Trinnie Tourismo
06 December 2016 | Trinidad and Tobago Sailing Association, Carenage Bay, Trinidad
Some playtime then. We moved MINNIE B from the dock at Peake Yacht Services on Monday 28th November to anchor at Trinidad and Tobago Sailing Association which is around to the east of Point Gourd and in the western arm of Carenage Bay. The holding is much better than Chaguaramas and the water much cleaner. In fact, there was an oil spill from a cargo ship in Chaguaramas Bay which had cruisers in high dudgeon.
We decided to take in some of the top sights of Trinidad that we did not see when we were here in 2010. First was La Brea pitch lake. This is a natural phenomenon of asphalt and the largest of only three such lakes in the world (the others are in Venezuela and Los Angeles). Ever replenished from bitumen oozing from a geological fault this 95-acre, 107 metres deep “lake” has been mined since 1859. We had hired a car and were accompanied by Chris from ‘Quicksilver’ – his wife Sharon was holidaying in Florida for a couple of weeks. We hired a guide – you are required to do so - and he took us out on to the surface showing us safe paths around the surface water and thin crusts, and demonstrated the gooey bitumen, a dead bird being swallowed by the lake, lighting methane bubbling to the surface and eventually wading knee-deep in water along some wooden planks that we could not see, to regain the shore. As Wows go this falls into the category of “if you don’t go, you don’t know”.
Then on to another tourismo highlight – The Waterloo Temple in the Sea. This is a reconstruction of a Hindu temple, lying on a “floating mandir” 150 metres out into the Gulf of Paria, built single-handedly by Siewdass Sadhu, a sugar labourer who was forbidden to build a temple on land. He never finished it but the government did in 1994 for the 150th anniversary of the first arrival of Indian indentured labourers. It gets the same muted Wow rating as the pitch lake.
Other than that we have been provisioning (0600 departure for the excellent fresh food market in Port of Spain) and readying the boat. So now we plan for the off – an overnight sail to Carriacou (Grenada’s northern island) where we may just relax for a few days and plan our onward trip to Martinique for Christmas.