I´m a millionaire!!!!!!

Last time I wrote, we were eating pizza and sleeping in an epic shithole in Chaguaramas, Trinidad, hoping that we could somehow gank a ticket to Venezuela on the next morning´s ferry.

So we woke up at 5:30 am on Wednesday, ate cold pizza that just barely escaped the clutches of the termites and zombie spiders, checked out of the palacial hotel, and grabbed a taxi for the pier. The ticket booth wasn´t open when we arrived at 6:45, but there were signs everywhere saying that tickets would not be sold on the morning of the sailing, and that four days advance reservation was required. Clearly, we were screwed. But we sat down with a nice Swedish/Kenyan couple that was waiting to board the ferry, and had a good chat. We figured that it was worth trying to beg our way onto the ferry.

At this point, it probably sounds like travel in T&T is incredibly irritating. Objectively speaking, it is irritating. If I were trying to travel on a schedule for, say, business meetings or something, then the wobbly travel infrastructure in T&T would probably make my anus bleed. But we´re leisure travelers, with no time schedule whatsoever. Why get upset? Most of the time, none of this stuff really bothers us, unless we´re hungry. It can also get bad if the heat is bothering us--this happens much more often to poor Amber (sunburns, heat rashes, dizzyness) than it does to me.

Anyhoo, people are pretty friendly in Tobago--I can´t really speak for Trinidad, since we spent hardly any time there. The travel delays can actually be kind of fun at times, and sometimes we ended up having nice conversations when we would ask somebody for directions.

Okay, so back to the ferry. We waited for awhile while the other fifteen passengers checked in. Then they decided to sell us a ticket, with almost no fanfare whatsoever. Very nice...the travel gods seemed to be with us that day.

We met up again with the couple that we had met earlier--he was Swedish, she was a Kenyan living in Sweden, and they had two adorable little girls, ages 14 months and 3 years. They were an amazing pair--she speaks four languages, he speaks seven. They were on ¨parental leave¨ for six months, earning 80% of their normal salaries. Hooray for the Swedish welfare state!

This was definitely the best experience I´ve ever had crossing an international border. There were only about 20 passengers on the ferry, and there was a makeshift T&T immigration post set up in a tent on the small pier. Definitely the most beautiful place I´d ever had to go through customs--literally standing over the Caribbean on a beautiful morning. Good stuff--way better than an airport.

It was really hard to find any information online about the ferry, and it seemed that some of the locals in Chaguaramas had no idea that it even existed. Which explains why there were only 20 people on the ferry...but it was a wonderful ride. Nice, comfortable little boat with an open-air deck and fresh coffee. What more could you want? We spent the whole ride chatting with our Swedish friends and a really cool Venezuelan guy named Edward. Not Eduardo, but Edward.

After four and a half hours, we arrived in Guiria, Venezuela, a crappy port town of about 30,000 people. Four serious-looking guys in military garb boarded the ferry as soon as we docked. They had swords. I think they were fake--they didn´t look even the least bit sharp.

Then three Venezuelan immigration people set up a makeshift office on the boat, and began to process the passengers. Edward sailed through in a minute or two, with almost no conversation. The Swedes took a good 20 minutes. We were last.

Supposedly, Venezuela and the United States aren´t too friendly with each other these days. A few of you (you know who you are) actively discouraged us from traveling to Venezuela, out of fear of the anti-American dictatorship in Venezuela.

We had a really fun, pleasant chat with the immigration people--they really got a kick out of the fact that Amber studied International Relations. Once I told them that, we were just joking around while they stamped our paperwork.

Then, we were off the boat to another small tent on the pier, where the four serious military guys were looking through baggage. They barely glanced at our backpacks, and welcomed us to the country. I don´t think that I´ve ever seen such friendly bag-searching soldiers.

They didn´t seem to like the Swedes so much. They ended up in the back of a truck, and were taken somewhere else for further searching. We know where they planned to stay in the city of Cumaná, and we plan to go looking for them in a couple of days...we didn´t even have a chance to exchange email addresses or anything.

The good thing about the ferry was that we managed to avoid the insanity of Caracas. The bad thing is, we were at a grungy port which looked almost abandoned--a fair number of really old sunken ships could be seen in the harbor, not far from where we docked. There was no obvious taxi stand or bus stop or anything, and most of the other passengers had left already.

