Denniblog

Today the situation at the maxi terminal was reversed: the platform was crawling with people, but there were no maxis. However we didn’t have to wait for long. One of the things I love about the maxis here are the little spare seats that prop up in the most unlikely places—disguised as arm-rests—when you think that they could really not fit in any more people.

Another thing I love about T&T are the epiphytes that grow on the powerlines (at least in the rainy season). The jungle is encroaching on the towns and cities. Even in Port of Spain, you can see brightly coloured tropical birds.

Once we’d arrived in Arima, I walked away from the maxi stand and headed north. There were no signs and nothing what looked like a main road to Blanchisseuse, but a man told me to “just walk up the hill”, and what a hill it was! (I have a picture, but I can currently not upload any files. There will be limited blogging and photos in the coming two weeks unless I decide to go back to Tobago).

Arima is bigger than Sangre Grande. It is one of those places that you think you never get out of, and it took me a good half-hour to do so. By then I had resigned myself to walking all the way, if necessary. I’d had enough of cities; I wanted rainforest.

A guy stopped to shake hands. “Where to?”

“Asa Wright.”

His expression turned serious. “Take care of yourself. Yong Shan has robbers.”

I have no idea whether he said ‘Yong Shan’ or ‘San Juan’ but the way he said it, it sounded vaguely Chinese. And why not? They have tribal names here, French names, Spanish ones, English—not to mention Scottish—why not also Chinese?

All I cared about was the mention of robbers. I stuffed the pillbox with my Xanax down my trouser pocket, put 20TT in my chest pocket and another five in my other trouser pocket, so that I would have enough for a maxi home. I only carried what I thought I would need for the day: about 90TT which was enough to cover the entry fee to the Asa Wright Nature reserve.

If I ever got there.

About a mile on there was still no sign of virgin jungle, or of a robber village. A red-banded maxi drew to a halt ahead of me.

“You’re going to Asa Wright?”

I nodded.

“I’m not going that far, but I can take you to the entrance of the forest.” The driver slid open the door. He was an Indian guy in his fifties. “You’ve got to be careful around here, you know.”

“I’ve heard. A man just told me about robbers.”

He appraised me. “If there’s some guys, meeting a single girl like you, it’s not robbers you got to worry about.”

Go on, say it.

“It’s—you know—rape.”
[read on]

I didn’t get an early start, since it was necessary to go back onto the Vitamin X. This time, I waited for a full hour before leaving the house, and I took a booster dose two hours in. This regime seems to work, although it took over three and a half hours before I was fully relaxed.

I wanted an easy trip, so I decided to head to Mananzilla Bay.

The maxi to Sangre Grande was an express service. The driver collected the fare in advance (8TT) and then put his foot down, not stopping on the way. The trip took barely an hour.

This time, I took my time before anyone could usher me into a waiting maxi or route taxi that was headed back to where I had just come from. Sangre Grande has more charm than San Fernando (for one, it’s the fruit & veg capital of the region), but there isn’t much to see besides fruit stalls and fast food joints, so I didn’t linger.

The road to Mananzilla (there is a sign) runs past the big blue police station a short way into town from the bus terminal. A bunch of people were already waiting by the shops next to it. On a Sunday, the wait can be long. Most drivers gave the international hitchhiker signal for ‘I’m staying (in the area)’. Taxis and maxis passing us were on private hire. The couple next to me kept shouting “Manan!” and eventually a driver signalled by circling his arm (there is a whole secret language here) and pulled in.

Places to stay in Mananzilla are limited, but the young man pointed out Dougie’s Guesthouse at the entrance to the village (120TT/20US for a nice apartment w/o aircon. 1(565)668-1504/cell 340-0123. See, I can do that Lonely Planet stuff!), a 15-20 minutes walk from the beach.

The beach itself is beautiful and wild, but I wouln’t want to go snorkelling there even if there was coral in Trinidad. The sea was whipped up and flecks of rust-coloured foam blew onto the sand from where I expected a pipe outlet to be. A dead catfish lay at my feet. As I bent down to examine it, something caught my eye.

