Hi Carranza2, Vacation Chronicles again. Ok, chatting with fellow passengers at the airport lounge yielded the following, (a) Trinidad is known as the jewel of the Americas, (b) has excellent education system producing high caliber graduates with high school kids doing US college level work, (c) has good national health system, and great natural beauty.
We spent Saturday meandering aimlessly, at first inside the compound of the sprawling hotel, booking diving and massage sessions for Monday, and sailing and massage sessions for Wednesday. We then drove around in a open jeep and spent a few hours eating, sleeping, and swimming at the Englishman Bay, reminiscent of a magazine cover. We spent another hour and half in a beach side bar at Stone Haven Bay. We did dig into a plate of chicken roti (chicken cooked in curry served on a bed of peas potato, and a side of unleavened bread) with hands only, for lunch, in a thatch-roofed beach hut. The road trip in the jeep, with calypso playing, sun shining, wind blowing, nearly turned my wife into a Trinidadian:0)
Tobago strikes me as a cross between Maui and Philippines; happy and docile folks living on a modern and clean island. I do not know the income strata here, but folks are not busy, nor starving. We ran into five Mandarin speakers at a roadside shop, and it turns out they are from the Chinese Embassy in Trinidad. We visited a combo saloon, gallery, and souvenir shop. The East Indian looking proprietress turned out to have a grandfather originating from China’s Sichuan province. She herself used to work for the IMF and then the Trinidad Foreign Service.
Time seems to pass quickly in this backwater, doing not very much, but passing quickly. Maybe it is because I have a definite schedule to keep. I hope that it does not pass quickly for the locals. I can only observe that the locals are spending their days chatting, flirting, drinking, and eating. I did not see anyone doing what we would call serious work. I do not know how much petro –dollar trickles down to the street level, but I presume some does trickle through.
My wife just finished filling the hot tub, and I have to go into it now. A day of bopping around in the surf requires thermo rejuvenation, before bopping some more. I do note that there was an intense-looking Creole-Oriental girl at the beach bar today. I was sure she was looking at me too. So much to do if I was living here:0)
Chugs, Jay (can not hangout here because I am accessing my account via neighboring Venezuela) |
