After Thanksgiving, we headed to the LaSource resort on Grenada. Vicky and Tim had both described it as one of the best trips they have ever taken and we can see why. The grounds were beautiful, the beach was lovely and daily spa treatments, yoga classes and scuba were all part of the package.
What was most striking however was the size of the caterpillars. I only ever saw them on one tree - but over the course of the week we spent there, the caterpillars (see picture of my hand for scale) ate all of the leaves on the tree. I imagine they now live on a different tree.
Trinidad is a small island and we've seen a lot of it. One afternoon, we realized that we hadn't yet been to the botanical gardens which are really close (just a 1/4 mile from the Embassy).
Like all of Trinidad they were lush and green with an extensive collection of different types of palms.
Next to the Botanical Gardens is the President's house. T&T has a president and a Prime Minister. While we have been here, the roof of the President's house collapsed from disrepair. From inside the gardens, you have a really good view of the damage.
In November, we took a long weekend trip to Curacao. Everyone posted in the Caribbean has visions of island-hopping and then discovers that airfares are ludicrously expensive. It is cheaper to go to Miami (4 hours away) than it is to go anywhere else including Grenada which is just a 30 minute flight and hardly farther away than Tobago.
At the same time this is likely our only time living in the Southern Caribbean so we paid the price and bought tickets on LIAT - a regional carrier that I have had TSA officials tell me not to take. It is the only way to get to Curacao. It is notoriously unreliable so we both warned our bosses that while we expected to be back on Monday, we were flying LIAT and might be a day or two late. Thankfully we were only an hour late going there - because they forget to file the flight plan and an hour late coming home - because the pilots wanted to have lunch (all of the passengers could see the pilots eating while we waited at the gate.)
Curacao was really pretty. It's naturally dry and much less lush than Trinidad but as a Dutch colony it has really cute architecture. Curacao also just changed status from some affiliate of the Netherlands to being its own country except that the Netherlands is still in charge of their defense and foreign policy and other things. I did not entirely understand it but many Caribbean islands likewise has weird relationships to other countries - some like Trinidad and Tobago are entirely independent whereas those born on Martinique are considered French citizens.
This is a picture of boats that sail up from Venezuela each day to create a farmers market. You can see some of the dutch-style buildings in the background.
Here's Dan in one of the buildings at the really excellent slavery museum. He looks happy but the exhibits were in fact really moving and tragic.
About a third of this very small island is a national park. We loved that both guns and slingshots were prohibited. The park was FULL of lizards - the roads were covered with literally thousands of them and while they scampered as the car rolled along it was still rather disconcerting.
Next to the National Park was a restored plantation - there are several hundred plantation buildings in the Dutch style still on the island. Most of the lizards were only a foot or so long but this iguana was probably 3 feet. The two halves of the capital city are connected by a floating pedestrian bridge. When boats want to pass the bridge rotates 90 degrees. You can see the pretty colored buildings in the background.
Dan and more nice buildings. Yes, it was very sunny there. We also visited the oldest synagoge in the western hemisphere. It had sand floors (see under my fet) which we initially thought were because it's an island and this emphasizes the beachiness but in fact the sand floors are to represent the exodus and the time in desert.
This is Dan outside of the synagoge in the courtyard where there is no sand.
Proof that in Curacao you can get more colors than just blue...
As loyal readers know in Jordan, the Embassy had LOTS of VIP visitors nearly all of whom were using Jordan as their layover on their way to Baghdad (a subset of VIP visitors had met King Abdullah and Queen Rania somewhere and had taken seriously their invitation"you should come visit Jordan")
Here in Trinidad, while we have had more houseguests (yay!) there are fewer VIPs coming to visit - but last month, I was the control officer for the BEST VIP visit I have ever done - Justice Thomas.
Some visitors are smart and other visitors are kind and Justice Thomas was the rare visitor who was both. I would put Senators Lieberman and Reed in the same smart+nice combination but they are now ranked second and third on my list after Justice Thomas. Justice Thomas gave motivational talks to school kids on the same day that he spoke to judges about framers' intent and the death penalty.
Here are some pictures from the visit. He has promised to come back - I hope he does.
Here is me and the Justice at the Diplomatic Center where we (and by that I mean he with me as the lackey taking notes) met with Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar
Here is an actual picture of me being a notetaker. Here we are at the Tobago House of Assembly meeting with the Chief Secretary Orville London.
Here are me and Dan. The Justice took pictures and chatted with every single member of the Embassy, and as a former maintenance guy and son of a domestic worker he started with our maintenance and janitorial crews.
Dan's parents visited for the first two weeks of October and they visited everywhere on Trinidad - Maracas beach, Asa Wright nature center, Petrotrin's wild fowl sanctuary, Caroni swamp and then spent a week on Tobago. One of the last stops was Fort George. This is a hill pretty much overlooking our apartment and the rest of the city. We had never gone because their had been some nasty muggings there right before we arrived in country. But when the security office decided that the site was safe enough to bring a high-level State Department official, we figured it must be safe enough to bring Dan's parents.
The site is mostly a terrific view of Port of Spain and the ability to see both the north and south sides of the islands but it also has this cute station house.
We suspect that Trinidad is the only country where a Rum Festival would be held on Eid (the holiday that celebrates the end of Ramadan). While we did go to iftars during Ramadan, we opted for the Rum Festival on the Eid holiday.
The first display was angostura art ... this one is a steel pan player
This was the crowd for the free rum drinks... This was the smaller group listening to the lecture on how rum is made which featured a lot of jokes in the vein of "friends don't let friends drink Barbadian rum" or "I don't know what they make in [insert country name here] but it isn't rum."
Trinidadians and Tobagonians are connoisseurs of beaches with strong opinions about the relative merits of some beaches over another. Nowhere on either island are you more than 30 minutes away from a beach and still when people go on vacation their most common destination is Tobago to go to the beach or Isla Margarita to go to the beach or Miami to go to the beach (and go shopping). We were on Tobago for Labor Day and visited three beaches that we hadn't visited before.
#1 Englishman's Bay - this beach had a very nice picnic pavillion with a swing.
#2 Parlatuvier
#3 Bloody Bay - named for a violent slave revolt that occurred at the site that made the waters red.
Next to the Botanical Gardens is the President's house. T&T has a president and a Prime Minister. While we have been here, the roof of the President's house collapsed from disrepair. From inside the gardens, you have a really good view of the damage.
Next to the National Park was a restored plantation - there are several hundred plantation buildings in the Dutch style still on the island.
Most of the lizards were only a foot or so long but this iguana was probably 3 feet.
Dan and more nice buildings. Yes, it was very sunny there.
We also visited the oldest synagoge in the western hemisphere. It had sand floors (see under my fet) which we initially thought were because it's an island and this emphasizes the beachiness but in fact the sand floors are to represent the exodus and the time in desert.
This was the crowd for the free rum drinks...
This was the smaller group listening to the lecture on how rum is made which featured a lot of jokes in the vein of "friends don't let friends drink Barbadian rum" or "I don't know what they make in [insert country name here] but it isn't rum."