Twenty metres above my head, a palm was swaying in the breeze. One of the brownish-yellow nuts had detached itself and was hurtling down, ripped sideways by the wind, until it struck the sand with a wet thud within spitting distance of where I stood. Yep, it can really happen.

There are no route taxis from the beach facility, so I trudged back into town. I passed two fishermen with their catch. Bake & Shark is really made with shark: one of the men carried two baby sharks—which I didn’t recognise—and a hammerhead no longer than his forearm.

The maxis offload in front of the bus terminal, but that appeared not to be where they pick up as most disappeared onwards into town. The people waiting to go elsewhere sent me into the other direction, down what appeared to be an deserted road. I passed another, smaller, blue Municipal Police station and came to a red-and-white building at the top of a desolate parking lot where a lone maxi was waiting. This was part of the Sangre Grande transport hub, and we left quite soon, with people appearing seemingly from out of nowhere or being dropped off by car.

A menacing cloud appeared overhead and let rip. I picked up my coconut and sought shelter under the roof of a public convenience, next to a couple of stone benches and tables where a group of dodgy looking men hung out whom I’d taken care to avoid. They smiled and moved over to make room.

The rain had not yet built up to full monsoon strength, so I nipped over to the coconut seller across from us and he opened the nut for me. As I scooped out the jelly-like flesh, the rain picked up. We were joined by two women, also munching on coconuts and chicken. When we had finished our respective meals, the seller came to collect the empty shells before joining us under the increasingly crowded roof.

“Are you enjoying Trinidad?” one of the dodgy looking men asked.

“Yes.”

He smiled again. “Just be careful, you know…”

I waited—entirely unmolested—until the rain slowed to a dusty drizzle and then slithered down Charlotte Street. It’s impossible to keep your feet dry during the rainy season and my flip-flops turned to soap-shoes on the glistening pavement. The damn things are the most comfortable flip-flops I’ve ever owned, but I got them in Australia where it rains less.

There was no sign of any maxis at the corner of Charlotte Street and Duke Street, but there was a line of people waiting. One of the women smiled at me.

“You’re waiting for a maxi?” I said, grabbing the opportunity.

“Maxi? No. Where do you want to go?”

“Blanchisseuse.”

“Oh, not here! You have to go to the City Gate, way back there,” she pointed south.

“I know, I’ve just come from there. They sent me here.” That wasn’t true, but I wasn’t going to pull out my faded LP printout again to show her the map where the alleged maxi stand was indicated.

“Don’t get into no maxi over here,” the woman said. “You can go from City Gate to anywhere in Trinidad, but don’t just get into any maxi. It’s not save.”

“OK.”

“It’s not safe,” she implored.

“OK, I’ll go to City Gate.”

“God bless. Be careful.”

“You too.”

*

“Be careful,” that is what people keep saying to me. The guy who sold me a pack of cigarettes this morning had said it. The woman I spoke to in the maxi from San Fernando to La Brea had said it. The bloke who sold me a second hand Ann MacCaffrey novel from a street stall had said it too.

Be careful.

And it’s true, you have to be careful here. Across from me in the internet café sat a Dutchman who had been mugged a few days ago. He’d lost his camera, money, driver’s license, passport—everything. It made the papers, which are full of stories about stabbings and shootings. His was the only feature about a tourist being robbed. By my reckoning there are at least fifty tourists in Trinidad right now, so I figure I stand a chance of escaping unscathed.

Today I’ve made it to Manzanilla and back without being robbed, but I was nearly slain by a coconut which dropped from a great height onto the wet sand next to me.

Staying at the Asa Wright Nature Centre is forbiddingly expensive, and not just for backpackers. I might have to do the bird reserve as a day visit, which sucks because the best birdwatching is early in the morning. Alternatively it is possible to stay at the nearby Alta Vista Rainforest Resort (the text is black on a black background so you have to highlight it to see it. Maybe they’ll let me stay for free if I offer my services as a web designer.), but the cabins are 200TT a night. While that is reasonable, it is also my entire daily budget. The pound has reached parity with the euro.

