IT’S A WET WET CHRISTMAS IN THE CARIBBEAN

Then the rains came, and the skies weeped and wailed until they finally cried themselves to sleep. I was afraid that Trinidad would flood and I wouldn’t even be able to get TO the airport, much less out of it. Then I watched the weather in the US on TV and felt better, people sleeping in airports while blizzards raged outside. Things could be worse. Still it’s stifling. When it’s not raining it might as well be. At least I got the Suriname visa, multiple entry too, though I had to promise my first-born for it, seems a safe bet, over $100 in ‘reciprocity’ charges, but good for five years of in-and-out privileges. It’s probably raining there, too. That means I can go to French Guiana and return with no extra visa hassles. Who knows? That might turn out to be the highlight of the trip, what with the resident communities of Hmongs and Laos in addition to the Amerindians and ‘Maroons’ typical of the region. I can speak passable Lao and my French is certainly better than my Dutch or my Taki-taki.

Traveling is hard work. Yeah, yeah, I hear you, but it’s certainly not as easy as it used to be, just hop on the bus and wake up somewhere in Mexico. At least I’ve got a couple rooms booked down the line, so shouldn’t have to sleep on the streets. I used to never do that; in the Caribbean region it’s typically required. In Jamaica I had to book before they’d let me through immigration, then the lady from the Health Department actually called a few days later to see if I was OK after my previous stay in a malarial region, i.e. Argentina (?!). Internet makes it easier now, which is good though far from perfect, since these backwater countries can be a bit short on services and logic. I don’t know what a backpacker would do if he got into Port-of-Spain without a reservation. There are plenty of spaces, but how would he find them? This isn’t Gringotenango or Khao San or Freak Street with cheap hotels lining the streets as far as the eye can see. Where I stayed is as close to a hostel as there is, but no one’s there, just a few locals… and me. The prices double for Carnaval.

More and more I see other travelers less and less. That’s what happens when you go to hard-to-get-to locations. Everybody and his brother go to Thailand, Guatemala, Peru, and Nepal. On a regional hostel circuit you might even see the same travelers 2-3 times on a trip. It’s not like that here. Even a place as famous as Trinidad is practically vacant except on cruise ship day. Sure there’s a reputation for violence and crime, but circumstances like that can usually be mitigated with a modicum of effort. I really liked Trinidad until I read an ex-pat’s lambasting indictment of the people, then started seeing the aloofness-bordering-on-rudeness he was talking about. Now I’m not sure. The books say they’re the ‘friendliest people in the world’, but that’s surely an exaggeration. They’re certainly not the quintessential laid-back ‘ey mon’ Caribbean locals a la Jamaica. The place is heavily industrialized. There’s no pervasive skunk smell either; that shit’s very illegal here. What is it about ex-British island-city-states that makes them so uptight? Ahhh, it’s only the ones that dream of industry and capital… I get it now. At least they let it all out for Carnaval. They’re already building little makeshift huts out at the fairgrounds. It’s starting to look like the Neshoba County fair. So why am I so… almost… border-line… depressed?

Maybe it’s because everybody’s drinking and I’m not. There are no Tiki bars or Thai-style R&R joints here like Jamaica, but that doesn’t mean the people don’t drink. Bars are everywhere, but I’m not sure I’d be welcome. There’s nothing worse than drinking alone in a bar full of merry-makers, except maybe being harassed by shit-faced drunks. It’s hard to find a balance. But the taxi drivers seem nice enough. They probably want tips; yeah, right. Maybe it’s the inherent racism of the system here. I’m pretty sensitive to that even when it’s well-hidden, like here, even when it has little or nothing to do with me. You’d have to look pretty hard to even tell the difference between an African and a dark-skinned Dravidian, but they can, you can be sure. “You better get out of here,” a Trinidad Indian I’d previously met told me as I hung out in Congo Square. “They’ll kill you here.” ‘They’ is the key word. Racism is like conspiracy. There’s always a loosely defined ‘they’ and a ‘we’. They didn’t kill me at JSU. They didn’t kill me in Bamako. Why would they kill me here?

Still you gotta’ be careful. They say don’t walk the streets of Port-of-Spain at night. That makes it a little bit hard to drink unless I want to hire a cabbie to drink with me. I’m not THAT hard up, not yet anyway. At least I lucked out and accidentally got a room in the entertainment district. At least looking’s free, and so is music. Alcohol’s not quite the thrill it used to be anyway. The beer’s too strong now. Back when I first started experimenting we’re talking 3.2% THC- I mean alcohol- so plenty of time to build up a head of steam and a bladder full of piss before feeling much of a buzz. But now, with this 6… 8… 9% stuff you find in Amsterdam, it’s like the psychic reverse equivalent of a cheap Red Bull imitation. You gulp one down and by the time you realize what’s happening… it’s too late. You’re on the roof, ready to jump into the swimming pool below. When you finally wake up in ER you’ve still got visions of sugar plums dancing in your head.

