A friend once told me my column had a problem. "Theo," he said, "you write like the whole world is next door to Tobago." He meant it as a complaint. I took it as the highest compliment I have ever received, because for the traveller I write for, the whole world should feel next door.
For years I wrote a travel column, Cruising 101, that ran in the Tobago News, and the same pieces travelled, like a good passenger, to the St. Lucia Star and Dominica News Online. I wrote about the things nobody was explaining to us plainly: how to beat a baggage fee, why the dining room beats the buffet, which of our Caricom passports open the most doors. Back in 2014 I even trademarked a phrase for the idea I kept circling: No USA Visa Cruises™.
I stopped writing for a while. The world got harder for people who carry passports like ours, with more refusals and more suspicion at counters that were never built with us in mind. And somewhere in that difficulty, the old idea stopped being a column and became a conviction.
The idea was always simple
You do not need permission from one country to see the rest of them.
A traveller from Georgetown, Kingston or Port-of-Spain can reach Europe, Africa, Latin America and much of Asia without a US visa and without setting foot in a US airport. That is not a workaround. For seventeen years it has been the specialty of my company, Cruise & Rail Travel, the Home of No USA Visa Cruises. What has changed is that it is now a platform you can use yourself.
What this Journal is for
Three things, the same three I always wrote about:
- Where you can actually go. Start with your own passport on the destination guides. The list is longer than most people believe.
- How to get there well. Routes, layovers, cruises and rail that skip the US entirely. You can search live fares now, every option filtered so it never touches the United States.
- How to build something out there. For the founders and exporters among us, the corridors to Africa, the wider Caribbean and Europe are trade routes, not just holidays.
A word to my old readers
If you read Cruising 101 a decade ago, thank you. You are the reason I never really put the pen down. The column is back, the destinations are bigger, and this time you can act on every word.
So, the same way I always closed: do you have a question, an idea, or a trip you can't quite figure out? Write to me. You might find yourself in the next piece.