I thought I’d have a look anyway and hopped on a maxi to Arima. There wasn’t much to see; the rainforest starts just north of the town. The drive from Arima to Blanchisseuse is said to be legendary.

I had hardly touched foot on the pavement when I was approached by another maxi driver.

“Where you going? Arouca?”

“Blanchisseuse.”

“Where?”

I showed him on the map. He squinted, but the rain had obscured the print. He ought to know it though; you can’t miss it since it’s right on the beach.

“Never worry yourself,” he said. “Get in.”

Arima holds the record for my all-time shortest stop-over.

By Gods, I thought, contemplating the scenery through the open window, travelling around Trinidad is so easy, a seven year old child could do it.

I was wondering where the forest would begin and if there would be enough light to snap some pictures. Fifty metre high trees are said to grow right next to—and over—the road. But we were still in conurbia.

We passed a building I recognized. The Faith Assembly. Maybe all their churches have a uniform look. Odd though that I hadn’t seen any on my way south.

The names of the pastors were the same.

If I had paid attention to the Lonely Planet, I might have remembered that maxis to Blanchisseuse leave from the corner of Charlotte Street and Duke Street, and not from the City Gate terminal, or—apparently—from Arima.

I’ll try it the other way round tomorrow.

The Germans were blissfully away last night, but this morning they returned with a vengeance. I hated to hear their voices outside in the corridor; I hate the sound of that language. I hated how they clattered about the place, claiming both the porch and the kitchen. It was like being back at boarding school.

Their irritating presence and the bleak outlook the French guy had given me depressed my mood. Suddenly I wanted to go home. I missed company at the same time as I craved privacy. Nineteen more days of this did not appeal.

There was only one place to go when I was feeling like that: Chaguaramas. Trinidad’s very own Crown Point.

Except that Chaguaramas is nothing like Crown Point.

I couldn’t tell where the town began, although the military museum (closed today) should have been a giveaway. The place was once a US base—there are still several military establishments on the site—and the whole thing has a barracks feel to it, even though it wasn’t barracks that I saw behind the barbed wire fences as the maxi passed them, but dozens of dockyards. And boats—hundreds, if not thousands, of boats.

But no sailors. I had my answer as to why they didn’t make for Tobago instead of coming here: they had left their boats behind and headed off.

I did likewise, jumping on a passing bus to race against the ominous grey clouds that were balling up over Port of Spain.

I failed to beat the monsoon by about five minutes and got as drenched as if I’d just emerged from a Miss Wet T-Shirt competition.

“When does the dry season start?” I panted as I crossed the hall.

“Around June,” said the landlord.

“Can’t be. In my guidebook it says December.”

“Patterns are changing,” he said.

Patterns are changing everywhere. Sometimes it feels like a slow-motion apocalypse.

On the way to San Fernando I had seen firework stalls everywhere. Long before dark, bangers exploded in the distance, sending the pack of guard dogs at Pearl’s into a frenzy.

New Year’s Eve would be a lively affair.

I sat down to write, but jumped when a cracker went off like a gun shot down in the street. Then another. The boys from the house were setting them off to get the dogs used to it. The dogs were cooped up in the back, and they kept largely quiet. I was still quite sensitive to noise, but the habituation effect worked on me too.

For a while all was quiet, as if the city was holding its breath for the New Year. At nine thirty three French guests arrived. I cleared some space in the fridge and was pleased to note that the sink and table were clean after I’d mentioned it yesterday. The German Medical Convention was oozing out over the place like a fungal growth. But they had learned to replenish the ice and I set out a bowl, although I ended up being the only one using it to top up my rum while the French sucked on some beers.

The French—two guys and a woman— were tired after an arduous journey from French Guiana and mainly wanted to relax, but we talked briefly about our respective adventures. It was great to meet some real travellers again.

“Do you knowwhy there are no women around in the north of Trinidad?” the older guy asked.

“What do you mean?” But I could guess.

“You don’t see them in the street. Just the men.”

“You mean in the bars and restaurants there are only men as well?”

“Exactly.” He pulled a face. “It’s not nice. It’s—”

Sordid.