Okay, I exaggerate, but you get the idea. I can’t exactly ‘hold my liquor’, though I never get shit-faced. I just stop. What’s so great about ‘holding’ it anyway? If you can ‘hold’ it, then why not just forego it? Getting a buzz is the idea, right? Actually all was fine until I got gout. That hurts like hell, believe me. Not coincidentally I believe, I started having bad reactions to beer, two-day hangovers and such; not wine or whiskey mind you, just beer. Since I decided to forego it, the gout attacks stopped. Problem is, I’m hesitant to drink anything now, and a good red wine is sometimes hard to find anyway in cheap bars. I’m still groping my way through the darkness. But that’s hardly depressing; that’s good news. If I were to drink a six-pack I’d probably be homicidal if not suicidal. I rarely got that far. So why the doom and gloom?

It’s Christmas time, that’s why. Christmas is like candy; it’s sweet but not necessarily good for you. Christmas is for kids, all the toys and free money and unrealistic expectations. I like the Christmastime shows on Nat Geo and the Hitler Channel searching for Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Darwinci code- I even like the Christmas carols- but not all that other stuff. Strangely enough, the symbols are all the same here, Santa and snow and midnight madness at the mall. The Christmas carols are even all the same familiar ones, including John Lennon, like some vast American conspiracy to dominate. The rain lets up enough for the plane to take off finally. Good-by Trinidad. I liked your food at least, even the ‘black pudding’ you tricked me into eating. I was expecting some rich chocolatey local confection and got blood-sausage chitlins; serves me right I guess, being born in Mississippi and all.

Welcome to Guyana. It’s the last link in a circum-Caribbean semi-circle of British intrigue that starts in Jamaica and the Cayman islands. Though the largest of the lot and a full-fledge South American state, it’s probably the poorest also. Georgetown is the perfect picture of a colonial capital going down on itself. In memory of my Thai wife who can’t pronounce the English name ‘George’, I affectionately refer to it as ‘Joshtown’, anything but Jonestown, which happened not so many years nor kilometers away. It still makes the news here. For those of you too young to remember, thirty years ago some nine hundred US citizens committed mass suicide in Guyana under the influence of a bad Elvis impersonator.

At first glance after dark Georgetown reminds me of nothing so much as… Vientiane, c. 1995, though in the light of day I’d say maybe Dakar. Lonely Planet says the market is ‘edgy’; I’d say it’s psychotic. Imagine a bus terminal and a market sharing the same space, accompanied by the sounds of barkers barking and horns honking. Their accents are pretty thick here too. You could almost imagine you’re speaking Creole. You almost are. Sometimes it’s nice to get a decent hotel in a weird place, so I do, complete with wi-fi, though not much cable TV to be had, just some Bollywood stuff, al-Jazeera and some American leftovers. I check out the zoo by accident, but the market’s the real zoo. I walk long distances as is my habit, making notes of cultural anomalies. ATM’s are all the rage, lines stretching around corners, notable considering that as of the latest Lonely Planet there were none. I check out various types of food, similar to Trinidad’s, but coffee’s non-existent.

Two days of that and I push on, straight across the new Berbice River bridge at New Amsterdam on its first day open for business. It was big news, the ribbon-cutting and all. I was expecting some concrete engineering marvel along the wild northern coast of South America. Alas and alack, the damn thing’s made of aluminum, bolted together like a child’s erector set, probably bought from US army surplus, riding about five feet above the water’s surface. I hope it’s low tide. It took ‘em two years to complete; the US Army could’ve assembled it and been killing people on the other side in less than two months, if not two weeks. They seem proud of it, so I suppress all laughter and sarcastic comments. I wonder if it’ll hold until my return.

Looks like I’ll ride out Christmas Day here somewhere in Guyana unless I happen to find easy passage straight through to Paramaribo in Suriname. I only hope I don’t get shut down with nothing to eat or drink. The Chinese should take care of that. So I get stuck at the border with Suriname- Corriverton, Guyana- Christmas Eve… and the place is hopping. They don’t decorate silly trees here; they party. There’s a little carnival midway set up on the main drag through town, and disco speakers are stacked all up and down the sidewalk blasting away at ear-splitting decibel levels. Liquor or beer, choose your weapon. It could be a long night, but at least the place isn’t shut down. Dutch-language TV from Suriname may have all the standard Christmas carols, but the street is different. Borders are the weirdest places in the world; just look at TJ. They run right through a lonely place in your mind. All the world’s fumbling schemers are here, the Indians the Chinese the Muslims and me. I guess I’m home for Christmas. Pray for rain.

