Trinidad, "respect mun"...

Stone, I see what you mean about these Caribbeans and their liming. After 30 or so continuous days on board the first thing I did after stepping onto the docks, was to wonder off to find a stranger to chat too. His name was Derck. Without a doubt the first thing I saw him doing was exactly this. For those of you in the dark, liming is a form of chilling, relaxing, wasting time/doing nothing while enjoying the company of others or kind of like taking an endless smoke break, without the smoke. So we just talked about a little bit less than nothing, until I was summond by the captian to clear into immigration. I usually find a good judge of what to expect from a country comes with the first person you have to interact with. Invariably this is the immigration officer. Its like in the US they´re rather nasty and unfriendly similar to the big bussling place that it is, with everyone on the go and in their own very busy worlds. Trinidad I can safely say was quite the opposite. We walked into immigration with 3 guys watching Die Hard. They were glued to the TV and nothing but big grins to say hi. "ya mun just fill in one of the forms and welcome to da Caribbean mun."

To desribe Trinidad, one only has to look at where it finds its roots, Africa. Its not like South Africa though, as its more chaotic. More like Zimbabwe, but more relaxed and without all the colonials lurking about. (like the present day Zim I suppose).

As I've come to experience from travels, the best investment one can make in a new place, is to hire some sort of transport. Here there was little difference to what you might expect in Zim. We sourced a good old Nissan Sunny, with a shot suspension and in desparate need of some panel beating. This is ideal though as no one will notice any further dents you put in it. Furthermore you don't bring any further attention to yourself as there's plenty of this already, being a "white boy" and all.

There were some further differences though. There were no motobikes or scooters to my surprise and relief. The next difference was regarding the dogs. As they can only see in black and white, I became somewhat of a surprise to most. Thus I obtained a large number of barks, snarls etc on my little wonders around the nieghbourhood. Payback for all those years of owning a "rottie" (big evil dog) I reckon.