I nodded and told him about Charlotteville and Roxborough.

“And Parlatuvier?” He pronounced it properly.

“Don’t know; I haven’t been there. After Charlotteville, I had enough.”

So the north of Trinidad is the same. A paradise for drunks. A no-go zone for women.

“You should have no trouble,” I said, looking at the Frenchwoman. “They’re mostly harmless, and you’re with a group.”

She didn’t look too happy and the older guy—who spoke the best English as well as some German—grimaced on her behalf. His sentiments echoed those of the German traveller I had talked to on the way from Charlotteville to Scarborough. It seems that even guys don’t enjoy the company of bums.

To think that I had carried the tent all this way, planning to stay at Marianne’s Beach Resort at Cumana Bay…

Charlotteville is one of the most beautiful places I have seen, and worth millions for the community in terms of small-scale tourism businesses, but it seems that they’re pissing it all away. There and here.

The French made their excuses at a scant twenty minutes to midnight.

“But you’ll miss the New Year! You’ll wake up!”

They grinned tiredly.

“Trust me,” said the guy. “We’ll be out like a light.”

So they went to their rooms and I went back out onto the porch. The time was ten to midnight. The streets were eerily quiet. A sparkler went of somewhere behind the trees, too far to see.

And then it happened. I shouted down the last seconds countdown while the boys got ready with their bangers and a torch. It was basically a repeat of the their earlier hosing around. The sky remained dark.

I’d seen more action on Guy Fawkes Night.

Then, suddenly, all the car alarms started sounding at once and the dogs were howling as crackers were let off all over the city. The sky may have failed to light up, but that was because people prefer to hold on to their fireworks here:

Figuring out the maxi system in Port of Spain can be confusing, although it doesn’t look so at first sight. Some of the platforms at the terminal—adjacent to City Gate Bus Station—display signs that say ‘loading only’ or ‘offloading only’ from ‘6-9 a.m.’. For some unfathomable reason, no maxi would leave for San Fernando until eleven.

I discarded my plan to head to La Brea (for the Pitch Lake) and decided to divert to Chaguanas instead.

it was curiously quiet. I had taken my time over breakfast (cheese crackers and ChocNut) and arrived at the terminal around a quarter to nine, but it would have made no difference if I’d been earlier. The commuter traffic seemed to be strictly one-way.

At nine o’clock sharp, the maxi diverted to another platform where ‘offloading’ had just finished and ‘loading’ presumably began. There were no waiting passengers.

While the engine idled—fuelling the aircon—I considered my plans. The PSTC was running a range of affordable ‘Know Your Country’ tours at weekends, and I was armed with a list of destinations but little else. The Caroni Bird Sanctuary was obviously top of the picks, but the scarlet ibis fly in to roost at sunset and the sky was still overcast in the evenings. I would have to wait and see if the weather improved towards the end of the week. The rain season was due to come to an end.

Touring around Trinidad by maxi was supposed to give me some pointers, as well as allowing me to select a place to stay during my final two weeks. Probably not in Chaguanas where robberies and street crimes had got so out of hand in the run-up to Christmas that the mayor had made a public appeal for people to stay away. The shopkeepers wouldn’t have thanked him, nor would they have welcomed the rogue street vendors who blocked their entrances and sometimes colluded with the robbers (turning up the music to conceal the screams). The police was overwhelmed and the army was getting twitchy.

I mulled this over while we stood on the hot tarmac and waited. The radio was tuned to a risible Eighties station, and I began to regret my decision to travel soouth, looking at columns of red-banded maxis that drove past our solitary green-banded van.

Maxis willl leave when they are full. They don’t stop to pick up en route in Port of Spain. Maybe I should go back to the PSTC. The buses here were likely to run more frequently than in Tobago. But the terminal was forbidding. There were no posted schedules (not even vague ones) and the information booth didn’t look like it sold tickets. The attendant kept her windows firmly closed to preserve the aircon and I didn’t really want to go back and ask.

But when Lady in Red came on, I had enough and jumped out of the van. We had amassed all of three passengers by then.

