Port-of-Spain, Trinidad

My brother Glen joined me on a trip to cover the three Guyana's - British Guyana (simply called Guyana), Dutch Guyana (Suriname) and French Guiana (a department of France) - but on the way I discovered there is also a Spanish Guyana in Venezuela called the Guayana Region, and a Portuguese version now known as the Brazilian state of Amapa. The last two would have to wait but the other three were my destination this trip, but before we could get there, we had a pit-stop in Trinidad to kick things off.

Travel days are never too interesting but early on a Wednesday Glen & I caught the 7:40am flight from DFW to MIA, hung out at Admirals Club for a bit and happened to bump into our neighbor Natasha while we were wandering around. The Port of Spain flight left at around 5:40pm arriving close to 11pm local time in Trinidad. Since it was after 10pm the standard taxi rates were higher than normal - $45 for the Hilton. The trip only took about 20 minutes but when we told the driver we needed to come back to the airport tomorrow afternoon, he said make sure you give yourself two hours just for the taxi ride. He wasn't wrong.
We are stopping on the way back to do some bird watching so I got some Trinidad Dollars exchanged at a rate about USD$1:TTD$6.

Tourists typically come to Trinidad for bird watching or the carnival but since carnival wasn't in season and the bird watching was planned for our return trip we wandered down to the Queens Park Oval to see if we could find a way inside. Glen was wearing one of his IPL shirts with Warner on the back (American's google David Warner Australia Cricket) so he immediately struck up a rapport with the security guard who made a few calls and before long we were in the members lounge drinking Stag beer and eating lunch. There was no game on but we had a blast talking to some of the members and wandering around the ground. It was all pretty surreal, especially when the clouds rolled in and the rain came down, only to clear a few minutes later. We retraced our steps back to the hotel and spent all of two hours in the taxi back to the airport.

It's only a 55 minute flight to Georgetown, Guyana and as soon as we landed we found a stoned taxi driver in a barely road worthy sedan to drive us the 40 km from the airport to our hotel in Georgetown for USD$25. I chose the International Guesthouse because of the location and the good write-ups - I bought the taxi driver and the front desk attendant a beer and made Glen pay for our stay - $87/night for three nights. Maybe I was excited by another new country or another new currency but I was on cloud nine.  The exchange rate was about USD$1:GYD$200

Glen at Queens Park Oval

Me at Queens Park Oval