Meg: Can you tell me about your background?
Ean: I was born in Trinidad but much of my young life during the holidays was spent on Tobago. My parents along with others started one of the earlier hotels here called Crown Point Hotel, which the Queen visited. Princess Margaret also came to Tobago for her honeymoon—they built a special cottage we called the Queen’s Cottage, which is still there. In those days–the late ’50s–it was one of the best hotels in the Caribbean. With the success of that hotel they built what is now the Coco Reef Hotel. Tobago in those days was extremely unspoiled and unique and to some degree it’s still that way.
I grew up with a hotel background. It was like a little Robinson Crusoe experience for a young boy in those days. In fact, the Swiss Family Robinson was filmed here. You couldn’t come to Tobago by jet aircraft until about 1989. You came on a smaller plane and you landed on a grass runway. Before the planes landed people at the airport would go along with a Land Rover to chase all the cows and sheep and the other animals off the runway.
I went to school in Trinidad and then my parents sent me away to England to study. I left here when I was about 11 years old, but I came back every two years on holidays. I finally returned to Tobago when I was 24.
I came back to Tobago because I had fond childhood memories and I wanted to give the island something back with my knowledge gained overseas in the hospitality industry as well.
I went to work for the Radisson Crown Reef Hotel, which is now the Coco Reef Hotel—it is considered the best hotel on the island. So with the knowledge and overseas experience I gained away, I trained the staff there. Then I worked at three other properties on the island and did the same thing. So a lot of the hospitality staff in Tobago may have worked with me at some stage of their career.
Meg: I understand you developed an environmentally-conscious irrigation technique.
Ean: We have a new technology I developed as a way of using up waste products. I saw that it worked during a drought a few years ago when only the irrigated trees survived.
After we built the villas we had a lot of pipes left over, so my wife was always remarking it looks unsightly so I had to find a way of getting rid of it. I set up a system so that when you plant a sapling tree, you put the pipe straight into the ground and it has this soft drink container (again left over from the guest) at the top. If there’s a passing rain shower, it collects the rain or if there’s dew at night, it collects the dew. It can also be filled at the top and the water filters through the pipe slowly and goes straight to the root of the plant as opposed to being wasted at the surface of the plant. If you want to slow it down you just put some leaves in it. So it’s very cheap technology and it works.
