About the Online Beach Bar
The Online Beach Bar is a source of inspiration, stories and information about the Caribbean islands: the hotels in which to stay, places to eat, the most rewarding activities and places to visit and of course the best places - many of them beach bars – in which to relax. Also stories about travel and life in the islands, at the eccentric Coconut of Damocles. It is the creation of James Henderson, a travel writer who has been visiting the Caribbean islands for nearly 40 years to write guide books and articles in the British national press.
Travellers invest more than just their money when they have a Caribbean holiday. The islands are so beautiful and often so enchanting that many visitors find themselves falling in love with the place and returning again and again. Our aim is to help them find places that are most suited to them and to make sure they have the best possible visit. The Caribbean islands have amazing variety, so there is something for everyone.
The Online Beach Bar is independent and its aim is to present the Caribbean in a fair and representative way. While he would be the first to say that he loves the Caribbean, his work for the UK national press James Henderson has given him a trained critical eye and he believes in a policy of independent judgement.
If you would like to contact us at the Online Beach Bar, then do please visit our Contact Page. However, if you are looking for current information about the Caribbean you might also like to join our facebook and Linked in groups, where there are discussions about the islands and the Caribbean tourism industry. You can also follow us on Instagram
About James Henderson
James Henderson has been travelling in and writing about the Caribbean since June 1989, when he first set foot on Seven Mile Beach on Grand Cayman. He cut his writer’s teeth foot-slogging around the islands researching guide books – The Cadogan Guide to the Caribbean and the Bahamas (six editions, 1990-2003), the AA Explorer Guide to the Caribbean and others.
At the same time he has written for the UK national press, including the Financial Times, the Telegraph, the Times, Conde Nast Traveller, Elle magazine and plenty of others. In 2003 he co-founded, edited and wrote much of DefinitiveCaribbean.com, a huge Caribbean website, until its sale in 2010.
The Caribbean has been an amazing office. James Henderson has visited more than 100 islands, cays and sandbars in 30 different political denominations. He has ‘played mas’ (danced in the carnival parade) in Trinidad, attended voodoo pilgrimages in Haiti, kayaked (almost) the length of the Exumas in the Bahamas and bathed among the ghostly green whorls of the phosphorescent lagoon in Vieques. And he has spent countless sunsets watching for - and seen twice - the Green Flash. He travels to the Caribbean as much as possible to keep up to date and to provide the most in-depth critical knowledge of the area for the UK consumer press. There have been a few notable moments, among them a prediction that on a bad day at work James Bond would eventually end up on Arecibo Observatory. It came about in Goldeneye (see Pierce Brosnan vs Sean Bean at the culmination of Goldeneye).
Unfortunately James Henderson doesn’t look great in a bikini, so the world of Caribbean social influencers rather passed him by. However, with the changes in social media, he will be putting more of his knowledge and stories on line at the Online Beach Bar.
For what it is worth, James Henderson is also a (mostly former) extreme sportsman who, when he wasn’t dozing in a hammock or counting grains of sand on Caribbean beaches, used to run across deserts, mountains and jungles (often to write about it in the UK papers). He ran the Marathon des Sables before most people realised it was a thing, kayaked the Greek Islands in the trail of World War II raiders and he competed in six Eco-Challenges, top finish 5th= (Morocco 1999). He still just about puts himself out there: in 2019 he became painfully acquainted with the new vogue of bike-packing in the 1040km non-stop Bikingman ‘sprint’ in Oman, and followed this in 2023 by completing 45 South-West (a 4400km self-supported cycle race from Krakow in Poland to Tarifa at the southern tip of Spain). He has followed the cycle tracks of the youthful Lawrence of Arabia and has plans for many more adventures. If you like an adventure, check out his other website, ALifeofAdventure.net