and indeed truly remote. There was not another living soul in sight for as far as we could see.

But there were cows. Some were wandering on the beach. Some were wading chest-deep in the blue Caribbean.

We plunged into the water stark naked among the livestock. The beach was just what we were looking for and we enjoyed ourselves, being careful, as I recall, not to annoy the cows. They, in turn, didn't seem to mind our presence.

True to his word, the driver returned at the appointed hour, picked us up, and delivered us back to St. John's. (I'm not sure what we would have done had the driver not come back. The beach was certainly isolated and as far from civilization as you can get on an island that's 14 miles long and 11 miles wide.)

That evening at dinner on the QE2 we had an interesting story to tell about our adventures in Antigua. No, strike that: We had the most interesting story to tell.

That day on the beach with the cows in Antigua was just one more delightful travel adventure.