Coconuts
Grown on estates throughout eastern Trinidad and the southwest peninsula, coconuts are in constant demand on account of their sheer versatility. Depending on when they are harvested, they can be a source of drink, food, oil, soap or animal feed, while their fibrous husk makes an alternative to peat for potting plants. Green nuts are full of sweet water, a popular drink sold fresh from the fruit from many an old Bedford van around the country. As the nut matures, much of the liquid is replaced by an equally delicious edible white jelly. A few weeks later, the jelly solidifies into firm white flesh, which can be grated, dried and roasted in cooking. Later still, a bread-like substance grows in the centre of the fruit; if caught at the right time, it makes a tasty snack. Soon afterwards it develops into a sprout, from which a new tree will grow. Depending on the type, a tree will take five to ten years to mature and live for many years after that, producing nuts all year round.
The east coast
South of Sangre Grande, the largest town on this side of the island and a transportation hub of considerable commercial vigour, Trinidad’s east coast is dominated by the Cocal, 24km of unbroken sand lined by swaying coconut palms, that begins at Manzanilla and stretches south to Point Radix. Beyond here the beach continues at Mayaro, long a popular holiday resort with Trinidadians but almost entirely undiscovered by foreign visitors. The Manzanilla–Mayaro Road runs the length of the east coast down to Galeota Point and Guayaguayare, fringed inland by the pristine rainforest and mangrove-smothered wetlands of Nariva Swamp, a primary breeding ground and habitat for all manner of rare animals and birds, including manatees and monkeys.
The Cocal
Source of most of the coconuts sold in Trinidad, the waving groves of coconut palms that line the Manzanilla–Mayaro Road, known collectively as the Cocal, make for an awe-inspiring drive: 24km of graceful, leaning coconut trees dancing in the wind, with unspoilt, wave-pounded beach to one side and the wetlands of Nariva Swamp to the other. There are no hotels or restaurants anywhere along the road (the only buildings are private holidays homes), but roadside stalls sell the shellfish known as chip-chip, freshly caught crabs, black conch, fish and, in season, watermelon. Note, however, that the Manzanilla–Mayaro Road through the Cocal was impassable at the time of writing due to severe flooding of Nariva Swamp.
Three-quarters of the way along, the road crosses the Nariva River, worth a stop for a lovely view of the mangroves along the banks; the waters are a popular swimming spot come the weekends, when cars line the roadside and chutney music blares out over the smooth sands. Nearing Mayaro, the road runs past a coconut processing plant, surrounded by huge mounds of discarded husks. Between 5.30 and 6pm every night the air around here is raucous with the calls of the red-chested macaws that come to roost in the trees (binocular-toting birdwatchers often mark the spot), while the surrounding swampland is a good place to see southern lapwings and the rare red-breasted tanager. The ponds in this area are full of cascadura, a small brown fresh-water fish, properly known as an armoured catfish, with a tough skeletal covering. It’s said that if you eat their chewy brown meat (invariably served curried), you’ll return to end your days in Trinidad, but picking and sucking the flesh from beneath the armour is a messy business.
Manzanilla
South of Sangre Grande, the Eastern Main Road cuts a picturesque and winding 8km route towards the Atlantic coast; underground waterflows regularly cause subsidence, so if you’re driving, take things slowly. A quiet and attractive village of gingerbread houses, MANZANILLA village straggles along roadside and down to the sea from the T-junction at the end of the Eastern Main Road (turn left at the end of the EMR at the signpost for “Manzanilla Beach”). Windswept and exposed, the wide expanse of fine, brownish sand is usually deserted during the week but becomes a popular swimming spot at the weekends (though the murky water isn’t particularly enticing), when locals descend with car boots full of food and drink. Take care while swimming, as the undercurrents can be dangerous; look out also for the jellyfish-like Portuguese man-of-war occasionally found in the waters here.
