Sunrise As We Approach Trinidad
We arrived at Trinidad around 7:00 in the morning. Everyone was excited to be in our first port, shooting pictures every which way as we approached the island. We had been told to be sure to get up early if you wanted to see the pilot boat come out to meet the ship, carrying a pilot who is in charge of navigating the ship through the harbor to the dock.
Pilot Coming Aboard
We were out on deck for about 20 minutes when the bright yellow, pilot boat maneuvered alongside as we were cruising along. A door opened near the bottom of our ship, and the pilot jumped from the deck of his boat, onto our ship, and the pilot boat sped off towards the island. It took about another half-hour to reach the port and dock the ship. I had a hurried breakfast on the back deck as the ship was making its final maneuvers, and at times my coffee seemed to be vibrating out of the coffee cup due to the power of the engines shaking the ship.
Performer Welcoming Us
Around 8:30 we went to the gangway area to be ready to leave as scheduled. A half hour later they were finally ready for us to disembark. We walked down the quay to the sound of steel drums with girls dancing in carnival dress, and guys dancing on stilts, dressed as clowns. We went outside to the buses, found our bus, checked all of the tickets and climbed aboard, and set off…in the wrong direction.
Performer Welcoming Us
Almost immediately I thought we were going the wrong way as we went east out of Port of Spain directly towards the Caroni Swamp, which I had been told was in the opposite direction from where we were going. I checked the FDP info sheet, but there was no map, no address, no campus name, and no phone number for our contact. The only info on the detailed schedule was “10:00 – Party arrives at campus”. That’s helpful.
Sign for the Wrong Campus
I pulled out the all-important “green sheet” and called the duty dean, but got a busy signal one time and a “leave a message” message the other times. After about an hour we arrived at the university, right behind another bus from our ship. We got off, went inside, asked for Betty MacDonald or Colin Stephenson and was told, “You’re at the wrong campus. They’re at the Chaguaramas campus.” They said they’d call and let them know what had happened and that we would be late. We went back to the bus and explained the situation to the driver. He grumbled, and called back to the ship for clarification, and finally left; eventually we passed right by the ship and went out of town to the west.
Finally at the Right Campus
We arrived at the correct campus a little over 1 ½ hours late, and were escorted inside. We were told that morning that Roslyn Berne, who was originally scheduled to be on our trip, would try to travel out separately, and would likely arrive about an hour or so late. I more than half expected to find Roslyn already there when we arrived, however the “student issue” she was dealing with back on the ship took so long she never made it. I couldn’t get any details about the “student issue” but found out something about a student making threats toward the captain and being put off the ship.
Betty Mc Donald of UTT and the Class
We met Betty McDonald, Colin (a different Colin), and another Professor and they brought us to their auditorium to describe their school and the various programs they offered.
Chit for Lunch
Before continuing on with the tour, they brought us over to the cafeteria, for a Trinidadian lunch of chicken in sauce, rice and beans, potato salad, and some vegetables. I was minorly excited when I found a Trinidad dime while waiting in line at the cafeteria. Then as my food was dished up, I took the bottle of pepper sauce and squeezed out a thin zig zag line on top the rice and was trepiditious when the Trinidadian-cafeteria lady sucked her breath and said “Oh that’s way too much!” I was a little less excited later when I found a Trinidad quarter in my rice and beans.
Lunch with SAS students and UTT students
They have certificate programs for training sailors to serve on a ship. Bachelor’s degree in Nautical Science and Maritime Operations and various diploma and certificate programs, all soon to be certified by the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The University of Trinidad & Tobago is only about 5 years old. They’ve strategically set up 5 campuses all around the island of Trinidad to enable locals to get higher education in various industries (as compared to the more traditional University of the West Indies that has been in place for over 30 years and is more theoretically based like most traditional universities). The Point Lisas Campus that we went to earlier was focused on energy production (Trinidad’s main industry is oil and gas production), and the one we went to in the NW corner of Trinidad focuses on maritime training.