The next fifteen minutes were a crazy blur. I heard some guy say ¨taxi,¨ and I told him that we wanted to go to Rio Caribe, even though I had no idea where that town was in relation to where we were. Next thing I knew, some gangly pockmarked teenager had grabbed both of our packbacks, and was taking them to a beat-up old 1979 Chevy Malibu. I barely had time to negotiate a price--I thought that we´d settled on 25,000 bolivars, but I couldn´t understand the cabbie´s accent at all. And they were just racing down the road, with our backpacks. We had to follow. Amber and I gave each other the ¨I think we might get killed in the next hour or so, but we have no choice but to follow these guys¨ look.

Luckily, there were already three other passengers in the taxi, and one of them was our friend Edward. To make a long story short, all was well, although Amber didn´t figure that out for another three hours or so--I had argued with the bag-carrying guy about his tip (he asked me for about ten times more than what was fair, and I politely told him to take the TT$2 that I offered and fuck off), but everything was fine. The cabbie was a great guy, actually, and I figured that out pretty quickly. But poor Amber had no idea where we were going, and couldn´t understand a word spoken by any of the Venezuelans in the car.

It was three hours to Rio Caribe, as it turns out. Lots of time for Amber to get a little bit freaked out. But all was well--we checked into a little posada on the main plaza, just a few meters from the sea. It´s a crazy charismatic place, with that classic shoddy half-built improvised Latin American look. No hot water, but clean and friendly. The door is somewhat broken (if the door is locked, it takes a key AND a knife to get in), but it´s definitely a safe home in a charming small town.

I played Powerball once when we were in North Carolina last month, and I won. Now I´m a millionaire.

I went to an ATM in Venezuela, and took out some cash. The ATM receipt said ¨available balance: B$15036305.00.¨ I´m a millionaire!!!! Fifteen million B$!!! Sweet.

Okay, so I only won $4 in Powerball. And fifteen million bolivares doesn´t really buy much of anything, even in Venezuela. Apparently, it won´t even buy a bottle of fernet--because as far as I can tell, there isn´t any. Waaaaaaah.

Tobago, land where nobody´s home

We´re in Venezuela now, but here´s one last round of stories from Trinidad and Tobago.

When I last wrote, we were waiting for a bus to the capital of Tobago on Republic Day. After three or four hours, we gave up and took a taxi for about US$35. It was a pretty damned unoffical-looking taxi, with beers on offer and party fliers pinned to the ceiling of the car. But it got us to Scarborough in record time--less than an hour. The bus takes almost two hours. We were happy.

After that, the rest of our plans kind of went to shit. Our plan was to catch the 10am ferry the next day for Trinidad--we had to be there on Tuesday to buy our ferry tickets to Venezuela. So we thought that we´d check into a posada, then buy the ferry ticket to Trinidad. It was only 3pm...no problem, right?

Ha.

We went to posada #1. The owner wasn´t around, but a guest called her, and told us that no rooms were available. Off to posada #2. The owner wasn´t around, but a guest said that she´d be back within an hour. We decided to wait in the living/dining area. After half an hour, I wandered off in search of food and ferry tickets.

First, there was a small mob at the ferry station. I arrived just in time to hear a message delivered by the Port Police--there was a waiting list for all ferries remaining on Monday. For anything pertaining to Tuesday´s ferry, I would have to come back at 4am. Whee.

Nothing I could do about that one besides plan on waking up really early the next morning. So I went looking for food. There are easily 25 restaurants and two minimarts in downtown Scarborough, but only two of those businesses were open: KFC and Church´s Chicken. I am not making this up. Luckily, Church´s serves tolerable hoagies and pizza in T&T. Yay for American fast food while traveling overseas.

After a full two hours at posada #2, we gave up. I stopped at #3. All of the doors were wide open, but nobody was home. After a long walk, we found posada #4. No answer. We started asking random people for directions to any damn room anywhere in the damn town, and got some vague stuff about a cottage on a hill with two large trees--you can´t miss it. By then it was kind of dark. We met a wonderful woman who worked in posada #5...but the owner wasn´t home, so we couldn´t stay there.

To make a long story short, I left Amber with the woman from posada #5, and hiked up a nasty hill in search of posada #6. And found it, but only after passing a minimart with its doors wide open...but not a soul in sight.