Mayaro and around
Some 24km south of Manzanilla, the coast road heads inland at Point Radix, crossing over the Ortoire River and passing the local market, where stalls sell fresh fish, lobsters and strings of wriggling crabs. MAYARO itself has grown out of two old French villages, Pierreville and Plaisance, and is still marked as such on some maps. Pierreville, on the Mayaro–Guayaguayare Road, is the business end of town, a neat nexus of fast-food outlets, shops and small businesses. A side road cuts east to the village’s seaside quarter, Plaisance, a lovely place with a thoroughly relaxing atmosphere whose greatest attraction is its beach, a gentle, coconut-tree-lined curve of clean, soft brown sand that’s one of the most popular bathing spots on Mayaro Bay, along with Queen’s Beach a couple of kilometres further south (signboards for the oceanside hotels here mark the turn-off from the Mayaro–Guayaguayare Road); both spots only see crowds at the weekends, however. Lifeguards keep a watch on bathers, but there are no public changing rooms, toilets or other facilities on this or any other part of the bay. The Queen’s Beach resorts all have restaurants and non-guests can usually use the swimming pool at the Radix Beach Resort for a small charge. Note that the sea in this area has strong currents, so exercise caution.
Past Queen’s Beach, the road swings past pasturelands and, with increasing frequency, luxurious houses built by the oil companies for their managers and workers; BP even have an entire compound, a fenced-off affair reminiscent of a 1950s holiday camp.
Nariva Swamp
One of Trinidad’s most significant wildlife areas, the Nariva Swamp covers fifteen square kilometres behind the coconut estates along the coast south of Manzanilla. The area is made up of agricultural land (rice and watermelons are the main crops), as well as reed-fringed marshes and, between the Mayaro–Manzanilla Road and the swamp itself, mangrove thickets. Deep in the southwestern corner lies the 16 square kilometres of Bush Bush Wildlife Sanctuary (often referred to as an island but actually a peninsula standing around 3m higher than the surrounding land), bordered by palmiste and moriche palms and covered in hardwood forest and silk cotton trees, and designated a protected sanctuary in 1968. A unique freshwater ecosystem, Nariva harbours large concentrations of rare wildlife, with some 58 species of mammals (including the impossibly endearing manatee, or sea-cow), 37 species of reptiles and 171 species of birds (including the yellow-capped Amazon parrots, and blue-gold and red-bellied macaws). It’s also home to 92 species of mosquito, so remember to bring your insect repellent.
Nariva is hard to explore in any real depth independently, but if you’re just passing by, it’s worth taking a stroll along the signposted Kernaham Trace, which swings in from the Manzanilla–Mayaro Road to Kernaham Village, a widely dispersed collection of picturesque board houses, mostly on stilts, that are home to a friendly, overwhelmingly Indian community of farmers and fishermen. It’s a beautiful scene, with the flatlands opening up huge expanses of open sky. Kernaham has a bar which occasionally serves food, as well as a building for worship that accommodates the community’s Hindus, Muslims and Christians; it’s marked with a moon and stars design on the outside, and a peek through the wall reveals icons (in picture form) of all three religions, illustrating Trinidad’s strong tradition of cultural and religious acceptance.
Sangre Grande
A thriving little market town slung along the Eastern Main Road, SANGRE GRANDE (“big blood”, after a long-forgotten battle between Amerindians and the incoming Spanish) – pronounced “sandy grandy” but usually just called “grandy” – is a bustling transportation hub for the whole east coast from Toco to Mayaro, and the only place in the region with a bank or ATM. Residents of surrounding villages crowd the pavements every Friday to deposit wage cheques, shop at the market stalls, take a fast-food fix and drink the night away at the many rum shops. Most visitors pass through en route to somewhere else, or stop off to change taxis and maxis, but it’s well worth diverting just south of town to check out the excellent Velaja cocoa estate.