DREAMS OF CONGO SQUARE AND THE TACO THAT ATE TRINIDAD

So I went on to Barbados from Jamaica by Air Jamaica, spent the night, and then continued on to Trinidad by Liat Airlines. I’ll spend a week here total, getting a Suriname visa in the process, then continue on to Guyana for Christmas. I’ll case out Guyana, and then continue on to Suriname, which is a major variable for the trip. It sounds interesting. If I like it, I’ll stay a while. If not, and I get a multiple entry visa, I’ll head on to French Guyana, or back to (British) Guyana if only single-entry the Suriname visa. There are no air connections amongst the Guyanas. From there it’s back to Barbados for a few days, then back to Jamaica mid-January. After three more days there, I go on to Havana. I finally got the $250RT killer deal to Cuba. That’s about half the normal price. That’s what it should cost. That’s why I went to Jamaica. For $6-700 you can fly round trip straight to Cuba from TJ, no need to hip-hop the Caribbean. But that’s a slow way to reach 200 countries. It’s not easy connecting the Caribbean dots without a boat, but with my other killer $250RT from Jamaica-Barbados, I’m doing okay, and that’s a three-hour flight! Havana’s little more than an hour from Jamaica. Guyana’s the expensive leg. Are the hardest places to reach ultimately the most rewarding? We’ll soon find out. I’ve schemed on Suriname for years, even if their language IS called ‘Taki Taki’. I’m battle-hardened linguistically now, and more flexible to boot. Everything’s different now. At least I’m finally vindicated after losing my killer deal from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt last month in Chile.

You can’t tell much about a country from a single night, but I can tell that Barbados is a pricey mother. If the Caribbean as a whole is on US/Europe price schemes with ‘budget’ hotels typically topping $50 and $100 on the horizon, then Barbados is setting the pace. Good luck finding a cheapie there. You don’t see many backpackers in the Caribbean and that’s why. Jumping puddles ain’t cheap and the pipe dream of hopping a boat just doesn’t happen unless you hang in those circles, and regularly… yachts and backpackers are generally mutually exclusive concepts… though not necessarily. More likely, though, you’ll be flying in circles, which wouldn’t be so bad, especially time-wise, if the lodging were more affordable. This is not an unreasonable expectation, given the wage differentials between the Third World and the Western World. Real estate prices are another story. If there’s a phenomenon of ‘island dwarfism’ in relation to body size of islanders, there seems to be an economic ‘island inflation’ operating in inverse proportion. The smaller the island, the more expensive it is, perfect for the Caribbean bedroom community. Welcome to Barbados. The bottom line is: the US is a pretty good deal, really. Costs in many, but not all, Third World countries, are similar. Wages aren’t.

Welcome to Trinidad. Super Burritos Gigantes, look out! You have competition brewing down in the southern Caribbean, down around where the islands meet South America meet India meet Africa. It’s called roti dhal puree. Imagine a Mexican burrito that has everything- no wait- that’s too easy. Imagine ordering Ethiopian food and taking that entire meal laid out on injera bread and fold the whole thing up into a giant four-cornered pie capable of being considered ‘takeout’ with at least enough structural integrity to stay together until you start nibbling away at it. There’s dhal, spinach, chickpeas, mango chutney, two kinds of chicken complete with bone, and of course ‘pepper’ (salsa); just tell them what to put in. Show me a burrito that can compete with that. This is what comes out of ‘roti’ shops in Trinidad, very similar to what goes on in curry kitchens, except ladled over bread instead of rice. ‘Roti’, of course, means ‘bread’ in Indo/Malay, but I’ve never heard the term used with Indian cuisine. The same word got carried to Thailand by the country’s Muslims to describe a sweet crepe-like street food concoction, so I’m guessing maybe some Commonwealth Malays introduced the concept here, too, though the components are unmistakably Indian. You can’t rule out the Chinese, though, considering they make Jamaican food in Jamaica and ‘Creole’ food here. Such are the mutations in the DNA of cuisine as handed down mouth to mouth over generations.

Following in the great tradition of Britain’s colonial island/city/states Singapore, Hong Kong, Penang, Zanzibar, Mumbai, and… oh yeah… New York, Trinidad has an ethnic mix that must be seen to be believed. Almost equal parts African and Indian, Trinidad also has significant proportions of Chinese, Arabs, and Hispanic Latinos. The Indians dominate the economy for sure, but Chinese run supermarkets and restaurants as they do everywhere, and the ‘Arabs’ are probably in fact Lebanese who have been trading (fabrics especially) world-wide even longer than the other two, even since they were Phoenicians and Carthaginians long before they were Arabs. Hanno the Navigator explored the west coast of Africa almost two thousand years before Prince Henry, Marco Polo, Ibn Battutah, Leo Africanus, Zheng He or any of the rest. This is the way the British liked it, ruling from the balance sheet by mercantile principles of economic control and hub-and-spoke monopolies. It worked far better than the French system of direct governmental control, which has spawned an overly dependent and costly colonial system which to this day doesn’t even WANT independence. It also allowed good food to flourish and supplant an otherwise dubious British cuisine, only pies making the transition. Pot of pie anyone?