The ticket booth was a hole in the wall next to the stairs, but the fare to San Fernando was a bargain 6 TT, which is less than quoted in the LP. The tickets are indeed interchangeable—the 2TT ticket I had bought to get from Crown Point to Scarborough was valid here—which made me feel a little richer.

The San Fernando bus left from a corner of the terminal where there was no shade and no benches. There was a long queue. I wrote my notes standing up, glancing longingly at the paper that lay at my feet, but the bus came in twenty minutes. It was a big, bendy job which would be full. People would have to stand, but—unlike in Tobago—boarding was orderly.

Why were there so few maxis? We passed hundreds of empty, parked red-band maxis, but no green ones.

At San Fernando, I looked in the wrong direction, lured by the sea. San Fernando is industrial and there is nothing much to see. The fish market opposite the bus station is a sordid place.

I turned back in the vague hope of finding a grill that wasn’t mainly a bar and was approached by a maxi driver before I had taken more than a few steps.

“Pitch Lake? This way!” He made a sweeping motion and the door of a brown-banded maxi glided open to admit me. A row of them was parked opposite the Sea View Restaurant.

Maxis are more relaxed than buses. People boarded with snacks and cold drinks and one bloke clutched a bottle of beer. Someone offered nuts for sale through the door. Soca music was playing, but quietly.

The drunken bloke made up for it by holding forth at full volume. He asked for a piss stop when we’d come half-way. I glanced at my watch: it was just past noon. Given that it was New Year’s Eve, he may have peaked too early.

I know this is what they all say, but from afar the Pitch Lake really doeslook like a parking lot, albeit one dotted with puddles and bushels of grass.

The area was fenced in and two tour guides stood at the ready to pounce on me, should I come any closer. But I didn’t care, I’d made it. I could take my snap and leave.

This felt like the end of a marathon.

Hector and Vincent weren’t too put off when I declined their offer of a tour. Ten US wasn’t a bad price, but I really couldn’t afford to pay that on my own. My secret hope was to tag along with a group and split the fee.

Vincent jumped up and sped towards a turning car. He waved at us, then signalled the driver to turn in and park a short way further down. He was on the job.

There is a fence around the lake, but no gate. It appeared to be publicly accessible. If I could get a little closer, I might get some better pictures.

“Don’t walk on the lake,” Hector warned. “It’s like quicksand in places. People die.”

“I know. I won’t—not without a guide.”

I got half-way to the turn-off—marvelling at the pitch that was encroaching on the path and rippling around the plants even without any visible source, this far from the lake—when Vincent called me over. He was consulting with a bunch of Indians.

“You walk with me,” he said, not waiting for any objections from the group. “Come.”

So I did get to tag along, but in my hurry not to cause any delays I missed a lot of good photo opportunities. If you want to see what the lake really looks like—and get a description of it from a better writer than myself—you could do worse than checking out this link.

Richard Seaman (above link) has found the words that escaped me on that day. The lake is almost like a living thing: oozing, warm and soft. It yielded under our steps like the skin of a giant beast. It oozed with imperceptible slowness, reminding me of a snail uncurling from its shell, wrinkles and grooves caught in a snapshot as they are unfurling. It even breathes. Vincent poked a finger into the soft pitch and prodded, opening a gas pocket like a tiny crater. He demonstrated that the pitch is riddled with holes, like a sponge.

“Otherwise this would be an active volcano,” he said.

In the rainy season, the lake is covered with small lakes and water-filled furrows. The water is almost golden with dissolved tar and smells of sulphur. Vincent swears that it would heal anything.

“Grazes, acne, mosquito bites—”

“Really?” I interrupted. “I could bathe in the stuff.

That got a laugh and I washed my feet with a bottle he had scooped up from one of the pools, but I didn’t have any actively itching bites that day, so I can’t attest as to whether it works.

Tiny fish dart between the furry algae that line the underwater walls. There was an amazing amount of life. Despite their pending peril, grasses grew crass and green between the black folds of pitch. Dragonflies perched on them. Vincent said that there were no mosquito larvae (“they can’t breath the toxic air”) but I saw a tiny waterbug, no bigger than a pin head.

