Locals kept getting into the ride with me. Three times cars stopped or people called out that they’d seen me earlier in the ride.
“Some watah?” one with his granny asks from a Nissan pickup. “Maybe a lift in the back? I saw you strugglin’ wid yu bags. Can I give you a drop down to Mayaro?”
“No thanks,” I say. “I can make it”.
Granny smiles, he smiles, and of course I do.
Later in the north, one slows to shout, “Drop de gear down! Drop de gear down!” as if I wasn’t already in lowest gear.
A rare cyclist passing the other way, calls, “Hey, you have a good load, Mon.” And I am still shy three late-afternoon miles from Rio Claro.
Reaching the Atlantic coast
A fellow stops me as I’m already stopped, and he is walking in the other direction. His tee shirt says, “I love Canada”. I repeat his words. We talk, which so easily happens in this country, especially on a bike. I hear pan.
“Yeah, Mon” he says, “It a pan shed getting ready for Carnival, and I too.” He lifts up his “I love Canada”. Tucked inside his shorts are his mallets.
In Princes Town, guys “lime” in front of rum bars. I watch a Chinese family preparing the East Indian staple, doubles, assembly-line style. One child separates the flaky wrappers, siblings fill them with shrimp, beef or potatoes. Mom wraps the plump parcels and maybe it’s an uncle who stuffs two at a time into bags. Dad handles the cash.
Roadside vendors will simply set a sheet of zinc over an oil drum and load it up with dasheen or some oranges or other roots. For anybody who has ever tried to grow bamboo, or elephant ears or hibiscus, crotons, bananas, anthuriums at home, this countryside will be a revelation. Also for horseflies.
After I call “Good morning” to people I’m passing, they typically call back, “Riight,” “Okay, all right.” “Yah, Mon.” I pass one lady looking proper to whom I toss a greeting. She screws herself up in defense of normalcy and with schoolmarm-ish de rigeur deigns a “Good Morning [class]!”
I reach the coast at a designated national archaeological site
Here the Ortoire River and Ortoire Beach Front contain middens of a Venezuelan settlement from about 2,000 B.C.E. I cross the ancient stream on an almost finished new bridge that leads to a shoreside corridor of mixed tall palms. Mayaro Bay laps the beach; the offshore breeze blows wind at my back.
Suddenly the road explodes in a shower of white, hundreds of cattle egrets that signaled a herd led across the road to the beach to reach fresh pasture.
The setting was jungle back of the beach until I reached Cascadoux Road to a village of houses on stilts in the Nariva Swamp where settlers cultivated rice. Reggae pulsed, roosters crowed, lush gardens and bougainvillea grew in patches of dark brown soil.
The salvation of Nariva Swamp
I got to talking with John, who explained he could make a living by working six months of the year with his power saw in Tobago construction and the rainy season catching fish and crab and growing melons and rice here. It was all picturesque West Indian except that the paddies were altering the swamp. Kernahan Village had been carved out of the forest by a grid of drainage channels. It could only happen, Karlin had told me, because wetlands were still looked at as wastelands by a ministry of agriculture that was also in charge of environmental affairs.
She had thrown up her hands as she added that more than a quarter of the 6,342 hectares [15671.4 acres] of reed beds and marshes had been converted to rice farming. She called the farmers squatters and their presence illegal. Not only did they pay no rent, no tax, no fee for water. They qualified for soft loans from the agricultural development bank, and because government had a monopoly on the purchase of rice, it could also subsidize the price for growers. Illegal farming was profiting the village by some TT$3 million a year.
Yet I would later learn of what Karlin called a “politically courageous move” that followed the 1993 signing by Trinidad and Tobago of the international Ramsar Wetlands Treaty.
That not only removed the squatters. It also combined with new protections for giant leatherback turtles between their March and August nesting period and the Nariva’s destination on the flight path for North American birds including raptors and seabirds that led to TT’s first significant marketing as a year-round nature-based tourism destination.
The Trust helped prepare a first-time management plan for Nariva.
The rise of ecotourism
Some former villagers have since taken to guiding visitors who come for wildlife viewing that includes not only the colony of scarlet ibis but other native species that include red-bellied macaws, flocks of parrots, and native howler monkeys, white-fronted capuchins, caimans, and manatees. [A Google map now shows guest houses and restaurants that have opened along the shore.]
A lot of thinking surfaced about how tourism might be meaningful in a place like Trinidad which offered not simply lovely beaches. Karlyn talked about “something else we had to offer at that time when consciousness about environmental issues began to grow and have their impact here.”
There had always been a great concern with the leatherback turtles. A big lobby had developed that won the issue.
“To the extent there might be violations, the community is quite harsh on predatory humans. There’s a lot of community policing. We understood that wildlife protection could be attractive to tourists, the leatherbacks one of them. So you had the conservation, environmental, heritage movements raising consciousness in Trinidad and that the culture of the country was now being managed in such a way that it could be linked with Trinidad as an attractive destination.”
Karlyn added that people began to see the north coast beyond Maracas Bay for its rugged natural coastline with its largely remote, untouched areas of interest to people interested in nature and hiking.
