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Like virtually all Down Islanders, my gypsy cab driver Kesler was out of his mind behind the wheel, but, God bless him, he did me sane, right and dandy insofar as leading me to accommodations goes, notwithstanding the rear end collision we sustained just outside the ittle hamlet called Betsy’s Hope on the island of Tobago’s rural  windward coast. The Restrite Sea Gardens…The purple blush of dusk is just now fading beyond my veranda overlooking King’s Bay, a deep crook in the island below the village of Delaford, which is perched high over the water on a steep escarpment. The full moon flood tide is lapping at the very steps to the Restrite Sea Gardens Guest House, an establishment I guarantee is not to be found in any guide books to the Caribbean; nor does it exist, even in theory, in the cyberspace fantasyland of travel agent computers. You don’t make reservations for the Restrite; you just show up, which is what I did. I in fact have no reservations for any of the seven nights I’ll spend on the island. This is part of my plan, or non-plan, in proving that a Caribbean vacation can be had for $25 a day.

The Restrite Sea Gardens…

Maybe, but so far so good. Since touching down on the island early this morning, I’ve spent a total of $17.09, and that includes ground transportation, breakfast, lunch, my room for the night and dinner, plus two Carib beers to wash it down with.

My room, by the way, is large, clean and airy, if peculiar in color scheme and appointments. The couch, I’m quite sure, was salvaged from the back of one of Kesler’s former gypsy cab wrecks, its previous automotive incarnation thinly disguised with a flowered antimacassar. There is a cavernous private shower in back, full kitchen out front, and neatly squared away double bed. The proprietress, Mistress Orr, a handsome lady in her mid-sixties, fed me to the bursting on stewed chicken, pelau rice, dumplings, plantains, sweetbread and callaloo soup, and seemed embarrassed when she said the meal would be an extra 15 TT (Trinidad & Tobago dollars), or $2.40, U.S., on top of the 40 TT ($6.42) for my cosy little palm-girded niche on the edge of the sea.

One of the reasons for choosing Tobago for my little low budget Caribbean experiment was that the island is in many ways representative of the economic and cultural transitions that have been taking place over the whole of the Down Island basin since I’d first visited here in the mid 1960s – the principals of cheap travel and living will be generally applicable to certain other islands that fit into its socio-economic mold. I’ve come in mid-October, which is off-season, the better for bargain hunting, especially with regard to room rates. (Although six bucks and change is the Restrite’s year ‘round price.)

Now I’m stretched out on my bed, cooled by the gentle nighttime trades wafting through my open door, contemplating my day’s exploration of the pristine shoreline of King’s Bay and Delaford proper high above it. I’m thinking about George, a young man of devout Rastafarian beliefs who shyly approached me on my veranda and was well read and opinionated about history and current world events. George was worried about the recent influx of land-buying foreigners, who “are stealin’ Tobago’s secret” – which I took to mean her culture.
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I dine in my room…

But mostly I’m thinking about Miss Faith, wondering about her 97 years (or 96 or 92, depending on who you ask) here at Delaford. What kind of lady was she? What were her hopes and fears? Did she have a good life? A happy life? Was she loved? I was the only non-local at the funeral up at the church this afternoon (I just wandered in), and I viewed Miss Faith, diminutive but not shrunken in her casket, which seemed tiny as a doll’s. Her ninety-whatever years rested easy on a bituminous black face, features soft though deeply lined around her mouth and eyes. I noticed that the borders of her lace dress and the soft lining of her coffin were the exact same shade of maroon as the uniforms of the little schoolgirls just then skipping down the street by the church. I wondered if this was coincidence, or a subtle, deliberate reference to her own youth so long ago, when she gamboled on this same sun-drenched street, pigtails flying in the seawind.

A kind-hearted fellow named Solomon takes me under his wing and leads me down a narrow, labyrinthine path past rooting pigs, brooding hens and scratching mongrels to a rooming house right on the edge of the seawall to the north of the village pier. “Dis place is cheap,” he says, but the rooms are all occupied.

I’m getting discouraged, but Solomon says not to worry. He points me up some stairs a half block off the waterfront and I soon find myself in conversation with a spry, kind-eyed gentleman I take to be in his mid-sixties, Mister Alleyne. I ask him how much for a single room. He tells me 100 TT ($16.05). When I sag visibly – it’s no act – he asks how much I can afford. Sixty TT ($9.63), I say, with an apologetic shrug.
 

“Jus’ you needs dee room?” Mister Alleyne knows I’m traveling alone, but I smile and play the game and say, “Yes, just me.” “Then sixty be all right.” “Did you know a lady named Miss Faith, from Delaford?” I ask as Mister Alleyne shows me my clean, spacious room, the full kitchen adjoining it. “Only to say ‘good-day’ to, “he replies. “I hear she die.” I’m hoping Mister Alleyne will say something more about Miss Faith, but he doesn’t. I nap for an hour or so in the heat of mid-afternoon, then take a swim off the pier. I’ve crossed to the island’s leeward side now and the cerulean waters of Man O’ War Bay are unruffled like a lake.

My wild ride to Speyside with David.

