Trinidad

It’s called Bake & Shark, except that the soft Trini accent makes it sound to me like Bay n’ Shar.  These are the open air shacks along Maracas Beach on Trinidad’s north coast.  The most popular place – Richard’s Bake & Shark – has been there for about 30 years and is known for having the best fresh condiments:  garlic sauce, bandanya, kutchela, grated mango and everything spicy.  The home-made roll, a sort of savory pita, is piled with fried locally-caught shark and then you add the sauces you like, all for less than $5 US.

Teaching landscape architecture changes the way you travel.  You notice the unusual native plants, of course, but you also are continuously aware of the cultural and environmental situations as they differ from home.  A tourist on vacation may think that concrete houses built on stilts are charming, but actually you see their design as responding to extreme conditions of intense rainfall, aggressive termites and relentless sun.  Oriented more for the prevailing breeze than the omnipresent view, they have large roofs to collect the rainfall channeled into cisterns, large overhangs for shade, no metals that rust quickly, and displayed prosperity with painted stucco surfaces.

The public works are equally straight forward.  Going from Port of Spain through the Northern Range to the beaches, the road is cut into an almost vertical mountainside.  It is only wide enough for two small cars to pass each other carefully, and are accompanied by power lines (no street lights), and a continuous concrete water channel on the uphill side.  Cars automatically slow at intersections where they have to cross rain gutters that serve as a sort of speed bump.  Along this 20 km winding road are two bridges with long spans that could only be made with short elements – truss and cable suspension – the type of heavy construction materials that can get up such a steep and tightly curving mountain road.  The biggest leveled area was reserved for a football (soccer) field that kindly included a covered viewing stand.  Along the way was a single police station in its official bright blue color, a country chapel and cemetery, and no gas stations.  Two shops had clear names:  one was called Tea Bar; the other simply Cash Bar.  More common were private high-walled and gated estates that seemed strangely silent and uninvolved.

Also in the north is the Asa Wright Nature Centre, a 1500-acre conservatory, eco-tour destination and tropical research facility whose main building has sixteen foot high ceilings and a deep, shady veranda that overlooks a bird sanctuary with seventeen species of hummingbirds among many ususual creatures and plants.  When the early nineteenth-century British landscape writer J.C. Loudon identified the highest achievement possible for a landscape design as one that attracts the fleeting, could he possibly have imagined sitting on a mahogany stool in a tropical rainforest and watching aqua, iridescent blue and orange hummingbirds, all  of which hung in the air within view?  Surreal, but authentic.  Very different from floating in the Hyatt’s infinity pool overlooking the Gulf of Paria, which is nice but more an experience that smacks of an intellectual construct when compared to feeling shark in my belly.