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Published: January 23rd 2015
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So, another flight from Miami to Port of Spain and we made it to Trinidad!! Only to be held up at immigration because our return flights left Costa Rica and not Trinidad itself, which apparently is against their Visa laws. Potentially the nicest immigration people in the world managed to create a flight for us to fake book ourselves onto and then let us go... all a bit underground/illegal, but we made it in! Leaving the airport and being hit by the 30 degree heat, the Northern Range mountains covered in rainforest and the palm trees was amazing! so worth the 40 hours with no sleep and millions of airports! A taxi took us to our guesthouse for the next week in El Socorro, which meant driving through a lot of the citys surrounding areas. Whoever says Trinidad and Tobago isn't a developing country anymore obviously hasnt been here!! So many slums, half built houses, dirty roads, roads so rammed with traffic you cant get anywhere; pretty much what youd expect from a third world city, perhaps with nicer cars!! Our host, Earle, took us out to get pizza and drove us round the area a bit, told us about what
ATMs we could trusts or not and all about how good Caribbean KFC is (which we aim to try soon). The area which he lives in and that we are staying in is quite nice, the houses look like Spanish villas, but all the shops have barely any signs and have metal grates infront of them - I think your just supposed to guess what they sell...Anyway, after this little adventure I headed to bed and slept off most of my jetlag.
Today we had a house viewing in St Augustine, the student area. The guy that showed us round and owns the place, Riazz, was the best! After the viewing he even drove us to his house to meet his family, tried to make us smoke hemp with him and generally seemed like the coolest 74 year old ever. The house was pretty cool aswell, pool table, garden and everything - I think we all really want to rent it!! We then decided to go into the center of Port of Spain, which you have to get a 'bus', basically a minivan, to take you to for 5TTD (about 50p). The center of the city looks very third
world, but is also really nice. I think the lack of tourism means tourists arent constantly being harassed, infact people came up to us and were genuinely nice saying 'I hope you have a great time in Trinidad'. At first I thought everyone was trying to rob me, but after a while you realize everyone is just really friendly - its completely normal to say 'hello' to a random stranger you walk past! The city has no proper infrastructure though, with drains running open in the street and at one point a broke electricity cable was just hanging down!
We tried some Trinidadian food - Doubles - for lunch. This is basically wraps made from flour and oil, with chickpeas and spices in. So hard/unelegent to eat but SOOOOOOOOOOOO nice!!! I also had coconut water but I wasn't a big fan of that. After a walk round the city we headed home, got some local beers had dinner and played some card games. We're saving ourselves for our day at Maracas beach tomorrow!!
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