Trinidad

Tuesday 13th January 2009, day 178. 10° 40’.81 N, 061° 38’.16 W. Chaguaramas Bay, Trinidad.

So much to catch up on since the last proper blog … all the Cape Verdes, Barbados, Tobago. I’ll pick up where we are right now, and then see about filling in the gaps later.

It is pouring at the minute. A real tropical downpour. Water is gushing down off the sun awning, blowing across the cockpit and in through the ports. All around, people are scurrying to close hatches and vents, workers are sheltering under hulls, tools and partially varnished wood is being rushed under cover. The temperature has dropped suddenly; it is almost cool. And five minutes later, it is all over, steam is rising from the forests behind the bay, and we are getting back to a nice muggy normality, at 30°C.

Chaguaramas is a little yachting community, which has grown in 10 years from a few men repairing fishing boats to a full-blown set up with five or six different yards, and any number of contractors offering everything from sail repairs to painting to electrical work. Trinidad is just outside the hurricane belt, so lots of boats lay up here in the summer, their crews fleeing from the heat back to more temperate climates. Building on the constant level of work this provides, the bay has become both a second home for people who use their boats like fixed, if floating, cottages, and a centre for all sorts of work. We arrived here planning to spend a few days seeing the country, before setting off for the beauties of the Grenadines, but here we are a week later, with our cruising chute repaired and a new snuffer for it ordered, electricians working on the battery charging system, quotes coming in for work on parts of the teak decking, steps made to get into the forward berths, fans installed to dissipate some of the heat, loos dismantled and re-assembled, prices investigated for satellite phones, the water-maker re-wired, an appointment booked with a hairdresser, oil changes on the main engine and the generator, a thorough spring clean for Tomia, comparing the merits of the different local data phones …also there is a wifi connection which works at least some of the time, hence the re-start of communcations.

We’ve now been living on Tomia for seven months, and have covered nearly 6,000 miles; in a normal season we might achieve a tenth of that, and then have the whole winter to bring her back up to scratch. So maintenance is an ongoing task, a little bit here, a minor upgrade there, to ensure that she continues to look after us as well as she has done so far.

In addition to all this boaty stuff, we’ve rented a car and explored the island a bit, going down to the La Brea tar pits in the south, and a wonderful nature reserve in the north, with an amazing array of bird life presenting itself. 4” long iridescent humming-birds, the bearded bell bird which does indeed make a noise just like the clinking of a rather tinny bell, and any number of brightly coloured tanagers and honey creepers. We also saw 2 ft long lizards, with black and gold stripes, marching along licking their lips as they looked for crumbs that had fallen off the birds’ table – and a tree porcupine, fast asleep, but looking rather precariously balanced, on the branch of a tree (of course).

The pitch lake was fascinating, but not exactly beautiful – Noel Coward called it a bunch of tennis courts in need of re-surfacing, and that is not unfair. In fact, it looks a bit of a mess, to be honest. I’d expected a vast cauldron of liquid tar, with the odd bubble breaking the surface every now and then with a great “gloop”, but it’s just a large surface of rough tarmac. The bitumen is not spooned out with giant ladles as one might have imagined, but dug up in chunks. We walked out over the surface, a bit gingerly at first, noting a slight give underfoot, but no more than a sprung ball-room floor. Even hopping on the spot couldn’t make more than a small impression in the surface. There is a lovely clean smell though in the tarry bits, and, oddly, a pond of pink and green lotus flowers just at the edge of the tar which give off a strong smell of an over-sweet air-freshener, so the nose is more stimulated than the eyes.

We then managed to get our hire car thoroughly lost as we went down to the south coast in search of mud volcanoes (which we didn’t find, and probably just as well). I have never known any where like Trinidad for not having road signs. Even the junction of the two dual carriageways on the island doesn’t have one. Do the taxi drivers and tour guides come out at night and steal them, to discourage tourists from driving themselves around? We had three maps, which disagreed with each other, even about the location of the roads … names on the map which weren’t where they should be, places on the ground that weren’t on the map … of course, being sailors, we can, and did, navigate by the sun, and ended up bumping our way to the end of the track, through dense thickets of wild bananas and palms, with the local vultures circling overhead. There was a tiny beach, three Trinidadians, and a brown, almost salt-free sea, in which we swam. “Why is the sea so brown and the water so fresh?” we asked. “It is the River” they replied – the great outpouring from the Orinoco, only ninety miles to our south.