Sweet Liming in Trinidad
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Port of Spain (Trinidad),
Trinidad and Tobago
Sunday, June 19, 2005
We caught the 12 noon flight out of Crown Point to the Port of Spain in Trinidad, a bumpy 20 minute jaunt to Tobago´s much bigger brother island.
We had been warned by lots of people that Trinidad was crime ridden, and that kidnappings were a particular flavour of the month (although targetted at local businessmen, rather than tourists - at least so far...) so we were fairly cautious in our approach. I had heard on the radio that there had been 161 murders on Trinidad so far this year - that´s on an island of less than 1.5 million people.
We got a taxi from the airport to our hotel, then went out for dinner. The centre of Port of Spain had some nice-looking historic buildings, but was very run down. The only nice area that we discovered was Independence Square, part of Brian Lara Avenue, which was quite New York-like in it´s feel, lots of people sat round chatting, playing chess etc.
We strolled for a long time looking for an open restaurant, but everything looked closed. so we eventually headed for Sweet Lime, a restaurant recommended by the Rough Guide.
This was, mercifully, open, and we had a nice dinner in a pavement-cafe type setting. ´Liming´ is what the Trinibagians call the process of hanging out, drinking beer, putting the world to rights, a very sound concept, so we just sat and limed for a while, while Port of Spain carried on around us.
We had an early flight the next morning, and neither of us slept very well for fear of missing our alarm. But we needen´t have worried, and we were up and racing through the still-sleeping streets of Port of Spain at 6am. It was a good 25 minutes drive to the airport, and our taxi driver had agreed to collect someone else from town at 6.30, so neither traffic signals or other cars were going to hinder his quest. We were a little concerned for our safety, but his habit of beeping at drivers in front of him at traffic lights even when the lights were red was quite entertaining.
The flight to Caracas was on a pretty ancient Aeropostal DC-9, but was short and thankfully uneventful.
