Trinidad - Sangre Grande

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Jan 27, 2012. I booked a flight from Guadeloupe to Trinidad and my ticket showed a stopover in Dominica. I ended up changing planes in Barbados and taking off and landing 4 times (Dominica, Barbados, Grenada, Port of Spain). Apparently, if the plane is not entirely full, they will make an unscheduled stop at Grenada if there are people who want to get on. Does that mean you can just show up at the airport in Grenada and try your luck? The planes were small, about 100-seaters, and would buzz rhythmically, a noise that made me really uncomfortable. Each landing was worse than the one before. There were some seriously bad landings. I wondered what the accident rate was with airlines in the Caribbean. In between all the taking off and landing, I met a guy from Caracas, Venezuela and we talked about los indignados and martial arts. He said that Venezuela is extremely dangerous, even for locals, he totally advised me against visiting Venezuela. In fact, when I was in the Canaries, I met a woman from Venezuela who told me that she lived in Europe for 4 years and when she went back to Venezuela, she couldn't believe the change. She was afraid for her life every time she walked out the door. The most dangerous part of her day was making her way from the door to the car and from the car to the office. After a few months, she just couldn't live there anymore and left Venezuela for good.

At the airport in Trinidad, taxi drivers wanted to charge me $80 US for going to town. I think it was supposed to be $80 TT and they wanted to take me for a ride in more ways than one. I took the bus instead which cost $4 TT and 50 min to get to Port of Spain. I bought a bus ticket to Sangre Grande (pronounced Sandy Grandy, the “an” as you would in French) for $10 TT and the trip took 1.5 hours. After that, I had to take a “maxi” which is a big taxi to get to Grand Riviere. You have to be really aggressive to get in a maxi and a woman helped me. The trip cost $20 TT and 2 hours. I was supposed to be there to help someone with an eco project. It turned out to be a really crappy project so the next day, I booked a flight home and made my way to Sangre Grande. There, I found taxis going to the airport. I talked to one driver and he said the airport is $150 TT. I said I only had $85 TT and he said ok. I got in and told him I was hungry and he stopped at a fast food joint and I bought whatever was most filling for the least amount of money which was fries for $8 TT so I ended up paying him $77 TT for the ride.

The taxi driver was such a nice guy. On the way to the airport, he had the radio on and I couldn't understand anything because it was all in Trinidadian. I can make out some English but most of the meaning was lost to me. He took the time to explain everything to me. When we were on a multi-lane road, a truck came along side him and the driver started talking to him. My driver explained that he said “gimme some wuk boy na” which means he is asking him to give him some work. I asked him about the curfew and he said that it lasted 3 months. It was enforced in the hopes of decreasing the crime rate as most crimes in Trinidad took place late at night, but the curfew didn't work whatsoever. He said that there are too many types of welfare and benefits, and everybody gets something from the government for different reasons so a lot of people don't need to work and have nothing to do so they look for trouble. (I thought, perhaps that's how working people feel.) He said that the police uses the military to control crowds because if the police shoots a civilian, they have to answer for it but if the military shoots a civilian, they don't have to answer for it. The friend who asked him for work is actually in the military which is like a job as he gets paid to do it, but he has other side jobs such as driving a truck. He also told me that cars are cheap in Trinidad because you are allowed to import your own car, a brand new one, directly from Japan for as little as $7000 US. Gas is also very cheap so everybody has several cars and pollution is sky high.

The luggage storage service at the airport is $15 TT. The tourist office has free internet. The cheapest hotel with shuttle service was $75 US and the tourist office arranged everything for me. The family who owned the hotel looked East Indian but the woman (mother) who dealt with me looked hispanic and behaved like one. I asked and she said that they are all of East Indian origin, herself included, but she is from Venezuela. I found everyone in Trinidad so nice and so human, but I couldn't stand the ugliness everywhere, the dirt, the disarray-ness, the shoddy quality that pervades; everything seemed to have been really badly done. Things were sort of just functional. Other than music and dancing, carnivals and partying, there is such emptiness. I couldn't stand the shallowness, the dilapidation, the complete lack of something higher in life, and I don't mean materialistically. I have a theory for why that is but way too long to go into here.

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