Of course, you can't come to a tropical island without going to the beach. But Port of Spain is a working port city and so there is no beach on our side of the island. The locals drive over the mountains to the other side of the island to go to Maracas Beach. I wrote about that in an earlier post. I haven't been back since I first got here because I enjoy driving the mountain roads in Trinidad so much. But with Georgia here and having gained some recent experience driving the mountain roads, I decided to try it again.
| Georgia enjoying the beach at Maracas. Of course, if you go on Monday morning instead of the weekend, there are fewer crowds. In our case, the beach had a nearly post-apocalyptic feel to it. We counted a dozen people on the beach. And we felt safe since there were also four lifeguards or about one for every three of us. You don't get a much better ratio than that.
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I went too.
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Georgia has many times expressed a desire to get Trini-food while here and Maracas is pretty much the epicenter for one of the classic Trini dishes, "Bake and Shark." Bake is a fry bread (which makes no sense to me) while the Shark is, shockingly, a shark. Served freshly made with a large variety of freshly made sauces... my personal favorite is Tamarind sauce.
Here is a clip from the Food Channel's Bizarre Foods on the matter.
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| We went to the best known of the bunch, Richard's, which is the one featured in the video but it isn't the only one. There must be a dozen at Maracas Bay and free enterprise and the Trini ever subtle sense of advertising being what it is... For some reason, I couldn't convince Georgia to go to this one. I guess she's just not patriotic enough to go to Uncle Sam's Shark and Bake.
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