Bright Lights, Bearded Bellbirds, and Baked Sharks

What shall I say about Divali ? Despite the booming fireworks and exploding bamboo, the smoke from the kerosene flambeaux and the bright bling of gold jewelry and Christmas lights, Divali really seems to be about creating a quiet, intimate space of gratitude, connection, and spiritual relevance. On Saturday afternoon Jan, Ellen and I made our way through shockingly empty Trinidad streets to the home of Shastri and Shirley Maharaj in Chaguanas where we ate and talked and looked at Shastri's lovely new paintings and talked some more and then went across the road to the neighbor's house and ate more and talked more and left with extra gifts of Indian sweets. The food was gorgeous; all vegetarian and most of it locally grown, complex spices and flavors weaving together in your mouth like a symphony - pumpkin with garlic, stewed and curried pomme cythere, chickpeas and potatoes, an amazing totally new-to-me vegetable called chataigne from Shastri's garden, and 'melangene' - eggplant - all eaten using layers torn from the bread formally known as silk paratha but descriptively named 'buss up shut' (translate to 'busted/ripped up shirt' and you can begin to see the allusion).

Divali dinner at Shastri's and Shirley with the final round of rice pudding at the neightbor's

After not one but TWO fabulous home-cooked Indian dinners, we all set out for the nearby village of Felicity whose residents deck their houses and yards and businesses with thousands of deyas and miles of electric lights along the two main roads in the town. Felicity is a village made famous in the 1992 address by St. Lucian writer Derek Walcott when accepting the Nobel prize for literature; Felicity is a village in Trinidad on the edge of the Caroni plain he began and went on to create a mesmerizing portrait of a Caribbean that is both desperately beautifully and terrifyingly fragile, But what is joy without fear ? he says towards the end; The fear of selfishness that, here on this podium with the world paying attention not to them but to me, I should like to keep these simple joys inviolate not because they are innocent but because they are true.
But I digress.
We got in our cars at exactly the right time, Shastri in the Suzuki and all the ladies piled into our little rented Nissan and when we got to Felicity it was full dark with lights on and deyas burning. We cruised along the streets trying to take pictures out of and through the car windows while slowly but surely the traffic built up behind us until it was fully bumper to bumper on the way in as we were on the way out. Some houses were purist in their approach and just had deyas and others had lots of electric lights with every conceivable combination and variation in between and everyone was out on the streets giving each other sweets and little bottles of 'Chubby' soft drinks and talking and laughing and continuing to light more and more deyas.

The practice of building complex bamboo structures to hold the lighted deyas seems to be somewhat out of fashion this year, but we did see a few and after watching me juggling my camera and the steering wheel Shirley suggested I just pull over so I did and ended up at the house of a very nice man who was swinging in a hammock with his baby grandson sound asleep on his shoulder while his nephew and a friend from Guyana lit deyas in the driveway and on the street in front of the house. 

I took lots of pictures there and they gave us little bags of sweet rice and when I asked the owner why he did all this he just said "I am Hindu". It reminded me of Sookdeo, the potter in Rio Claro, who in talking of his temple and the prayers his family offers up twice a day said simply "this is how we do life". 

Divali was great.

Sunday we were back in the car looking for adventure, and enjoying the wacky signage that always comes with driving through countries different from your own. Carrots and french fries. Go figure. We wound our way from the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway through the town of Arima and up into the northern range of mountains as the road got narrower and narrower and the rainforest closed in and eventually we reached the Asa Wright Nature Center, a mecca for serious birdwatchers and a must-see for anyone coming to Trinidad. This was my third visit and even tho we couldn't stay for the formal 90 minute afternoon tour we did manage to arrange a 30 minute trek with Noel, one of the incredibly knowledgeable volunteer guides who gave us a really great highlights tour that included a very close encounter with the fabled bearded bellbird - you have got to go on YouTube to hear the amazing percussive racket this bird will make to attract the ladies. Lots and lots of great things to see - tropical plants and trees and flowers and ants and agoutis and birds and birds and birds.

That's our guide but I stole the bellbird off the net; we did see it clearly but not this close

lobster claws and powder puffs

torch lilies - so beautiful in flower, so ugly by the time the seeds are dropped

leaf cutter ants busily moving their future fodder into a GIANT mound

aw come on - what's a post without pots ? saw this lovely pair of old lead glazed monkey jars in the  beautiful main house of the nature center 

From there we kept on the narrow twisting road across the mountains in search of the northern beaches; this is the only south to north route in the middle of the top of Trinidad, and we found out later that the great-grandfather of my old friend Ken Crichlow migrated here from Barbados in the late 1800s because there was work available specifically to build this road (more on Ken later). When the Americans were here during World War 2 they apparently widened and improved it, but a hundred hairpin turns later I'd say they weren't able to do much. Gorgeous drive tho and thankfully very few cars to share the one and a half lanes with and we did eventually emerge quite suddenly onto the beautiful beaches and vistas of the north coast. By then we were all rabidly hungry and determined to find the famous 'bake and shark' stands at Maracas Bay. 

It was the Sunday after a national holiday and we were warned that all of Trinidad would be at the beach but the traffic was okay and after my many years of experience of mass market tourism in the Caribbean it was lovely to see Trinidadian people enjoying their own beaches. The tourism industry here is slowly growing and you do see the usual signs saying things like"Tourism - it's about all of us !" but I don't think it is a major economic sector as it is elsewhere in the region (Trinidad drilled its first successful oil well in 1866) so the beaches are still largely for the locals.

And there was absolutely no problem finding bake and shark - Uncle Sam's is just one of about six elaborate food stands across the road from the beach at Maracas Bay. You place your order at one window, wait at another for your food, and then personalize your sandwich with a dizzying array of condiments that stretch down a long table - I went for tamarind sauce, chopped cabbage, lettuce, a little coconut chutney, a little chadon beni sauce, and it was just gorgeous. Last night Ellen pulled up a video clip of Andrew Zimmerman from the 'Bizarre Foods' show on TV eating shark and bake here at Maracas and he said it was one of the ten best things he had ever eaten. Ever.

I'll post one more time for this trip tomorrow after I get home; yesterday we had a fascinating day having lunch with faculty from the Visual Arts Program at the University of the West Indies, and then just barely made it onto a boat for the Caroni Swamp tour to see literally 5000 red ibises (the national bird) and today we're off to an exciting tour of the brick factory with the manager himself so there are more stories to tell. And thankfully there's just a couple more hours of driving on these MAD Trinidadian roads - wish us luck....