Caribbean and Central America Travel

When people are asked where their dream vacation is, they would say the Caribbean. And when they say The Caribbean, the first to come to mind is the Bahamas.

Sprawling in a 100,000 square mile archipelago, Bahamas offers travelers 700 islands to choose from. Each island offers something different from the one before, thereby assuring travelers that there’s something for everybody.

Christopher Columbus was the first European to arrive in the islands. He dropped anchor in San Salvador in 1492 and encountered the Arawaks, the native island people. He called them “indians,” thinking that he docked in the West Indies. The Arawaks or Lucayans as they are also called, were taken as slaves and their population began to decrease. Eventually, the islands became uninhabited.
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One of the top tourist destinations in the Caribbean, Barbados features the spectacular turquoise waters of the Caribbean sea rushing up on its pinkish white sand shores. With a major international airport in the island that acts as point of entry to the Eastern Caribbean, Barbados is almost always the first stop to any tour in the Caribbean.

First known as the Isla de los Barbados in Spanish documents dating back to the 1500s, the name of the island can either be attributed to the bearded fig-tree that is indigenous to the island, or the bearded Amerindians that inhabited the island, or to the sprays of foam that forms on the outlying reefs that looks like a beard.

It was the British, however, who settled on the island. Upon landing in the present-day Holetown in 1625, British sailors found the island uninhabited; the Spaniards have captured the Caribs who used to live there to work as slaves for sugar plantations, while others have fled the island to escape slavery.
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These two spectacular islands in the Caribbean sea boasts of having more than 300 beaches, each one of them more magnificent than the last one. The island nation, part of the Lesser Antilles archipelago, enjoys a tropical climate year round, due to its location just 17 degrees north of the Equator.

It was Christopher Columbus who was the first European to see the island in 1493. He named it Santa Maria de la Antigua after a church in Seville, Spain. It wasn’t until 1632 though, that European settlers came in, due to the aggressive nature of the Carib natives who were inhabiting the island.

It was another Christopher who made a big impact on Antigua’s history and economy: Sir Christopher Codrington of England. He came into Antigua in 1684 and discovered the island’s potential to support large-scale sugar cultivation. Over the next fifty years, there was a boom in Antigua’s economy, fueled by the sugar plantation that sprouted throughout the island.
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One of more popular Caribbean vacation destinations, Aruba certainly lives up to the hype. Bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to its east, crashing unto dramatic cliff face and the Caribbean Sea lapping in gently on its western beaches, this island is the perfect destination for sun and sea lovers.

First discovered by the Spaniards in 1499, they deemed it useless and was left to the native people of Aruba. During the war between Spain and Holland, Aruba was seized by the Dutch in 1636. The Dutch settled in the islands soon after. It wasn’t until the 19th century though, that gold was discovered in Aruba. This brought on a new surge of immigrants, mainly from Europe and Venezuela.

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Central America is the name of the region that connect North and South America. It is also sometimes referred to as the “southern end of North America.”

This narrow strip of land separates the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. On its narrowest point, Darien in Panama, the land is only about 30 miles (50 kilometers) wide. It is said that there is no area in Central America that is more than 125 miles from a body of water. Like the Caribbean, Central America also lies on the Caribbean Plate. This region gets its fair share of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The region is mountainous (with majority of its people living in the mountains than in the lowlands), though there are also a stretch of lowland along both coasts. The seven countries in Central America occupies a total land area of 202,265 square miles (523,865 square kilometers).
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