Velaja Estate
This ten-acre working estate Velaja Estate offers a fantastic insight into traditional cacao production. Trinidad Select Hybrid cocoa is grown and processed on site using age-old methods, and the estate has been opened up to visitors by way of a couple of excellent tours. The “Love of Cocoa” trip takes you through the shady cocoa groves, with guides explaining how the trees are maintained and the cocoa pods harvested, and into the processing house, where the raw beans are fermented, “danced” to remove the sweet outer pulp, and then dried ready to be ground into cocoa powder; the tour also includes tasting of raw beans, cocoa nibs and a cup of hot chocolate tea. There’s also a “Secrets of the Forest” tour, a moderately challenging hike up into the high reaches of the estate to learn about the trees which make up the woodlands here, and how they’ve been used in traditional agriculture and husbandry. Workshops on organic and hydroponic gardening are also regularly staged, as are special activities for kids; and custom-designed tours are available: call ahead to find out what’s on.
The interior
Despite the beauty of its rolling countryside, the interior holds few specific draws for visitors; in fact, perhaps the best way to get a feel for the area is simply to get happily lost in its maze of rural roads, stopping off for a drink or an Indian snack at one of the innumerable small bars and food stalls in the villages. As maxis and taxis take long, circular routes to the villages, this is a difficult area to explore without your own vehicle, though the absence of road signs can be frustrating; asking for directions is usually your best bet for finding the right road.
Aripo Savannahs
Northeast of the Caroni Plains and right at the end of the Churchill Roosevelt Highway, stone pillars at the edge of the tarmac mark the entrance to the former American airbase at Waller Field. The hangars, barrack blocks and control rooms are long gone, though the old runway is used for regular drag racing meets. The main draw in the area, however, are the 18 square kilometres of the Aripo Savannah Scientific Reserve, Trinidad’s last remaining portion of savannah land, which was given protected status in 1934. In 1871, author Charles Kingsley wrote that the area “filled me with more admiration than anything I have seen in the island”, and it’s still a startlingly beautiful place, vast, eerie and empty despite its proximity to the Northern Range and the clamour of the East–West Corridor. The emptiness is deceiving, however; the area’s sensitive ecosystem provides a home to 260 species of birds and 243 documented species of flora, many of which are rarely (if ever) seen elsewhere on the island. Among the plants are parasitic vines, wild calabash, ground orchids and the endemic carnivorous sundew plant, while savannah hawks, red-bellied macaws and fork-tailed palm swifts (among innumerable others) are more easily spotted here than elsewhere on Trinidad. Each savannah is divided by impressive galba-palm forests and palm marshes including abundant moriche palm trees, while the disused bunkers and wells are a legacy of World War II, when the Americans leased 1600 acres here to use for training exercises.
The signposted entrance to the Aripo Savannah Scientific Reserve is at Cumuto, about 5km south of Waller Field. The best time to visit is at dawn, when you will be rewarded with a spectacular aspect of the palms glowing in the light, along with the birds’ enchanting early morning chorus.
The Caroni Arena Dam and Reservoir
Reaching 40.85m at its highest elevation, the Caroni Arena Dam is Trinidad and Tobago’s largest, while the Reservoir covers 6.8 square kilometres. Caroni is a haven for birds and animals. Parrots, hawks and white egrets are frequent visitors to the area while blue emperor butterflies flutter among the reeds by the water’s edge, caimans lurk in the swamps bordering the reservoir and red howler and capuchin monkeys, toucans and tree porcupines inhabit the surrounding forest. There’s no public transport to the dam, though Paria Springs offer a marvellous birding tour here, and will be able to arrange the necessary permits for entering the area.
The Caroni Plains
Running roughly parallel to the Uriah Butler Highway, the old Southern Main Road south from Curepe on the Churchill Roosevelt Highway is little more than a parochial thoroughfare these days as it potters through one small community after another surrounded on all sides by the Caroni Plains, Trinidad’s original sugar heartland and a region dominated by the East Indian community, whose ancestors settled here as indentured workers. The complete restructuring of the sugar industry during the 1990s and the eventual closure of the state-owned Caroni Sugar Company in 2004 has forced farmers to diversify, however, planting rice, pigeon peas and cassava in the former canefields. Some 5km south of Curepe, Caroni village was founded around the old Caroni Sugar Factory, though this and the rum distillery closed in 2003; you can still sample local rum in any number of rum shops along the road, however. Set in a former train station, the Railway Bar is especially distinctive.