The Engine Room Simulator
They have lots of different classes (economics, maritime law, navigation, shipping operations, radar, bridge watch, etc.) as well as hands on training in their various simulation facilities. Their engine room simulator had displays and controls that could be moved and rearranged to be similar to those that would be found on a specific type of ship. It also had a sound system that could play the proper sounds of that specific ships’ engines, and could even produce the sounds of various fault conditions, allowing the students to diagnose problems partly based on the “engines” sound.
Inside One of the Bridge Simulators
Bridge Simulator in Use
There was also a bridge simulator where they can simulate scenarios with four different ships’ bridges at the same time, with students in each simulator navigating their virtual ship through a situation at the same time. Each student team in each bridge simulator room is looking at a virtual view of their ship in front of them, rolling and pitching like they would see out the bridge of a real ship, with terminals in front of them for charting, communications, etc. When we were there, three of the simulators were in use for a graded class exercise. The scenario we were watching had them entering the New York area, and navigating up the Hudson River. The professor explained how the system can simulate weather, currents, navigational hazards, rogue waves and even pirate ships, and to demonstrate he launched a rogue wave at the virtual ships, and you could see the view on the simulators’ screens rocking and pitching wildly.
Campus Librarian
Look, LC Call Numbers, Yay
They also train the students on fire fighting, basic medical procedures, welding, machining, knot tying, ladder making, everything they would need to know to run a cargo ship. We also stopped in the campus library, and met the campus librarian, and I noted that they use the Library of Congress classification system. It was kind of an interesting dynamic at the school. They seemed almost as excited for us to be there as we were. Betty MacDonald took about as many pictures of us as any of us took of them and their campus.
Ex-Ship’s Captain in the Auditorium
We ended the day at the campus back in the auditorium talking with a former ship’s captain, who was answering questions about the school and the programs and life aboard ships. He gave such lengthy, interesting-anecdote-filled answers that there was only time for 4 or 5 questions before we had to leave. Upon seeing pictures of our ship that holds 850 passengers, he said cargo ships can be much, much bigger than that, with only 22 total workers on board. If something happens in the middle of the sea, they can’t just call 911, they have to handle any emergency themselves.
Interestingly, he said that by-law all ships will have to move to electronic charting (ECDIS) by 2013. When we were on the bridge tour of our ship the previous day, they were still doing charting on paper maps.
View on Way Back to Port Of Spain
Also as I learned later, when one of the students in Stephanie’s class (Greg) heard that Trinidadians can go to college for free, he jokingly asked how he could become a Trinidadian. The other students said the easiest way would be to marry a Trinidadian, and they called one of the girl students over and started trying to set them up. As we rode the bus back to Port of Spain, several of the UTT students we had met were driving along following our bus in their car, waving and laughing. I wonder if the girl in their car was the one they were trying to marry off to Greg. Along the way we saw several instances of “Trinidadian driving” Garrick had warned us about in the preport briefing, with drivers treating stop signs as mere suggestions.
View of Independence Square
It was good that we hadn’t decided to tack on the trip to the Caroni swamp bird sanctuary, which was scheduled to leave at 3:00, since we didn’t arrive back at the ship until shortly after 4:00. We dropped off some of our stuff from the school visit in our room, and went right back out to see some of the city, being sure to stay within the boundaries that Garrick defined as “safe”. We kept a careful eye on the time since we were supposed to meet up with Patrice for dinner at 6:30, back at the cruise terminal.
Statue on Square
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
We walked the short way to Independence Square. (Which, by the way isn’t square, the literalist in me was offended. :-) We walked the length of the square, mostly drinking in the sights and sounds and hoping to avoid being hit by a car coming from an unexpected direction. At one point I was looking at an approaching car to see whether the driver saw me, and not only was he talking on his phone, and not looking at me, he didn’t even have a steering wheel in front of him! Oh wait, the driver is on the other side, whew. At the end of the square, there is a Catholic Cathedral, we went in to look around but got inside and discovered that a service was in progress. We sat quietly in the back and listened for a few minutes, hoping for a break when we could slip back out unobtrusively, but eventually just got up and quietly left.
