The British Virgin Islands - Pearl of the Caribbean | Free Documentary Nature

[Music] [Music] life in the caribbean is relaxed and easy going if you have the right ideas all you need is food and entertainment already the first settlers on the british virgin islands got their salt from the sea and pirates distilled rum by the barrel from sugarcane [Music] [Music] josiah's bay is far off the beaten track it's really quiet here normally good museum [Music] the sound of the caribbean it must be played loud they need it for the warm-up of their weekly training they are moko jumbies stilts dancers for their upcoming appearance they train on the beach of tortola the biggest of the british virgin islands from since i've borne i always wanted to be um i'm like a german dancer because i just like to see everyone up there so tall it just looks so you know fun chevron is the group's boss the first time i tried it was a little bit scared but you can't be scared when you're gonna do it because you're gonna panic and then you're gonna fall it's about that so you gotta keep tripping while you're holding on until you get your balance to it and when you don't get your balance you're gonna lose off the wall and then you're gonna be like this you're gonna be chipping like this and then you have all the kind of space then you're gonna trying to do all kind of tricks to it but this only works if the two meter long stilts are tightly attached to the legs i always the last one to come up everyone is so fast and i'm so slow [Applause] due to the soft sand here on tortola it doesn't hurt too badly if you fall this was jamal's biggest fear when he tried it for the first time it was really terrifying because i was scared of heights because looking at these local zombies you could actually fall and hurt yourself so that what gave me fear but i overcome my fear by showing this and i actually get it done yeah slaves introduced a stilts dance to the british virgin islands originally moko jambis expelled evil spirits but nowadays they are mostly booked as a show troop during carnival or for private parties the next show is coming up soon the british virgin islands the british queen still reigns over this island state this overseas territory is under the protection of the british crown 350 years ago great britain annexed the remote archipelago consisting of 60 islands in the north of the caribbean only 16 are inhabited [Music] before the british danish spanish and dutch buccaneers roved about these parts and as pirates like to drink rum it is distilled here since then this is very ancient you know that is why i always tell people the rum is so good that's why it keeps me looking young the sugar cane bay distillery is rumored to be more than 400 years old caleb himself is only 29 but nevertheless he's the master distiller at calwood rum every morning before eight he heats up the fire from rung sugarcane this makes his product very special by using the like gasoline it actually gives the rum a taste like a bad taste so that's why we don't show any like diesel or gasoline in here so we try to do it you know naturally you know it's like cooking a food outside if you cook some food outside with using like trees like woods like dry woods it tastes much more better than using a stove you know is the food will taste totally different so this is something like this here right now the ancient pot is still cold but it may become critical once the fermented sugarcane juice bubbles in there in a couple of [Music] hours the dented copper apparatus has little cracks and holes everywhere which is why caleb always uses his special [Music] filler uh this is like a flower paste we make the seal of the leeks from the stills so this is gonna get dry when the pot gets real hot so it forms similar like a bread so it would not escape the alcohol so it would not boost out the filler outer flour and water is 100 biodegradable but this is one of the problems see sometimes the the fold come like five o'clock in the morning and pick on the flower because this is like a bread to them so that's why you see all these parts here eat out as the fall would actually do it the first drops of rum are supposed to dribble out of the condensing tube around midday [Music] with 500 horsepower through the sir francis drake channel alexandra durant and her brother edward want to cross from tottola over to salt island the island is uninhabited but alexandre and edward aren't looking for company there they are after the natural resource that everything revolves around in their [Music] family maybe like look at all that up there yeah yeah there we go it's early in the year but still it's extraordinarily hot and dry therefore the first salt of the season already builds up at the lagoon shimmering i just love how it's all symmetrical in squares and triangles usually their harvest only starts two months later when the sea water in the lagoon evaporates quicker than it can flow up again alexandra and edward have their own exclusive harvesting ground here we're descendants of salt island uh my uncle norwell durant mine salt for years um where the original family that actually lived on this island and buried the uh sailors from the rms roan in 1867 and for rent the queen actually asked us or asked my family to supply her with one pound of salt a year harvesting salt this early in the year this hasn't happened for a long time they only need one bucket of salt from now on they will come here once a week to carefully harvest the crystals they are supposed to be as big as possible as this salt is the most important ingredient at alexandra's small soap manufacturing beautiful keep going it's to fully drain the salt because salt attracts moisture so the drier it is the longer it keeps in your bucket when you bring it back before we cure it fully so it doesn't all melt in a bucket and you open it up and it's all brine the freshly harvested salt shall now rest for at least one hour salt island is a natural salt farm sea water constantly seeps into lagoons slowly