That was definitely an odd experience. Five of Scarborough´s six guesthouses were left completely unattended. If you ever want to start a crime wave in Scarborough, I can assure you that it would be really, really easy.

Let me put it differently for the sake of any parents who are prone to worrying: if that many people leave there businesses unattended, it must be an incredibly safe place.

This has already been a long posting, so I´ll gloss over the rest fairly quickly. Up at 3:30 am, down to the ferry station...no space on the 10am ferry, so I ended up waking up way before dawn just to buy a ticket for the 1:30 pm boat. Poopy.

The boat to Trinidad was amazing. I expected a grungy old boat with tin benches, certainly nothing better than the Staten Island ferry. But we ended up on a super-fast catamaran with really comfortable reclining seats, great views, and a bar. Good stuff.

Trouble was, we had to make it to a completely different pier in a different city in Trinidad by 5:00 on Tuesday--supposedly, we couldn´t even buy a ticket on Wednesday morning to catch the weekly ferry to Venezuela. After taking a taxi from one pier to another, we arrived at 5:20. No tickets, no information, nothing. All we could do was try to find someplace to stay for the night, and come back before 7am the next morning.

I´ll try to make this short...we walked about five miles through a seemingly neverending series of boatyards, and finally found a hotel called The Cove Beach Resort, at the very end of the highway. It was an epic shithole. But it was an air conditioned shithole, although the air conditioner was stuck on one setting--we couldn´t turn it off or down or up. There was no hot water, the toilet only flushed after ten pumps of the handle, there was no key, the furniture had piles of termite-induced sawdust around it--but no visible termites, thankfully, although there were plenty of bug corpses and spiderwebs around. Even a vacated wasps´ nest in the bathroom. Which was carpeted, by the way...scary, considering that the carpet looked like it was 25 years old. Mmmmm.

This luxury in Chaguaramas, Trinidad can be yours for just $50 a night.

And guess what two restaurants were open in Chaguaramas that night? Yup, KFC and another pizza joint.

I´ll continue tomorrow, and tell you all about how our new Swedish friends were abducted by the Venezuelan police...

sucked inside the discovery channel

We're presumably in our last few minutes or hours in Charlotteville. I'm in an internet cafe (duh), Amber is sitting a few yards away in a shady bus shelter, hoping that a bus will show up eventually. There's no bus schedule, it's a major national holiday (Republic Day), and the petrol station that sells bus tickets is closed. We're betting that a bus will show up eventually, but who knows?

Normally, I wouldn't try to travel on a day like this, but we don't have much of a choice. If we want to catch Wednesday's ferry to Venezuela, we need to get to Scarborough (Tobago's capital) tonight, catch a ferry to Trinidad tomorrow (Tuesday), then be at the ferry terminal at the buttcrack of dawn on Wednesday. So we're waiting.

We've spent the entire week on the same beach--lovely Pirate's Bay. Arrg. Pictures coming soon, maybe.

And we're a little bit stupid.

The whole time we've been here, we've seen groups of snorklers in the water. Small groups, sure, but there are always a few of them. It didn't really cross our minds that there might be something neat in the water, at least not until we saw this beautiful iridescent blue fish a couple of days ago. I had a pair of swim goggles in my backpack, and decided that we should bring them to the beach the next day.

And then I forgot the next day, and finally brought them to the beach on our last day there. I floated over to a few rocks, just to see if there was anything cool over there.

Turns out that we've been splashing around next to a coral reef all week. Absolutely stunning--it felt like the TV had sucked me into some aquatic documentary on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic. There were fish everywhere, all of them completely different from each other, most of them were ridiculously colorful. Some of them were large enough to be a little bit scary. Even after spending several hours floating around in the reef, I still saw new types of fish everywhere I looked.

To be honest, I never really had the least bit of interest in diving or snorkeling or anything like that. How cool could it possibly be? You couldn't possibly see too many neat fish, right? Nope. It was absolutely amazing--if you ever get the chance to do something like this, I strongly recommend it. A snorkel and flippers might have been nice, but a $10 pair of swim goggles from Target did the trick just fine.

And it was all under our noses for six days before we figured it out. Lame us.

I'm off to sit by the side of the road for awhile. Yay.

sand-poopy towers

A couple of days ago, Amber and I decided that wet sand is really fun. After splashing around in the obscenely-beautiful clear Caribbean waters for a bit, we plopped ourselves onto a wet bit of sand on the far end of the cove. And we started playing with the wet sand, making little mounds and castles, which would get washed away every few minutes when a larger wave would hit.

