Beware the sea

I think the Forth of July is not my holiday.  Last year we went to the beach and I got terribly sunburned.  To make it worse, I had to put on a wool suit that night and work a big formal reception, enduring lots of solicitous comments on the lines of, "You're really burned, did you know that?"  This year I was determined that it would be different, partly because I got the embassy reception scheduled for July 2nd, so we'd have the 4th to just relax.  A whole bunch of us went to Maracas Beach to enjoy the day.  It's lots of fun going to the beach on American holidays, since we have the place pretty much to ourselves.  I've been to Maracas many times, and have been boarding there also many times.  Despite that, I got badly crashed on my first wave of the day.  Extremely sore neck, bleeding face, and a puffy eye.  I got through the rest of the day with some ice, but was a hurting unit.  By the next morning, I looked like Quasimodo.  A beautifully swollen eye, raw patches all over my face, painful back, etc....  Again, to make it all better, I had an early morning flight to Tobago to have a day full of meetings with a bunch of new contacts for my job.  I did as many meetings as I could that day with my biggest sunglasses on....  Sadly, I did not get any pictures - you'll just have to imagine it. To add insult to injury, we were planning a big day of diving at our favorite spot in Speyside since we were in Tobago anyway.  I somehow managed two dives, even though the combo of my scuba mask and the water pressure made my face feel less-than-awesome.   Tobago was beautiful as always though, and we had a relaxed snorkel on Sunday before flying back to Trinidad.

One image I want to remember from the weekend:  our hotel was really short-staffed on Sunday, with our dear dive instructors Tanja and Adrian working as cooks, waitstaff, reception crew, boat driver, and dive leaders at the same time.  We were waiting by reception that afternoon to check out and pay our bill while the crew was out diving, when a boat pulled up to shore, Tanja dove out and swam to the beach to come up and settle our bill.  It was straight out of a Bond movie. 

Hello, Goodbye

In the Foreign Service, the only thing worse than when your colleagues and friends leave post is when you have to leave yourself.  We are still a year away from our next departure, but now that summer transfer season is here, we're having to say goodbye to some great people.  It was a bittersweet run for Team Banshee (long story) up our favorite mountain road this morning as our fearless leader is departing post tomorrow.  Such is the life....

This is a 'before' picture.  We were significantly grosser after the run.

Carnival

Have rum, will travel.

Trinidad and Tobago is known for having the best Carnival blowout in the region; some make the claim that it's even better than Brazil.  Huge multi-day drunken street parties are not exactly our thing, so we mostly laid low and had a great long weekend at home.  On Carnival Tuesday though we did go downtown to see some of the big parade.  There are quite a bit of variance in the bands - lots of 'beads and bikinis' which lure young (and not so young) tourists [Andy's comment to me after watching one of the bands go by:  "I'm so glad you're not on duty this week!"], and some more traditional bands with elaborate costumes and themes.  It was really fun to see, for about 2 hours.  Then we happily went to the beach.

One of the bands had a zoo/circus theme.

A bit of a loss with this one.. hippie dreamcatchers?

Resolution Review

In short, I had decent success in 2012.  I had 2 goals - to visit 4 new countries, and to write 36 blog posts.  Well, we visited 5 new countries (and Trinidad & Tobago are 2 islands, so one could almost count them twice..) , but I only did 29 blog posts.  I blame my family for showing up for a visit on Dec 1 and proceeding to keep us way too busy to write about anything for the next 2 months.  I love blaming my family for stuff.

 A representative sample of our house, circa December....

Hiking to nowhere

We have gone out hiking the last two weekends in search of the Covigne River trail.  It should not be this hard to find, but we're 0 for 2 right now.  It's supposed to be a great rugged hike in the national park near us, ending at a waterfall and bathing pool deep in the woods.  Cool, huh?  I'm sure it would be, if we could find it.  We're also thinking this is complicated by the fact that we're in the dry season right now, and so landmarks like stream beds and waterfalls may not actually be there anymore....

Last weekend we did a very hilly 3 hour hike, up to a ridgeline with absolutely no views, due to the dense foliage.  I think we actually found the mythical North Coast Trail, and might have been able to follow it all the way up to some of the northern beaches if we had had time, energy, and more water on our hands.  We did run into a pack of monkey however, which was pretty neat.  We also found some interesting remnants of the American military presence in the park.  Nothing like stumbling upon a creepy ammunition bunker in the middle of the jungle.

Today, after a brief interlude to wander around an old graveyard and church, we found a whole network of trails that led along a dry stream bed.  On the positive side, these trails are totally run-able, and I'd be so excited to do real trails again!  On the negative side, we don't think this was the Covigne trail.   The search continues....

Turkey Day and the TSA

It's that time of year again, when we engage in a time-honored Foreign Service rite:  scrounging up ingredients for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.   This practice can take several forms, depending on how exotic your current location happens to be.  I rather hope that nothing will top our first post of Mongolia.  In the year before we got there, the community was actually raising live turkeys in the garage of the Deputy Chief of Mission.  Sometimes, I really miss that place.

Overall, we were not in bad shape in Mongolia, because things were so hard to get there that the State Department allowed us to ship a certain amount of food to post, so I carefully planned for enough cranberry sauce, spices, and pumpkin pie filling to last 2 Thanksgivings and 2 Christmases.   I did have to put a bounty out for any form of celery that might have been lurking in Ulaanbaatar, and the community came through with a lead in the end, to my stuffing's relief.   Which brings me to this year....

On the whole, American products are much easier to find here in Trinidad.  Turkey?  It took 3 stores, but we finally snared one.   Cranberry sauce?  If you're wiling to pay $2.50 a can, it's yours!  Canned pumpkin?  That one was proving a bit more challenging.  But one of our friends was heading to the states last week, and he said he'd pick up a few cans for us.

The issues arose when he went to check in for his flight, and was only traveling with a carry-on.  The TSA flagged his bag for liquids and opened it to find our 2 rebellious cans of pumpkin.  Agent #1 was not sure if these cans of pumpkin constituted a threat to our national security and to the plane full of passengers, so he got a supervisor.  Supervisor was also not sure if pumpkin was allowed.  Our friend was asked, is this liquid-y pumpkin filling, or high quality solid pumpkin?  He assured them it was the highest possible quality.  They ran it through the viscosity machine (! seriously, this exists), and determined it could pass.  Victory!  It's the little triumphs that make this life so entertaining....

Tobago Take Two

Sunset over Goat Island and Little Tobago

We've been up to Tobago twice now since we got here.  Though we spent much of those two weekends underwater getting scuba certified, on our last trip we had a chance to enjoy some of the island as well.  Tobago has a completely different feel from Trinidad.  Relatively few people live there, there is little infrastructure, and the water/beaches are much nicer because we're further from the silty Orinoco River currents that hit Trinidad.    We took a day and drove the 15 minutes from Speyside to Charlotteville on the North coast to enjoy Pirate's Bay, one of the nicest beaches in Tobago.  As seems to be the rule here in the Caribbean, we had the place basically to ourselves!

We had a fun mini-hike over a hill and down lots of stairs to the beach.