South of Caroni, the SMR becomes increasingly urban as you pass through Warrenville, home of a particularly attractive mosque, which merges imperceptibly into Conupia, itself morphing into a suburb of Chaguanas. The route displays a fascinating combination of old and new Trinidad, with mandirs and mosques interspersed with evangelical churches, while extravagant signboards shout out the wares of the small shops and mom-and-pop restaurants that line the road, many of the latter selling excellent Indian fast food.
The Montserrat Hills
East of the Solomon Hochoy Highway, the Montserrat Hills are the most picturesque part of the Central Range, a rolling landscape which shelters huge cocoa estates and the Navet Dam and Reservoir, as well as some of Trinidad’s sleepiest villages, accessed via winding roads with rickety wooden bridges. The nineteenth-century English novelist Charles Kingsley, who visited in 1870, described the panorama from the top of Montserrat as “the most vast and most lovely which I have ever seen”. Most of the villages have little specific to recommend them apart from the odd picturesque colonial house and a great deal of rural charm, though there are a few gentle attractions on which to hinge a visit.
Mount Tamana Bat Caves
The distinctive, flat-topped Mount Tamana is the highest in the Central Range at 308m, and its porous limestone core holds a series of lengthy cave systems which provide the perfect home for huge colonies of bats. The gentle thirty-minute walk up Tamana’s slopes is pleasant enough, threading through shady groves of lichen-covered cocoa trees and under giant silk cotton trees, with the occasional eye-popping view over the Caroni Plains. However, the real draw here are the bats, which make a spectacular exit en masse at dusk to feed. It’s best to arrive around 3pm, in order to have enough time to walk up to the top of the hill and admire the spectacular views over the forested slopes of the Central Range, and descend to the caves before the sun goes down. It’s easy to go inside the first of the caves to peek at the ceiling – almost every inch is covered with roosting bats (though be warned that the bat droppings are copious). As dusk approaches, the first stragglers make their way out, and as the darkness thickens, the trickle becomes a stream as about a million and a half bats shoot past like furry, flapping balls, their sonars clicking away as they avoid flying into you.
Navet Dam and Reservoir
With only the minuscule hamlet of Brasso Venado nearby, the towering Navet Dam is an isolated place, excellent for quiet picnics and birdwatching, with plenty of waterfowl scooting around on the reservoir’s intricate network of inlets and coves. As with visits to Caroni Arena, you need a permit to enter the area, best arranged via a company such as Caribbean Discovery Tours or Paria Springs.
Piparo
Set in beautiful low-lying hills south of Montserrat, about 10km from both Tortuga and Tabaquite, PIPARO has the dubious distinction of having suffered one of the Trinidad’s largest mud volcano eruptions in 1997, which saw mud spewed 60m into the air, covering 2.5 square kilometres and displacing 31 families. Half of the village cemetery remains buried under the (now solidified) mud “lake”, which has two small oozing mounds at its centre that occasionally spatter out small eruptions of mud. Piparo is also infamous as the former home of notorious drug lord, Dole Chadee, whose 1994 arrest drew attention both to the significance of cocaine as part of the island’s economy, and to the extent of his Piparo estate, close to the volcano site, where an extensive mansion and Hindu temple behind 4.5m razor-wired walls attest to the extravagance of the cocaine don’s lifestyle. The rest of his land, just north of the village, was seized by the government and now houses a rehabilitation centre for drug users and the homeless.
The rise and fall of Dole Chadee
Widely claimed to have been Trinidad’s most influential and successful drug lord, Dole Chadee’s story reads something like an illicit Colombian rags-to-riches tale. Born Nankissoon Boodram to a poor Indo-Trinidadian family in Curepe, Chadee went from mason to cocaine empire-builder, and was a charitable community godfather who skillfully avoided arrest until his eventual downfall, which was shrouded in unanswered questions and political intrigue.