turning to brine due to the heat and then to salt queen elizabeth also rules over this barren island well the queen is in control the whole thing is hers now because she doesn't want us to come over here and kill each other i guess the family you know because everybody wants to fight over this and then for property and salt rights and whatnot what not you know so i guess she just took it over to mediate it and keep everybody alive you know in tortola but everybody's cool with it though it's nice yeah the hard solid big chunks after almost two hours the fresh salt is dry enough and ready for transport in the midday heat alexandra and edward head back home to tortola the smallest of the british virgin islands lies in the middle of beef island it's an island within an island and it's so small that there's just enough room for a bar it's called the island a name that's easy to remember even if you're plastered it's quite popular due to its exceptional location and famous for its population of hermit crabs once a week the bar staff collects the little buggers they like the trees they like to hide they're under under stuff like under this rock maybe but i don't there seems to be none over here you got one hermit crabs don't have a shell of their own they live in empty snail shells some were painted by the bar staff house and home for crabs [Music] there's two of them hiding in here they're awesome and they're good entertainment and they're like family all of them has personalities as you can see this one here he's a biter this one hair is kind of shy this one hair is young so he's you know see this one here is not shy at all he's all over on the rocks there are hermit crabs everywhere they even nest inside the walls of the house they hide inside of the creases of the wall where they think you cannot find them where the shell can blend in with the wall so you have to look good in the creases to make sure you found some see like this one you see how he's in there when he's holding onto the wall see he's coming out well we have two three four five six seven eight nine the crabs are taken to the back of the restaurant tonight it's all about them during the heyday of rum production there were 26 distilleries on the british virgin islands rum was mainly exported to europe but today only the calwood distillery is left it is said that it's the only distillery that has been running constantly for 400 years caleb samples the first distillate [Music] so that's how we know as ram because if it don't fraud it's not alcohol this is how they have been doing it for hundreds of years it's all original except for the plastic bucket so we will pick up like a 25 gallon a day so i would get 25 gallons like a half a barrel so we get a half a barrel a day before the fresh rum is bottled it needs to mature in oak casks for one to up to 10 years but master distillers like kalem already see the quality of the vintage by looking at the freshly distilled alcohol excellent you get all the sugarcane like the sweetness and they get a nice like a very strong taste enter and when you enter in your mouth so remember this is like a white rum so it will be more flammable when you enter in your mouth so it's good it's good it's good to buckle cheers customers a couple from glasgow scotland whiskey country hello hello how are you guys today we're good seven bottles three ten four calwood distillery is an insider's tip among yachtsmen a few bottles of authentic caribbean rum in the onboard bar is more popular in each harbor than the best sailor's yard do you have a scottish whiskey's a totally different spirit this is great it is different yeah totally different that's fantastic this room well whiskey is great but i'm a rum drinker and i like rum there's a discount but only if you buy more than two boxes but a small one is on the house it's from the world thanks a lot cheers the ram is given a lot of time to mature in solitude there are no tours of the distillery and no ads well behind us curtain is a secret what we cannot let out for like the customers so it'll go way back and so we have to keep that like how it is nobody not allowed upstairs through this door so we leave it like that [Music] the midday heat burns down on tortoise bays and mountains at the little island bar at trellis bay it's shady and fairly cool [Music] the hermit crabs houses are decorated creatively so that they can be distinguished every tuesday evening there is a race at the island bar the crab rays the claws are very sharp so once they clip on you they clip and make you bleed so you sometimes when you see they're coming out to do it you have to let them go a funky crap runner requires a groovy name i'm gonna name her purple rain i'm doing a very glittery design because i love glitter and i love the color purple so she's gonna be my little art for today she doesn't really like it so she's a bit of a runner right now there we have it purple rain and then the two female bar keepers jamila victor and rice baltimore assigned the bip numbers crap races are a fun activity with sophisticated rules and i'm going to paint her number her racing number on her and there is her number number 11. but there's a twist in regards to the numbers that are painted on the shelves bar keeper gabriel woodward already experienced quite some surprises they switch shells by night so you never know you can't really know yeah they well sometimes sometimes they do yeah like this guy if they're the same size but yeah so i don't know it depends some get tired out by night because we'll test we'll test raise them so they might be tired after that they're all so pretty though you did a good job which one you think might be the fastest oh no it's so hard to tell i got my money on purple rain therefore for revitalization the hermit crabs are fed some dog food [Music] in the north of tortola way up on the steep hillside there is an organic farm salad spinach papaya avocado fruit and pineapples are grown here the terraced fields were used for growing sugarcane for the rum