“In six months they all die,” Hector said. “Here we get six months of sun and six months of rain. In the dry season, the water evaporates. Within three days, the pools will be filled again with pitch. Pitch is lighter than water and it’s pushed aside.”

At the bottom of every one of the mini lakes and furrows, we could see seams of fresh pitch oozing forth, as well as sometimes another substance that was creamy white. I wanted to ask, but the others were hurrying on. Vincent had stopped by a shiny patch, gesturing us all to stand back.

Most of the lake is covered by a leathery layer commonly referred to as ‘elephant skin’. It is peeled back and discarded when the pitch is mined. For some inexplicable reasons, part of the lake stay soft and you can draw strings of tar with a stick ‘like taffy’ as RS puts it.

Even on the dry patches we had to watch our step, as the lake constantly expels twigs and tree trunks, bits of a forest that may have been swallowed thousands of years ago. The wood is bone-dry and—as Vincent put it—as light as cork.

We had to come to the end of a fascinating tour. It was a bit like walking on the surface of another planet. I drank in the rich green of the wetland that surrounds the lake as Vincent went to pick a few flowers “for the ladies” (me and a teenage girl). Feeling sheepish at having intruded on their tour, I offered the others the bag of rose apples that I had bought from one of the street vendors in lieu of not taking him on as a tour guide.

When we shook hands I gave Vincent my card and twenty TT. I had noticed that this was what the others had paid per person. He didn’t say anything.

On the way back to the road, I stopped over at his and Hector’s patch to thank him again. I was gushing, because it had been an unexpected treat. I had regarded the Pitch Lake as a glorified parking lot: something that has to be ticked off on the list of sights in TT, like the Tower in London (not that the Tower is a glorified parking lot, but I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been there).

“One of Trinidad’s true surprises,” I said.

The pound had dipped almost to the level of the euro, so I decided that the time had come to change my emergency American express cheques. I waited around at Scotiabank for an inordinate time, only for the teller to tell me that they didn’t cash TCs, despite the rates displayed on the screen. He sent me up the road to Republic Bank where the queue had swollen in the meantime.

I signed and handed over my 120US in twenty-dollar cheques, grinning sheepishly when the cashier looked at me.

“They’re worth a lot more in Thailand.”

She pushed them back at me. “Fill in the date”.

This was followed by a yellow form, and then a pink one. The process took a good ten minutes.

The whole morning was taken up with banking and shopping. I figured since I would stay at Pearl’s for a week, I might as well pick up supplies.

*

If somebody would build a northern-style supermarket in Port of Spain, they would make a million bucks. And I’m not talking TT. There are no shops other than the service station in a two-mile radius around Pearl’s, and while almost anything is for sale along the streets, it was impossible to scare up a single vegetable.
[read on]

The Lonely Planet isn’t really aimed at backpackers; it’s aimed at people who travel around in hire cars and don’t mind dropping 50-100US for a night’s accommodation.

What would make travel around Trinidad stressful is my tight budget. I might not get to see all the sights, but I came here primarily to immerse myself in the Caribbean vibe and to get away from the dreary, long, dark, wet UK winter—especially the Christmas madness and the month-long national January hangover that follows. Everything else would be icing on the cake.

As the ferry passed the island, it appeared that the whole of Trinidad was shrouded in clouds so dark that I could barely make out the outline of the mountains against the sky. The weather front was not moving.

I got a good drenching as I walked up the street, but it wasn’t enough for me to don the rain jacket. I hate wearing rain gear in the tropics. If you’re not doused from above, you’re steeped from underneath, in your own sweat.

I went back to Pearl’s. Not only was the weather lousy, but it was too late to travel on. They welcomed me with open arms and had my old room ready. I counted my remaining cash and negotiated a weekly rate of 100TT a night. There would be no extravagances.

There was practically a travellers’ convention going on. I wondered if all these people had read my blog. They were doctors—three Germans and one Dutch—here on training (“We get to see stab wounds and gunshot victims!”).

They hadn’t read my blog, but they had a better guidebook.