http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/travel/island-hopping-in-the-caribbean-with-carrie-gibson.html 2014-11-04 22:22:51 Island-Hopping in the Caribbean With Carrie Gibson The British historian, who toured the region to research her new book, talks about ferries versus flying, places to stay and more. === Colonialism has left its mark on many aspects of Caribbean life. Among them: travel. So the British historian Carrie Gibson discovered when she toured the Caribbean to research her new book, “Empire’s Crossroads.” “It’s a little post-colonial,” she said. “There are still these really outdated linguistic and cultural divides in the travel industry.” The Caribbean airline Liat, for example, connects mostly former British colonies, offering no direct flights from Dominica to the French island Martinique next door. And with international resorts dominating the hotel sector, she found few locally owned options. That made it tricky to backpack across the islands — though not impossible. Recently Ms. Gibson gave tips on island-hopping and talked about some of her favorite cities for soaking up culture, not just sun, in the Caribbean. Following are edited excerpts. Q. How did you travel between islands? A. Any locally owned hotels you like? ­Cuba has this wonderful system of B&Bs; called casa particular where you can stay in people’s houses for $30 a night. Loads of them are ranked on TripAdvisor. It’s one of the few ways Cubans are allowed to run their own businesses. For a traveler, it’s brilliant. I had some luck on Airbnb. We found beautiful places to stay in Barbados and in Curaçao on it. Otherwise I did a lot of Googling. That’s how I found this small hotel on Treasure Beach in Jamaica called Any itineraries you recommend? ­Cap-Haïtien in Haiti is small, walkable, beautifully preserved, though the port was filled with rubbish — I wouldn’t go swimming, let’s put it that way. Then you can take the bus from there to Santiago de Los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic, which is a pleasant, sleepy place. And from there you can go to Puerto Plata, which starts to get into resort country. You could do such a fun holiday doing Port of Spain in Trinidad, Georgetown in Guyana, and Paramaribo in Suriname. Port of Spain, I thought, was brilliant. It has a beautiful big park, the food is amazing, the people are super nice. I passed a very happy time there, thinking this is a really cool city. That whole region has a unique architecture — lots of wooden Victorian buildings known as gingerbread houses. One of the largest wooden churches in the world is in Georgetown, St. George’s Anglican Cathedral. And the whole center of Paramaribo is