distilleries before aragorn dick reed and his helpers can harvest fresh arugula today it's about time right now we're blessed because it rained just a little bit in the past week but before that we had like three weeks of no rain at all and um it was uh it was scary but right now we're pretty much out but so we've had three nights of enough rain to make everything you know go back in back in action aragorn is part of a network of activists who intend to revitalize self-sufficiency on the island these fields were overgrown for decades there's a weird situation we're in in tortola where since the beginning of human habitation on these islands there has never been so little food grown as there is now and now is the point where it's the most populated it's ever been in history which is pretty strange and not very stable but when i was a kid there were people farming not all of these hillsides but in parts and it was still a strong part of the whole culture but the big seller of his fruit and vegetable farm are the birds of paradise that's what they call the exotic flowers that are mandatory for every holiday photo taken at the caribbean aragorn needs to hurry as is expected down at the bay he'll start his delivery rounds later tonight [Music] roadtown the capital isn't just a destination for yachts and cruise ships it's also a safe haven for the assets of tax dodgers from all around the world half a million offshore companies are suspected to exist on the british virgin islands high above town at the mountain site of mount sage is alexandra durante's small business a startup inside a bedroom here alexandra manufactures bathing soap from the salt of salt island it's a clean business even though she almost landed a job with the money laundering industry i went to school for accounting because as well as tourism here in tortola it's big in trust companies and so i thought i'd might go into accounting but um after a summer of you know in that field it wasn't for me you know i need to be out and working with my hand for me my philosophy is you know i'd rather be happy doing something i love than you know making money and something that i don't really love doing um it's not my passion this is my passion before she can add the harvested salt alexandra needs to mix the base ingredients of her soap oil fragrances colors sodium hydroxide the recipe isn't a big secret but there are some tricks i think it's more like an art you either can make soap or you can't make soap you can either paint or you can't paint you know um it's you can have a recipe but if you don't know what to do with it then it's you know it's not gonna do anything for you soap with sea salt alexandra first heard of this at a soap makers workshop in florida the salt should work like a peeling and rejuvenate the skin [Music] not a few crystals on top almost done the mixture now needs to harden in the mold for a few days then alexandra will be able to cut it into soap bars pretty proud of myself it's beautiful alexandra's father built the soap cutter out of his old guitar two bars of sea salt soap are already done see it's a mixture of the sand and the salt and the pumice an island with salt on its doorstep and always a few new business ideas um salt i mean they've been using salt for hundreds of years to salt from salting beef to you know obviously now we're putting them in baths so i don't i don't think it'll ever go to waste and it'll never die down it'll be always a tradition in our daily staple of life i don't think you can really recreate salt so they'll still be here [Music] at the tiny bar island preparations for the crab race get into top gear the bar keepers start the test runs the hermit crab that reaches the rope ring first is ranked highest [Music] pretty quick 11. yeah fourteen it's like and right purple rain trails far behind maybe it was a bit too much glitter as during a horse race there are test runs now they picked the runners for the evening we rank them we rank them fastest to slowest and then we put them in tears the fastest guys in tier ones slower guys tier two two three and then the slowest in tier four so tier one if you bet on him you would get a you would win a beer if he if your crab won and then the second tier you would get a soft drink if your guy won if he was a tier two crab and then tier three would be a dessert if your crab won and he was from tier three and then tier four who's the underdog there's only one crab 13 this guy right here he's the slowest so if he wins and you bet on him it'd be a whole entree whoever bets on the loser of the training runs today's number 13 has a chance for the biggest win at trellis bay beach organic farmer aragon dick reid prepares for his evening delivery rounds the yards anchoring at the bay want to stash the flavors of the caribbean they need room they need one to keep them sailing and they need fresh food they've come to paradise so we'd deliver it's all part of the the plan it is and this is the boat shopping i think we're ready every evening at six o'clock shop aragorn starts his hustle as he calls his tour on a swimming village shop the british virgin islands are a very popular sailing area especially among u.s american families hey guys how are you all hey good day guys hey wonder if you'd like anything fresh from the farm or any fresh fake breads yeah how are you all today no i'm real hippie that would be a hard thing to define in a bit of a bracket aragorn's tour is off to a good start the family from baltimore is in a buying mood papaya mango bread and flowers eighty dollars from the first yacht tax-free there you go that's a beautiful sight which is the lucky lady that's what i want to see who's going to be the bring her out here the beautiful smile that's fantastic cool that's a nice shot aragorn needs to hurry one of his regulars is waiting at the harbour of scrub island it's a millionaire from boston on his luxury yacht accompanied by his skipper and personal chef [Music] where'd you go today well i've got a little selection of what we picked