I’ve often wondered what it was like in Congo Square in New Orleans back in the early 1800’s. At the point in time when Louisiana joined the USA, African practices had long been suppressed by the English and then American settlers with their families and religions and five-year plans, something the French and Spanish in Louisiana Territory had never bothered to do. So when the US headed ‘West’ in the early 1800’s and riverboats began docking in New Orleans, they were treated to an unparalleled spectacle at Congo Square on Sunday afternoons. Eye-witness reports tell of hundreds of slaves and free men of color (a large percentage of the population even then) taking the day off to perform age-old celebrations of music and dance in front of equally large numbers of spectators. This inspired more than a few Homies in the process. Thus almost all forms of American music had their origins right then and there. This golden age of cultural intercourse was as short-lived as the golden age of riverboat travel unfortunately, as trains soon passed them by and southern apartheid tightened its grip on all forms of African expression as a threat to its economic and political stranglehold. It would all be re-born and abstracted and sanitized post-War as minstrel shows, minus the animal skins and voodoo.

Trying to imagine something and actually seeing it are two different things. What goes down when the sun goes down in the pedestrian park of Port-of-Spain is the closest I’ve seen to what I imagine Congo Square to have been like. Mostly its just rival boom-boxes selling pirate CD’s and ensuring that no one will suffer in silence, but somehow it lives and moves and breathes like an organism of which the individuals are only body parts. Liquor lines tables and the brain cells of people dancing with their own ghosts, both aging retirees on the way out feeling it for the last time, and young bucks on the way in feeling it all for the first time. The music is primarily calypso-derived soca, with a thousand hyphens attached reflecting each new generation’s novel input. There’s a heavy admixture of modern American hip-hop of course, but with one important difference- I’m liking it. I think the problem with so much rap is that the music is lost in the background and the ‘poetry’ is so bad. Keep the music up front and good, and the stuff goes down easy, just a few lumps in the gravy. The live bands are even better of course. Even now, long before Carnaval, steel ‘pan’ bands are honing and licking their chops, hoping to win the Carnaval competitions. I wish I were here. I think I like Trinidad more than Brazil. Too bad they speak English.

Trinidad seems to overtly prize its African connection more than any place I’ve yet seen in the Caribbean. That may seem surprising, considering its less-than-absolute majority. Maybe that explains it. I’ve seen people wear true African dress here, but nowhere else in the Caribbean; rasta colors yes, but not real African. I’ve seen shops selling African goods here that would rival those of the US, not just cheap tourist schlock. I can watch the ‘Africa Channel’ on TV here. I’ve never seen it elsewhere, except maybe LinkTV in LA. The ‘Cowheel Soup’ may not be my favorite item on the menu, but there’s plenty else to choose from- oxtail, etc. Yes, there’s a real cowheel in there. Yes, it’s disgusting. Yes, the soup is tasty. But there’s plenty of Indian and Chinese food, and the bakeries aren’t half bad. Street food is second to none. If roti is the Trinidad burrito, then ‘doubles’ are the Trinidad taco. This is fast food par excellence, the same kind of curry thing but smaller and rolled over, ‘doubled’; get it? They come off the line about 5-6 per minute by a guy who resembles nothing more than a DJ wowing the crowd with his mixes. The trick is to eat them before the goop drips all over you and starts to get embarrassing- true fast food; eat it fast. It’s also fart food. Mexican food can’t hold a candle to this stuff. Don’t try that at home.

The music is good and the bars stay open all night on weekends. The food is good and there’s even a local home-grown Starbuck’s-style coffee chain called ‘Rituals’ (yes!) with little Aunt Jemimas cranking out as good of a macchiato as I’ve ever had, for prices at least no higher than US standards. Anything’s better than Nescafe (a menu in Guatemala once translated this as ‘Nescoffee’). It sounds like paradise. So what’s my problem? I’m afraid my trip my climax prematurely. I just started and there’s no return to Trinidad planned. Maybe it’ll just get better. Maybe this is nothing compared to Guyana, and Suriname will put them all to shame. Maybe the dollar will re-gain ground against the euro and I’ll go on to French Guiana also. Maybe ‘Good Morning America’ will invite me on the show to tell all about it. Maybe Trinidad is a revelation. Maybe it’ll be a Merry Christmas just five days from now. Maybe it’ll rain all day and I can just keep on dreaming…