Our driver pulled the cab to the side of the road and we dismounted, leaving the air conditioning behind and stepping back in to the mid-June Tortola humidity. Ken paid the fare, then ushered me toward the most dilapidated, neglected building I’d ever seen. Bomba’s truly was a shack—there’s no other way to describe it. Imagine if someone had collected every piece of scrap plywood and every tin roof from every condemned building and assembled (I use this term very, very loosely) it on the most picturesque white sand postcard beach with absolutely no regard for aesthetics, security or safety. Above the makeshift shanty myriad flags flapped lazily—the red-and-white divers’ flag; a green Heineken promo; the skull-and-crossbones Jolly Roger; the blue British Virgin Islands flag featuring the Union Jack in one corner and a central image of St. Ursula (the patron saint of the BVI, clad in white and flanked by a dozen golden oil lamps).
Across the dirt road stood a younger- and more sturdy-looking row of booths referred to as the vendors’ pavilion, where my father informed me we’d need to purchase tickets ($1 for 1 ticket) that we’d use as currency while at the Full Moon Party. Sidled up alongside the ticket booth were t-shirt and beer stations, all manned by friendly locals decked out in their finest carnival attire. All around us people were singing, dancing, drinking, smoking, carousing, flirting, swearing, puking, buying, selling, kissing, pissing, stripping, shouting in a dozen different languages all at once… and every few feet hand-lettered signs announced in bold, black letters: NO VIDEO. Apparently what happens at Bomba’s stays at Bomba’s.
We approached the booth and bought $20 worth of tickets, enough to get us a few beers and a plastic mug full of mushroom tea at the stroke of midnight. After procuring two cold Coronas, Ken gave me the dime tour of the rest of Bomba’s compound (meaning we took a short lap around the beachside clapboard shack); the most amazing part of the whole enterprise wasn't the fact that the building was still standing—I’d heard that every time a hurricane blows through, the locals all help Bomba track down the strewn pieces and put the thing back together—but the amount of flotsam and jetsam tacked, pinned, glued or otherwise stuck to the walls. It looked as if everyone who had ever visited had signed his or her name or left behind a photograph or some other memento of the visit. “We love Bomba” must have been scrawled a hundred times between rusty old metal beer signs and license plates, busted-up lobster traps, a discarded Coleman lantern, and even an abandoned 10-horsepower outboard motor wedged into the crotch of a tree.
Note: here's a photo of Bomba's Shack for reference.
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