Goodbye, Trinidad!!!!

So this is going to be my last posting from Trinidad: the project is at its end, my job is over and it is time to pack up and go home (home being Ecuador). We've been getting our luggage ready and saying adios to friends for a week now. It is pretty sad, especially for my wife and the two children. They made lots of very good friends at school and it is hard for them to think that they might never see each other again. People here have been especially nice to us. Maybe my being from India resonated with them or maybe they are just nice generally, but they really made my family feel very much at home.

It has also been sad in another - cruel - way. Yesterday, our dog, Calypso, escaped onto the main road through the gate, carelessly left open by the rental manager of our house here, and was hit by a pickup traveling very fast. The whole thing happened in literally the blink of an eye. By the time the man shouted that the dog was on the road and I turned around it was already over. The poor creature breathed his last in my arms. My wife has been devastated by this tragedy and has still not stopped crying. We did not have the heart to tell our children about this - luckily they did not see it happen - we just told them that we gave him away to our driver, which is what we were going to do in the evening, anyway. He was just six months old and not yet wise to the ways of the world beyond the house walls. So, goodbye, Calypso. You brought much happiness to our family and taught the kids a lot. May God keep you in dog heaven eternally.

Where do we come from?

"Daddy, where did I come from?" the seven-year-old asked. It was a moment for which her parents had carefully prepared.

They took her into the living room, got out the encyclopedia and several other books, and explained all they thought she should know about sexual attraction, affection, love, and reproductions. Then they both sat back and smiled contentedly.

"Does that answer your question?" her father asked.

"Not really," the little girl said. "My friend said she came from Detroit. I want to know where I came from."

Leena and Sebastian absorbed by the sea foam.

Leena running through the waves.

Sunset on Store Bay

Private beach at Coco Reef Hotel. This is a white sand beach made of white river sand imported from the neighbouring island of Granada.

Santa came on a surprise visit bearing gifts for the kids.

So, Christmas in Tobago. A nice Nativity scene on the Store Bay beach.

A Moment of Sorrow

On Sunday night, the Doc was sitting on a bench on the hotel lawn when a German guy walked up to him to strike up a conversation. When I walked up to them he had just started telling about the enormous tsunami that had struck Malyasia, Sri Lanka and India as a result of the massive seaquake. The loss of life is horrific, especially because these countries have no public information system for emergencies which might have cut down the losses drastically. Let us observe a few moments of quite and prayer.

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I am astounded that countries that are willing to spend billions of dollars worth of resources to "defend" their people from "enemies" do not think enough of these same people to try and protect them from natural disasters that visit them and kill thousands every year.

Merry Christmas (running late...)

I am really running late on my blog. Christmas is come and gone. I am still posting pics from my last visit to Tobago when I have already made another visit during this holiday.

Holidays here for my family get to be a bit depressing - all of us, especially the kids, miss the extended family in Ecuador. On Christmas Eve, we were sitting in our new apartment, where we have still not finished moving our stuff, when our friend, the Doc, called us to say that he had rented an apartment in the Hotel Johnston on Crown Point in Tobago and would we like to join him and another friend there for the weekend? We jumped at the chance to escape the depressing loneliness and by the afternoon of next day, 25th of December, we were there.

Johnston hotel shares the premises with the Crown Point hotel, about three minutes walking distance from the airport. From the outside they look kind of run down but on the inside they have magnificient open spaces with walkways threading about green manicured lawns dotted with pine trees. In addition, they allow direct access to the Store Bay beach, one of the main attractions in Tobago.

We enjoyed sunset from the Store Bay, visited the private Coco Reef beach (more on which later) and revisited the Pigeon Point beach during our two days' stay this time.

In the afternoon we decided to try Pigeon Point beach again. We got there after lunchtime. It was nice weatherwise, although we did have a rain shower that passed away quick enough. Pigeon Point is the best beach on the island although you have to pass through a privately controlled gate and pay an entrance fee of US$3.00. You can also reach there by boat. In this case you don't have to pay the fee but you also don't get service from the restaurants.

The waves were huge that day. As a matter of fact, a few minutes after taking this pic, I waded into the water and almost immediately I was caught by two huge waves, one after another, and thrown, tumbling head over heels, on to the sand. Both the waves crashed about a meter-and-half above my head and in the blink of an eye the world had gone dark, I was turned upside down and was being dragged unceremoniously to the beach. I called it enough after the second time this happened!

Sunday, Nov 13th, was our last day in Tobago. We started the day by visiting Store Bay Beach, a five minutes walk from the hotel.

At the end of the day we enjoyed a refreshing dip in the pool.

Spot the fish!!!

The trip was tiring but the day hadn't ended yet. Our next activity was a boat ride to see the famous Bucco reef. This is about a mile North-west off the coast from Pigeon Point. The whole trip lasted about two hours in a glass bottom boat. We were expecting to see lots of marine life but the trip was a complete waste of time. Although we did see large fields of coral but as far as fish are concerned we could spot just a few six- to twelve-inces long black ones. I even donned the snorkels provided by the boat operator and dived into the water but no luck. On top of everything, Anita and I both started feeling sea-sick after I stepped back onto the boat after the snorkelling experience.

End of the long ride. We came back tired after an almost five-hour long car ride through the different parts of the island.

First a correction: the last two pics are frm the Englishman's Bay and not the Castara beach. Here some more wave action at the same beach.

I loved the light filtering through these colorful wraparounds hanging from the wire at Castara, although the composition leaves a lot to be desired. It would have been better if I had stepped back a pace and shot the picture from the ground up - that would have kept the shoreline from intruding into the pic.

The waves were ponding the beach at Castara.

Next day, Saturday, Nov 12, we decided to hire a taxi and go round the island with a friend, Doc Hoyos. Here my wife and kids are poolside in the Tobago Plantation, a hotel run by the Hilton group in Scarborough.

My son definitely had fun that day on the beach. He found a boat moored out on the water with its mooring ropes running out to the beach tied around a tree and started pulling on it.

Another pic at the same roadside beach, this time the camera facing the Crown Point end of the Island. This is on the second day (our first FULL day actually) of our trip. We were planning to go to visit the Pigeon Point beach, said to be the best beach in Tobago. The day had dawned with a hugh thunderstorm and heavy rainshowers, as a result the freshly washed air made for quite nice walking weather late in the morning. We decided to walk to the beach, which is only about a mile and half from the hotel, one mile of which the road runs parallel to the sea about 30yards from the shore. However, when we reached the entrance to the beach we found the gates closed because, as the guard explained it to us, the outflow of debris to the sea from the morning's rains had made it too dangerous. So we just turned around, walked back about 100yards and stepped on to the beach where there was no guards to stop us from doing so!

Roadside beach on the way to Pigeon Point.

The restaurant was decorated in pirates theme which my daughter thought was great fun.

Our first night we went to the Pelican Grill restaurant, just a block down the road from where we were staying near the Store Bay beach. Pretty good food, plus the waitress was real nice and helpful.

The kids had fun exploring the ferry from end to end. This was their first time for a boat ride. Here they are on the deck, grabbing a railing tight as the movement of the boat made them a bit nervous.

The Hindu festival of Diwali and the Muslim festival of Eid resulted in a long 5-day weekend here in Trinidad (Nov 11-15). We decided to take some time off to go visit Tobago, a small tourist island off the north-east coast of Trinidad. We took a ferry from Port of Spain and after a five-and-a-half hour ride reached Tobago at 4:30pm.