Our goal for the day was to get to the Pitch Lake. We had instructions from a random TripAdvisor post on how to get there, which seemed to be a pretty complicated, but we went for it anyway.
Step one: get to Independence Square. We walked to the main road with the intention of hailing a taxi, but we couldn’t see any. Julia said she read somewhere that the taxis in Trinidad don’t have clear markings, but rather have something different about their license plate, but she couldn’t remember what it was. So we just stood in bus stop and indeed someone pulled over. Maybe that was a taxi. Maybe someone who just wanted to make a buck. Anyway, he took us to Independence Square. This is the main transportation hub of the city, and it’s surrounded by a very vibrant and loud market. We looked for something that resembled breakfast, but couldn’t find any. We ended up buying some pears.
Step two: get a Maxi Taxi to San Fernando. We figured out that all taxis have license plate that start with an “H”, for “hire”. We started asking around, but taxi drivers just threw random prices at us, like 70 dollars. American. We finally asked a guy specifically for the Maxi Taxi to San Fernando, and he directed us to an alley where the Maxi Taxis for San Fernando were lined up. A Maxi Taxi, now we learned, is a minivan with a specific route that leaves when it’s in full capacity. Very similar to service taxis in Israel, only harder to locate. They’re also priced reasonably, and I think this ride cost us about 15 TTD, which is about $2.5 a head.
Step three: get to La Brea. We walked to where the taxi driver told us the Maxi Taxi stop to La Brea would be. Now we learned to recognize the little white signed that mark the taxi stops. We waited for a while, but saw no activity, so we asked one of the store owners next to the stop. This stop is no longer active, he said. We should walk all the way down the street. We did, but had no idea what to do now. We sat down and ate the pears. It wasn’t enough, so we decided to look for food
Unfortunately, everything was closed due to the Christmas vacation. The only thing that was open was a Subway. This was extremely disappointing, but there was no choice. In the line, some lady asked for a replacement sandwich - a fly landed on the meat while they were piling cheese on it. I found that funny. For me, the problem would not the fly. It would be the actual food. Julia had their new Sriracha chicken, that was terrible. I blocked out what I had.
Outside, we were getting frustrated, but then two policewomen walked by, so we asked them. It’s very hard parsing english with a Caribbean accent, but after they repeated themselves five times, we understood what we had to do next: we walked to the bank, looked for a Maxi Taxi to Point Fortin and asked the driver to drop us off at the lake.
It worked! We finally got to the lake, but it was now raining pretty bad. We followed Trinidad rule #1, avoided a random dude who offered us a tour, and went straight to the guy with the right T-shirt. We waited for the rain to weaken and Garvin took us into the lake. It’s pretty crazy: you get to walk on this huge lake of tar. Rain is trapped in the small valleys that the folding of the pitch create, and small fish and plants live there. Tiny holes on the surface release sulfur and they bubble when you step near them.
Garvin explained to us about the history and the chemistry of the place, and eventually showed us a pond full of lilies. He took us back to the visitor center, and then we asked if we could go back to the lake on our own to play. He told us to be careful and not go to the center of the lake where we might get get stuck and sink. We managed not to sink, but when we finished playing we had a hard time navigating back to the visitor center. We finally made it. We washed our feet, ate some terrible Subway sandwich leftovers, and moved on.
Step 4: Walk back to La Brea. This was relatively easy. It’s 1km to walk to the end of La Brea, where the driver who brought us to the lake told us to wait for a taxi. The only hard part was that my flip flops were dying.
Step 5: Taxi back to San Fernando. No taxis were passing by. A woman joined us. She was also going in that same direction. She just hailed every car that passed by, until one of them stopped. Every car is a potential taxi, so it seems. The lady got off after 15 minutes, leaving us alone with the driver, who drove insanely fast.
Step 6: Maxi Taxi back to Port of Spain. Piece of cake.
We sat for a little while in Independence Square and then walked around in the market trying to find me some new flip flops. I felt that the merchants were trying to charge me too much money, so we gave up and took a taxi back to the hotel. After chilling in the room for about an hour, Julia couldn’t find her purse. We went through our bags. Twice. We looked all over the room. We moved to extreme measures, clearing one corner of the room and then scanning everything, bags, pillows, clothes, and moving every scanned item to the clear corner. The purse was definitely gone. Damage assessment: phone, wallet with credit cards and driver license, a paper with all our flight and hotel reservations. We started making calls. The credit card company said an attempt was made to withdraw money just half an hour before. To us, that meant that we have to escalate. We blocked all the cards, and asked T-Mobile to put a hold on the SIM and brick the phone. Considering the circumstance, we managed the situation pretty well.
The receptionist stopped giggling when we explained the situation to her, and she explained to us how to get to the police station. The police officer gave Julia a piece of paper that basically says “To whom it may concern, Julia lost her stuff. Try to be nice to her.” I asked him what would they do if they find the stuff, so he agreed to write down an email address. That did not give us any hope.
We walked over to St. James, the nightlife part of town, and got jerk chicken from a street food cart. It was awesome. When we started walking back to the hotel, it started raining again. This time it was raining hard. We had no umbrella, and we just could not find a taxi. We started walking in segments, from underneath a roof to bus station. We then heard music and saw people dancing. If it’s a club, we thought, we could get a drink and wait for the rain to stop.
It was an Indian wedding, and we were not invited. So we stood under a shed right next to the wedding and rested. The wedding was taking place under a tent, but one young woman seemed to have found the tent isolating from mother nature, and danced very purposefully under the rain. She raised her hands to the sky, part to embrace the rain and part to make sure she is noticed. She signaled other guests to join her, but they valued their dryness. We, too, valued their nature. “She’s a free spirit!” Julia said sarcastically and we both burst with laughter.
The rest of the journey home was torture. It just kept raining harder and harder, and by the time we got back to the hotel we were completely soaked. “Are you sure you don’t want to blog about this?” Julia asked.
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