(This is the first in a series of excerpts from my travel memoir, After Overtourism; Reimagining the Caribbean and Florida, that I will publish in 2025. Researched 1998, not updated.)
Years after cycling Trinidad the moment hangs full in the mind like a cluster of ripe papaya, like the fast flutter of feeding hummingbirds, the lure of pungent roti, of aromatic sweet cocoa, of bananas eaten four at a time, of a chin slobbered with coconut water, of the rippling sounds of steel drum, the jook of calypso, and everything from flocks of scarlet ibis to the regalia of Carnival in the vivid colors of the soda pop that Trinis swig.
If the Caribbean is paradise, Trinidad is paradox. It sits at the foot of the tropics turning Caribbean stereotypes head over heels. An island of beaches, Trinidad behaves continental. It’s industrial and worldly, and because of that draws fewer tourists than its junior link in the twinned Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Result is a rare Caribbean state with an average income of US$5,000 that the World Bank ranks among the upper-middle of regional economies.
Were the United States literate, it might seem paradoxical, too, that Trinidad ranks far more popular in South America than it does in the States, considering that two of the great names in English literature — both Nobel laureates — closely connect with the island: author V.S. Naipaul born here, and poet-playwright Derek Walcott nurtured here. Geography explains the paradox: Trinidad is only 10 degrees north of the Equator, only 20 miles offshore from Venezuela.
The Andrews Sisters’ 1952 smash recording of Rum and Coca-Cola may still be the prevailing identity for mainland Americans.
I might never have returned to Trinidad but for a chance look at a topographical map of the island. In an instant, I saw that Trinidad, with its largely flat southern mass and its Northern Range rising to 3,084 feet at Mt. Aripo, would make for wonderful warm weather winter cycling. Cycling also let me enjoy the folkways of this island’s 1.2 million people as they stirred their intuitive search for a form of tourism they could live with.
I planned 10 days on the road starting from Port of Spain. Rather than bring my own bicycle, I arranged for an 18-speed all-terrain Trek from Geronimo’s, the pick of the island shops. They helped me attach the Dylan-like mouth harness I’d contrived for recording impressions and warned me about cycling with Trinidad’s notorious traffic that I couldn’t avoid while setting off south. Rocketing oil revenues during the ’70s and early ’80s put this country on four wheels and six-lane highways that zanies drove at 70 and 80 miles an hour. Even on most secondary roads, cars were everywhere.
Nor was the rainy season quite finished, so that after two miles on heavily trafficked Wrightson Road, the rain I’d seen in the mountains reached me. In the lee of a bus shelter, I dismantled the mouth harness that I’d right away found unworkable. The rest of the way it was all the time ride, stop, record. Ten days of this?
I was also already familiar with tabloid headlines: “Man Buried Alive”; “Rapist Hunted”; “Man’s Left Arm Hacked Off”; “Robbers Killed in Shootout.” Yes, I was also soon warned personally about the robbers.
At a T-junction where I stopped to pick up a 25-cent piece (altogether I probably gathered up some TT$3 — about US 50 cents), I asked a fellow with a watch what time it was. He told me, then added that what I was doing was very dangerous. “You have de knife?” he asked, suggesting I arm myself. “Dey all have knives,” he said of the fearful “‘other.’ Dey will t’ief your t’ings an’ de bike too,”
Instead, when I reached those distant African precincts he had warned me about — in still natural Grande Riviere on the far north coast where
immortelles bloom orange across the hills and roads already skinny narrow to a single lane on plank bridges across streams — instead of “de knife” guys offered “de spliff.”
The East Indians were equally generous. On a cross-island day through canefields between San Fernando and Mayaro I asked a roadside vendor what “Portugals” were. I had seen signs everywhere, 15 for $5 (TT$, that is). Turns out that Portugals are tangerines, then newly in season and plentiful. The Indian woman handed me two — “Sweet, sweet,” she encouraged — and a banana for which she accepted no payment.
So despite the sour warnings, I was quickly relaxed by the kindness and remarkable humor of Trinidad’s people added to the sense of wonder, which is the close-up reward of every day on a bike. As well, I was all the time reminded that, different from almost anywhere else in the region, Trinidad is the same for visitors as for locals. Tourists are simply people from elsewhere, and people from elsewhere is what this country has always been about.
One mid-morning at a roadside grocery I stopped to refill my water bottle and got talking with a Rastaman. After answering the usual questions about where I started and where I was going I mentioned that I wasn’t planning to travel to Icacos in the far southwest or to Galeta Point in the far northeast. “I don’t feel I have to go to every last place,” I said.
“Den you don’ have to reach de cemetery eeder,” he replied.
East of Caroni Swamp the first whiff of cane and molasses reached me in dusty Chaguanas. This largest city of the country was once a vast plantation area worked by East Indians, where a young Naipaul began his literary career. Naipaul’s early works — especially The Mystic Masseur set here with its tale of a manipulating body practitioner who becomes a manipulating politician — still reflect polyglot Trinidad with humor and compassion. You’re again reminded that you’re someplace out of the ordinary.
A fellow joins me at the Indo-Chinese Vegetarian Restaurant. Lays on a rap about how the bible reveals that black people were formed by angels who came down to Earth and had sex when they shouldn’t have. They created beings of dark skin who then went and mated with apes and chimpanzees, and that the black man descended from Not as a Darwinian matter but as an immediate matter, the black a table over might yesterday have swung down from a cypress. He is otherwise a swell fellow and quite informed. He cleans streets for the City Council of Port of Spain and rides a little motorbike. He asks my age, I say 67. He says, “You are a giant of a man.”
To clear things up, another fellow and I shared a bus shelter while an afternoon squall passed. We kept dry while he proudly informed me that “black people are descended from King Edward VIII — you know, the one married to Mrs. Simpson.”
