Company provides visitors tuktuk tours
Antigua’s Elroy Emanuel serves as something of a historian, botanist, tour guide and operator of a type of transportation that would seemingly be more at home on the streets of a major city half a world away.
Emanuel is with tour company Rock Adventures Antigua, which includes among its offerings tutktuk tours that showcase both urban and rural Antigua, using a three-wheeled vehicle also used to wheel people around Bangkok in that Thai city’s notorious traffic.
Rock Adventures Antigua’s fleet of brightly coloured tuktuks — imported from Bangkok — have cushioned seating and plastic sheeting that’s rolled up on sunny days and lowered on rainy ones, keeping passengers dry.
“It’s more open. You feel like you’re closer to nature,” Emanuel says of choosing a tuktuk tour over a more conventional form of tour vehicle, such as a van.
Rock Adventures Antigua’s tuktuk operators are given a lengthy course on operating the vehicles before being cleared to take people on tour.
The tuktuks can top 60 mph, although Rock Adventures Antigua clients will travel at a much slower pace, enabling them to take in the scenic island’s sights, among them historical structures, including a long-standing prison that Emanuel reports has at times had to deal with overcrowding. (“You sleep standing up.”)
The affable Emanuel – who frequently waves at island residents he knows during his tours – also likes to point out different plants to tourists, including distinctive Antiguan pineapples, which he notes, grow from the ground, not on trees.
Also pointed out are the homes of people who have reached the age of 100 or more, with Emanuel happy to share wise counsel on living long. “Eat from the ground,” with those who grow their own food avoiding unhealthy preservatives, he advises.
Green Antigua is also home to 365 beaches, prompting locals to declare they have a beach for each day of the year and Emanuel to tell his clients before they set off that he’s “Going to show you a little bit of paradise.”
Emanuel says he and his colleagues frequently park their tuktuks at a cruise ship port when a ship is docking with the Asian transportation quickly attracting a crowd when cruise ship passengers disembark..
And Emanuel’s colleague Ray Pile says if he evers visits the Thai capital he’ll be certain to hop into a tuktuk in a city synonymous with them.
“That would be my first mode of transportation,” he says of riding a tuktuk in Bangkok. “I would be really excited to do that.”