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Back at my room, I shower and dress, then hit the streets for a little Sunday afternoon walkabout. I’ve been to Charlotteville once before years ago and remember it as the quintessential small Caribbean town, with it’s fishing-based waterfront activity somehow at once bustling and indolent, the anchorage a winsome mix of net-laden dories and world voyaging yachts.

I pass by the bargaining clamor of the fishermen’s co-op, then find myself sauntering inland toward a high valley wall, lushly resplendent in its rainy season frippery, that nestles the town on three sides. My amble feels random as I cut down side streets and walkways between low rambling structures; but I soon realize I’m being aurally courted by the distant, dulcet resonance of human voices raised in song.

Following a narrow trace skirted by a panic of untended yellow and orange hibiscus, I find myself watching an assemblage of formally  ressed local folk filing out of a little church cantilevered into the verdant hillside, and singing the hymn “Amazing Grace”.

I spot Mister Davis in the throng as he descends the church steps, head bowed. He looks up, notices me, and smiles warmly. The congregation promenades by, then on down the flower-fringed path. I fall in behind and find I’ve unconsciously joined in the singing.

Ten AM the morning of my third day on-island, I’m in Speyside, a handful of miles up the coast from Delaford. Recumbent on the roadside in the shade of an almond tree, my knapsack as backrest, I’m wondering if a car will ever pass this way. Not just a “drop” taxi (gypsy cab), route taxi or maxi-taxi (a van or mini-bus); any car.

I’ve been lolling here for an hour, maybe more. No cars.
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A beach drowse

Mister Davis, a septuagenarian Seventh Day Adventist preacher, crosses the road from his Atlantic View Guest House, where I stayed last night. Newly renovated, with a huge kitchen and seaview veranda, I’d settled in after tactfully negotiating Mr. Davis down from 110 TT ($17.65) to 60 ($9.63). Mr. Davis fastidiously arranges himself by me on the curb, all decked out in his Sunday best. His brindled, swaybacked old goat, tethered in the guest house yard (the perfect low-maintenance lawn mower) spots him and commences maaa-aaah-ing in recognition and concern, ears perked like a dog’s. “Don’t worry,” Mister Davis says to the animal. “I be back ‘fore dark.” Mister Davis, like myself, is going to Charlotteville on the northern tip of the island. He has a church service to attend, I remember from our conversation yesterday. We confabulate in the gathering heat of mid-morning. I want to talk about Miss Faith, whom Mister Davis knew. I’m concerned because Miss Orr hadn’t attended Miss Faith’s funeral and when I’d asked why, she’d shrugged and turned away, as if there’d been bad blood between them. So I want Mister Davis to say something nice about Miss Faith, but all he’ll say is that he intends to live to be older than she had.

..
A maxi-taxi blows by, Charlotteville-bound. Riding low, packed solid, it does not stop.

Time passes. Shadows shrink. No more cars come. I sit by the standpipe on the roadside, stick my head under the cool stream, drink my fill of sweet Tobago water.

David breezes by in the back of a pickup, on his way home from his morning’s work, going the other way. He yells out effusive greetings. I met him yesterday when that same pickup had taken me from Delaford to Speyside.

My wild ride to Speyside with David…“No charge fo’ dis mon,” David said to the driver. “We got to take care of our visitors.” David led me down to his waterfront cottage – just one small room but with a million-dollar view – to meet his wife Annis and two daughters, Cheyenne and Swan, beautiful little girls. He pointed out the best, cheapest local restaurant, aptly named The Paradise – full island style fish dinner with trimmings and beer for about $6 on the rickety wood open-air porch overhanging the harbor.

After dinner I met up with David again and we’d bought each other Caribs at The Boats Men’s Pool Hall and “limed” (a cross between hanging out and lurking) with his buddies. Played a game of 8-ball.

I blew them all away with an incredible three-bank combination that would take four million tries to pull off again. Back on the roadside now, finally a drop car pulls up, but with room for only one. I gesture for Mister Davis to take it. Mister Davis’s old goat watches, straining against his tether as the cab accelerates down the narrow, lushly fringed road. He lets fly a booming Maaaa-AAHHH, timbre rising sharply at the end like a question.

After a dinner of fish and chips, salad and beer in a local bistro down by the pier (28 TT – $4.97), I’m sitting at my kitchen table with Mister Alleyne, leaning towards him in rapt attention as he describes what Charlotteville was like in the late 1920s, when he was a teenager; how it has evolved from a plantation economy over the decades. Turns out Mister Alleyne isn’t in his mid-sixties as I’d guessed, he’s in his mid-eighties. His memory is clear, his imagery detail-rich and enchanting.

He tells me how his mother’s father came to Charlotteville in the mid-nineteenth century and bought the land upon which his guest house now sits for the equivalent of $50. How he himself had rebuilt after the family’s original little wooden shack was severely damaged in a hurricane in the 1950s. He sighs but his smile lingers, eyes bright. “Dee houses and dee boats and dee people come and go but dee island, you know, is dee thing dot stay.”

I’m experiencing history, largely unrecorded except in the minds of the few like Mister Alleyne. These things he’s telling me are, as my Rastafarian friend George back in Delaford would say, the secrets of the island.

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