View of Ship from Waterfront Park
We walked back down the length of the square, stopping to get some Trinidadian money and a latte, but I thought, “Oh it is hot out, maybe I should get an iced latte instead, which the server lady didn’t understand, so I got a “coffee chiller” instead (a sort-of coffee slurpee topped with whipped cream). I only realized after it had been ordered that being an iced-based drink, that meant that it was made with ice, which, of course, is made of water. D’oh. After that we went back to sit in a park by the water and then shop in the booths just outside the cruise terminal to kill time until Patrice was supposed to pick us up.
Cruise Terminal View from the Ship
As each vehicle pulled into the cruise terminal parking lot, I looked trying to guess whether it was Patrice, whom I had never met or even seen. However Stephanie had Skype’d with him so she had a better idea of what he looked like. Although for the third vehicle that pulled in, Stephanie glanced at the car and said “that’s not him” because the driver was a burly, bald, black man, but the passenger jumped out and ran around the car saying “Bon Jour”. He introduced us to his driver, and said that many of the restaurants in Port of Spain close fairly early, and that he and his wife usually go to a little place on the water out west of the city near the town of Chaguaramas, and that it’d give us a chance to see a part of the island that we might not otherwise get to see.
PT Boat at the Chaguaramas Military History Museum
We didn’t want to tell him at first that we had been right there just an hour or two earlier for fear that he’d either feel bad about it or feel put on the spot to find another restaurant. When we told him that we had just walked up and down Independence Square, he reacted like it was a foolish and dangerous thing to have done, and that we were lucky nothing had happened. He talked about various topics on the way out to the restaurant: his job as head of the water and sewer authority, his family, the board meeting that he had been in that day that had caused the disruption to the original planned shore trip, how Garrick’s FDP went, and the Trinidadian way of doing things. The restaurant was just past the Chaguaramas Military History Museum that had a PT boat and an old commercial airplane on display, and was probably about 1/4 mile from the UTT-Chaguaramas campus we had been at earlier.
Sails Restaurant
The restaurant was owned by a Frenchman, whom Patrice seemed to know quite well. We ordered drinks and callaloo soup, which is some sort of greenish-soup that Patrice said was spinach based (but which the SAS guide said was made with pigeon peas.) In any case the soup was absolutely delicious. While we were eating that the owner came over and said they had a large, just-caught-today tuna that they were slicing up for sashimi and that he could make us tuna steaks from it, that would be “tres bon”. (If a Frenchman says a restaurant is good, believe them, and if a French chef says a dish will be very good, be prepared for an experience.) The tuna steaks were cooked past the typical American way of seared-but-near-raw-in-the-center, which in my experience can make the tuna tough, but these were extremely tender and sublimely delicious. Dessert was some fruity ice cream the waitress recommended which went amazingly well with the red Chilean table wine Patrice brought for the restaurant to cork.
Dinner on the Waterfront
We presented Patrice with the book from Stephanie’s class and a bottle of wine we had brought from Charlottesville (Pollack Winery – Cabernet Franc). The gifts were fortuitously chosen since Patrice loves sailing and boating, and the book deals with human factors in ship’s navigation, and with the wine he asked whether we had grilled Thierry and Julie about what he likes before buying it.
We went with him and his driver back towards Port of Spain, but stopped along the way to drop Patrice off at his condo, and then his driver drove us the rest of the way back to the ship. I have no idea what time we got back to the ship because after the long day, the rum punch, and most of two bottles of wine between three people my memory is a little hazy. We went right to bed since we had to get up and be ready for our trip the next day that would leave at 7:00.
Bob Voyage 
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