Accepting the ephemeral nature of our sand structures, we started to build them sloppily out of incredibly wet sand. If you take a handful of wet sand and squeeze it, it sort of looks like your hand is pooping. So we starting making sand-poopy towers. We started flinging wet sand-poopy at each other, too. Lots of fun, until we started to get sunburnt. Then we went back to our hotel.

The next morning, we decided to wake up at 5:30 a.m. to go for a walk in the jungle (on a lightly-traveled, paved road--nothing too adventurous). It was the only time of day cool enough to take a tolerable walk.

We were joined by a dog, who started following us on the edge of town. Two hours later, he was still trotting alongside us...not begging, not barking, not being annoying--just along for the ride. We called him our tour guide. We met a gigantic hummingbird--easily the size of, say, a robin--and saw lots of sensitive plants lining the roads (you know, the type of fern that closes when something touches the leaves). I thought that those were the coolest thing ever when I was a kid, but I'd only seen them in pots--never guessed that I'd see fields of them in the wild.

After two and a half hours of wandering, we drank the most coffee we'd had in a week, and watched crappy TV all day. Yay for vacation.

Today is Friday, and we're out of here on Monday. Since life will be a lot trickier in Venezuela and Brazil, we're working hard (ha) to be degenerates while we have the chance.

Okay, now pretend that this one is from Wednesday.

This is our second full day in Charlotteville. It's supposed to be a quaint little fishing village on a nice little bay, well off the beaten path. It's cute enough, and there's a bay with a tiny strip of sand--if you're really determined to use it as a beach, you could.

We went looking for a place to eat lunch yesterday, and found exactly one place that was open. It had two items on the menu: kingfish and chips, or shrimp and chips (oddly pricey, too--US$10 and $20, respectively).

When you see only one open restaurant in a town, you start to think that it must be a poor sort of place. Lots of people just seem to hang out on the streets, on the small dock in the center of town, on random benches scattered around. There were little tourist businesses everywhere--craft shops and cafes and the like--but most were closed.

The weird part is, there seems to be plenty of money washing around this place. There's a nice library which looks brand-new, a disturbingly well-manicured soccer field, and some nice-looking homes. A fair number of swanky cars can be seen in the town, blaring soca or hip-hop out of some crazy aftermarket amp. Yes, you see the spinning hubcaps, too.

And everybody seems to have a cell phone, and the internet cafes have DSL. And we're in a dinky town on a dinky bay, surrounded by jungle. Definitely an odd mix of worlds.

For us, the important part of Charlotteville is proving to be Pirate's Bay, which is about a 15-minute hike over a fat hill from the town center. After climbing a dirt road into the jungle, we decended about 180 stone stairs to get the the beach. It's unbelievably beautiful down there--a barely-visited beach in a little cove, surrounded by forest. We'll post pictures.

On our first walk over there, we met an amazing Trinidadian fellow who gave us a quick rundown of some of the tropical plants. He makes some fantastic hand-carved crafts out of coconuts (no room in the backpack for them, unfortunately), built a little shack for himself on the beach, and spends his spare time gardening in the forest--plantains, flowers, corn, among other things. He even had a documentary made about his craft work. And he's just chillin' on this beach, hanging out with tourists. Fascinating guy--grows or catches most of his food, but owns a car and a four-bedroom house in NE Trinidad. Looks like the classic rasta beach man, but has a sharp business mind, as well.

Anyhoo, we're just hanging out on the beach most of the time, sunburns permitting. Not much else to do here...and that's probably a good thing. After spending our first night in a dirty, buggy motel, we switched to a much nicer and slightly cheaper place called Seaville Chateau. Sounds fancy, huh? Not really, but at least there's a kitchen, a/c, and a TV. The TV is probably not a good thing, but at least we can cook for ourselves, so that we're not at the mercy of overpriced fish and chips.

our first third-worldish experience

Pretend that I wrote this on Tuesday...it's Friday now.

So Amber and I decided that we'd had enough of Crown Point, which is the heart of the touristy part of Tobago. After carefully reading our guidebook for a minute or two, we carefully took another minute or two to pick another place to go for a week or so. We settled on Charlotteville, a supposedly-remote fishing village on the exact opposite side of Tobago.