At the peak of his reign, Chadee owned a large estate guarded by gun-wielding henchmen at the village of Piparo; he had his own ornate no-expense-spared Hindu temple, owned racehorses, a fleet of flashy cars (despite not having a driving licence), as well as shopping centres and petrol stations as far afield as Princes Town and San Fernando. Chadee employed a large contingent of the Piparo community and was intent on looking after the village’s welfare, offering money for food and electricity at difficult times, as well as funds for sporting events and other community activities. His group remained seemingly untouchable (he’s even said to have bought a car from former prime minister, Patrick Manning), despite showing a ruthless side which saw witnesses to alleged crimes poisoned, killed or their jaws shot off, and families intimidated or murdered.
Chadee was never tried as a narco-trafficker, however. Despite US authorities’ suspicions that he, along with partner “Shortman” Beharry, were heading the eastern Caribbean’s leading cocaine cartel, in league with Cali of Colombia, it was for a dual murder charge that he and eight accomplices were eventually arrested in 1994.
Talparo Road
Signposted from the Churchill Roosevelt Highway, Talparo Road runs south through serene rainforest where you’ll rarely meet another car. As you pass the tiny settlements of Brazil and Talparo, the foothills of the Central Range appear, cloaked in luxuriant vegetation: thickets of bamboo jostle with papaya, mango, banana, cashew and breadfruit trees. The blooms of the golden poui dominate in April, while from December to March magnificent immortelle trees blaze a fiery red.
Triveni Mandir
Set among the canefields of south-central Trinidad, in the fantastically named community of Hard Bargain, the remarkably large Triveni Mandir owes its existence to the vision and devotion of local furniture-seller-cum-Hindu teacher Shri Ramoonsingh, who spent his entire life savings on the temple’s construction. It’s wonderfully detailed, with huge elephant sculptures outside and solid marble figurines of Shiva, Ganesh and Laksmi set in recesses in the walls both inside and out, while stained-glass windows and ornate paintings on the inside walls add to the atmosphere. Shri Ramoonsingh died before the temple was completed, but a small plaque at the front of the building dedicates the mandir to him.
Phagwah
A joyous celebration of the new year and the arrival of spring, the Hindu Holi festival – known in the Caribbean as Phagwah (pronounced “pag-wah”) – is held around the first full moon in March to mark the end of the Hindu calendar’s twelfth month (Phagun). Upbeat and lighthearted – to the horror of more traditional Hindus, who consider this attitude adharamic (anti-religious) – Phagwah celebrations are massive outdoor parties that represent a symbolic triumph of light over darkness and happiness over suffering. In Indian religious mythology, the festival commemorates the death of Holika, the sister of evil king Hiranyakashyapu, who repeatedly tried to murder his son Prahalad because of the latter’s insistence on worshipping Vishnu as the only God. Immune to flames, Holika carried Prahalad into a fire, but the gods ensured that she burned to death; her brother was later slain by Vishnu. Holika’s conflagration is re-enacted the night before the main festivities, when sins amassed in the previous year are ceremonially consumed by the flames of large bonfires.
The main festivities revolve around traditions such as the singing of devotional folk songs called chowtals, sung in a mix of English and Hindi and composed specifically for Phagwah to tell the story of the festival, normally accompanied by goatskin dholak drums and brass cymbals called ghanj. Local businesses sponsor chowtal competitions in the weeks preceding Phagwah, and the winners perform on the day itself. The principal focus of the festival, though, are intense dyes of various colours including the fuchsia-pink abir, which is strewn about as powder or mixed with water and squirted from a plastic bottle renamed a pichakaaree; participants wear white to make the most of the ensuing glorious mess. As the festivities wear on, classical Indian dancers display their movements and chutney soca fuels the more risqué dancing. Games add to the fun; adults participate in makhan chor, where teams form a human pyramid in order to grab a suspended flag; and children compete in roti-eating contests in which skins are strung through the middle and tied in a line to be eaten with no hands allowed.
