This would be our last day in Tobago, so we started planning our departure. We went up to the lady at the reception in our hotel to talk about checkout time, and also to express our discontent with the hot water and Wi-Fi situation. We felt that we deserve some compensation. She called the manager, who seemed for nice. The manager asked us to wait for a few minutes while she called the owner, and when we all reconvened she told us she would not charge us for the first night. That sounded perfectly fair, but once my credit card didn’t go through and I suggested that I pay in cash, Julia noticed that the numbers don’t add up. It turns out that the manager thought we stayed for four nights, rather than three. In that case, said the manager, she can only reimburse of for three quarters of the cost of a night’s stay. This seemed to us unfair and random. Why three quarters, we demanded to know. To her, it made perfect sense: it’s the amount of money she meant to give us back, divided by the amount of nights she thought we were there, and multiplied by the number of nights we were actually there. We just wanted to be reimbursed for the night we didn’t have hot water and Wi-Fi. I offered a compromise. She refused. It was unclear to me why she got to set the terms.
- “And what if I don’t give you what you ask for?” I asked.
- “Then we’re going to have a problem.”
- “Then I guess we do have a problem.”
- “I’m sorry sir, that’s the best I can do.”
- “In that case” I said, took out some bills from my pocket - the amount I offered as a compromise - and put them on the counter, “this is the best the I can do!”
- “You do not come in good faith, sir.”
I didn’t want to rub in her face the fact she’s been constantly lying to us, so I just stopped talking. She wrote a receipt, and I just hoped she wouldn’t call the police or poop on our bed. We left. Julia asked me whether I was sure I wasn’t going to blog about this trip.
Having already experienced the procedure of getting ferry tickets, we decided this time to get our tickets back to Trinidad a day in advance. We drove to Crown Point to a small store that sold tickets, but the line was long and the people who were waiting have been there for over two hours, and to make it just a little more interesting, it started raining pretty bad again.
We drove to Scarborough and found another store, but the line there was even longer. Our best chance was to start our day, drive around, and hope things will fall into place.
This time, we drove along the northern shoreline. When we got to Plymouth, indeed, we found a small store that sold ferry tickets, and we were the only ones there. The tickets to the early ferry were sold out, but the dude told us there’s a new ferry that runs at 10AM, and tickets were available. This actually made everything much simpler, and mostly meant we get to wake up in a reasonable hour.
We drove around, moving away from the shoreline but eventually coming back, until we hit Castara.
We were late for lunch, again, but we found a restaurant that had people in it, so we sat down. A customer went into the kitchen, looking very impatient. The owner came out with a plate and put it on one of the tables. “Finally!” the client said. “An hour and a half!”. Everybody else got up and left.
We walked around and found a restaurant that just opened. We sat on the porch with a creek running below us and nobody else besides us. I don’t remember what we had, but it was the best meal we had in Tobago.
At sunset we started driving back. Nobody pooped on our beds or threw our stuff in the pool. We went to a new restaurant down the road from our hotel that served fancy food, which was actually pretty good. From there we went back to our hotel where we packed, watched terrible American reality shows on the TV and went to bed.
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