The lovely woman who owned (or managed...we couldn't quite tell whether she actually owned it) the posada we stayed at in Crown Point gave us a ride to the bus station in Scarborough, the capital of Tobago. She's really nice. If you ever go to Tobago, stay at Kia's Across from the Beach...it's a five-minute walk from the airport, and is across from the internet/laundry cafe.

Yes, this ad space is for sale for the right price. A ride to a bus station? Sold.

Some excellent ad space on my butt is also for sale for the right price. I have two cheeks, both only slightly hairy. I'm willing to get them tattooed with your company's logo. Again, for the right price. I'll even moon people more often.

Anyhoo, we got the the bus station in Scarborough at noon. There was a bus for Charlotteville leaving at 12:30. Sweet. And it only cost TT$8 for the 2-hour trip...that's equivalent to about US $1.30. Nice.

Then they told us that the bus was cancelled. No worries, there was another at 2:30. We went to a nearby bar, had a few Caribs (very tasty beer, incidentally--much better than most national flagship piss-waters) and some rum and coke and really good plate of grilled snapper with veggies and rice (you can get fat and happy real fast with Tobagoan food). Then we went back to the station.

Which had no fan or air conditioning, by the way. Amber was sweating like a pig. Not cute.

They cancelled the 2:30 bus. But there was another at 4:30...so we decided to hang out. Amber drank a cup of coffee, and got plenty of weird looks--who the hell drinks coffee in 90-degree heat and tropical humidity? With no fan in sight?? White people are weird.

Then the 4:30 bus was cancelled. At 5:00 we finally asked for other options at the cafe next door. Turns out that most of the busses had been run into the ground when T&T hosted some big sporting event (cricket world cup, I think) a few months ago. Apparently, it was common knowledge that there weren't enough busses to run the normal routes, but nobody had told us...or the other people waiting for the bus...or the ticket window lady.

We hiked to a "maxi-taxi" stop, on a hill overlooking the rest of the town. We waited for another hour, and watched chickens in a small plaza, trying to eat styrofoam. We decided that we'll stick to eating fish around here.

Finally, a maxi-taxi came. After leaving our motel at 11:30 am, we finally arrived in Charlotteville at about 9:00 pm. And the entire island is only about 45 miles long. Sweet.

And the best part was, we didn't even get upset about it. The relaxed Tobagoan spirit is just infectious enough.

Tobagan mauby is almost like a stinky version of fernet

We were stupid enough to start our trip to tropical paradise with a 2:30 a.m. shuttle to LaGuardia Airport. Which sucked...SuperShuttle insisted that we take a 2:30 shuttle to catch a 6:00 a.m. flight, but then we waited twenty minutes for the check-in people to show up, then another hour for the security line to open. Lame. And that's all the bitching you'll hear from me for awhile. Once we got on the plane, everything was lovely. Flew to Miami, then to Port-of-Spain, then to Crown Point in Tobago with no delays at all. By 4:00 in the afternoon, we were sipping coffee in a bamboo-walled cafe, just a few meters from the beach. I think that I told everybody that we were heading to Trinidad, but that wasn't exactly true. We were checked in by a Trini, who told us to skip Trinidad and fly straight to Tobago. Then Amber sat next to another Trinidadian woman, who said exactly the same thing. So as soon as we landed in Trinidad, we bought a ticket to Tobago. Tobago is the quintessence of Caribbean postcards. Completely clear water, palm trees, nice beaches, mellow people...soca and calypso and reggae music playing everywhere. We even met a bull who seemed to have a sense of rhythm--he was just bopping in time with the music. The song changed, and then he swayed to that tune. Really odd.

And the food is amazing. About half of Trinbagoans are of East Indian descent...so there's a definite Indian influence on the cuisine. We ate really tasty roti with flying fish (fish fly?), a great dish called Coo-Coo Callaloo (something resembling polenta with fish and some sort of green chutney), and lots of pigeon peas pelau (a rice and lentil dish...mmm).

Amber and I both love to order odd-sounding things off the menu, just to see what they are. We tried mauby, a drink made from some sort of tree bark. It smelled like fernet. I was excited.

But it had no alcohol, and just tasted like tree bark, not fernet. Waaaaa.

Off to a tiny town for a week...yay.