this morning oh bok choy wow yeah i got some me and we're gonna have that tonight yeah we're gonna have that good good we're not ready for them yeah give those away give them two days yeah excellent yeah very nice yeah they love it looks new they're ready wow um papaya ready to go it's a good evening for aragorn he has chosen the right selection of goods and always hits the right mood with british decency in the morning he has an important appointment among his clients are also millionaires who own their own private island [Music] high tension at the island bar it's after eight o'clock and the first run of the legendary crap race is about to start the staff is betting too in order to cheer up the mood [Applause] [Music] gabriel woodward is also the bookkeeper tonight the steak is one dollar per crab center the first crab to touch the rope we'll lift the top and the first one to touch the rope each race lasts about one minute but the first run already delivers a surprise [Applause] [Music] purple rain lacks far behind again flesh number 11 he's not in a good shape it's sensational the loser from the training run wins tonight [Applause] uh number 13. lucky for some right so number 13 best number in the world died everybody just be cool right number 13 as well the underdog yeah winners winners champions man champions everyone is in a betting frenzy the main dish they won will be served [Music] later this strange cargo on tortola's coastal road is meant for aragon dick reed the roadtown port authority has taken some boys out of servers the organic farmer has another string to his bow he also works with steel [Music] yeah i get them from the sole fuel depot where they tie up their tankers to them so these are the ones that they're getting rid of and so i'm recycling them basically they once we grind off the rust and with paint we're actually pretty usable and they've they've got a lot of years there's fireballs ahead of them so that's the name of the game here these heavy monsters are unpredictable they roll around better be careful but it's a long way from the discarded mooring ton to the flame spitting fireball [Music] first they need to be moved from the truck to the workshop [Applause] and then the arduous part begins aragon uses a plasma torch to burn ornaments into the rusty balls of steel he likes sun patterns best but his demanding clientele often has unusual wishes i've done one for richard branson just recently that was a fun project because it had scenes of sort of all of his friends that have visited necker island so there was mandela there was lady dye and his princess the princess and mick jagger so they were all kind of richard branson's good friends which was cool this fireball costs ten thousand dollars richard branson's special order cost a bit more singing and the sound of the ukulele belong to carrot bay like the rushing of the surf or the screeching of the turtle my girlfriend [Music] donovan likes to sing all day long because he is in a good mood and he attracts customers with it he writes his own song lyrics as well as the many epigraphs he sells handwritten cheeky four liners in his caribbean pigeon english life is high help me jane jane what can i do she said go and look thank you egbert needs to paint a new sign because he just sold this little joke to an american woman at a signing then a lady her husband was a very lazy guy so she see the sign and she decides she's going and she'd take me back to the states to her husband let him see what people thinking out there edward thought that the original version was a bit too harsh john tell his wife jane life is so hard she tell him get up your all ass and go look walk she tell has many business ideas too up in the village he has his own little seashell museum inside the ruins of a hotel he runs a restaurant a telephone repair shop and does musical shows there is always something going on but edward's little wisdoms of life are the biggest seller the old man with the beautiful lady but he cannot sleep with his two eye clothes hell why you see he said that his lady his wife was a beautiful lady but everybody looking at her so when he now go to sleep she disappeared so he decide he have to sleep one eye closed one eye open to see when she going out of the house [Music] at trellis bay beach the spirit expellers on their stilts prepare for their show chevron and his moko jumbies it's a premiere for jamal he is quite excited romantic graduation i feel extra anxious in the world like the music have to get good music to get me anxious yeah and i get extra hype and actually perform better yeah and i'm more anxious i love doing it yeah ah yeah the costumes are homemade onesies with three meter long legs it is said that moko jumbies have magical powers but in any case they are an attraction with me aragorn dick reed employed chevron's troop for a little party at his workshop he has a reason to celebrate well i just finished this new ball so we're doing a little um celebration ceremony just to christen the ball you know make it come a light and um we hope it's going to catch fire and then i've invited some mokka zombie buddies of mine to come and bless it chevon and his stilts dancers expel all the evil spirits so that life on the british virgin islands here in the caribbean can remain relaxed and easy going [Music] now [Music] you

Channel: Free Documentary - Nature

Views: 527,186

Rating: 4.7181997 out of 5

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full documentary, HD documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), nature documentary, Free Documentary Nature, Nature Documentary, Free Nature Documentary, Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, Caribbean, Caribbean Islands, Lesser Antilles, British Overseas Territories, Leeward Islands, Travel Documentary, Free Nature Docuemtary 2020, Travel British Virgin Islands, Vacation Caribbean, Caribbean 2020, Rum, rum distillery, Bikini

Id: 0yImINjgAUM

Length: 43min 57sec (2637 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020