As a kid growing up in the middle of Virginia, I told myself
I would one day see the world. Now in my late 20s, I am happy to report that I
am doing a decent job of fulfilling that kid’s dream, though I had envisioned
more glamour in the travel and less cramming my shoulders in a coach seat for
12 hours at a time and trying not to fall asleep at my morning meeting in the
middle of Africa or Europe or wherever. When the opportunity to take an actual
vacation abroad instead of going for work or school came along, I went for it.
I’ve always been one to make random decisions, and randomly decided the random
country of Trinidad would be my random destination. I booked the ticket and
painted the decision as a brilliant move few people would understand.
And indeed it was a brilliant decision few people
understood! My career may not be good for things like obtaining health care
benefits or, you know, progressing in life, but my God, it is really good for
assessing the vacation quality of a country in under 20 minutes! Not only is
Trinidad not bombarded with the average, annoying selection of Caribbean
tourists – including the mid-life crisis population of Canada, Americans who
can’t bring themselves to leave North America, and every law student ever – it
has a brilliant landscape, a rich history, a number of cultural and
architectural monuments, and solid public transportation, all of which I knew
about before going.
Thanks to the auspices of Couchsurfers and friends of
friends, I am happy to say I took advantage of a number of these things. But.
Let’s be honest. As intellectually curious as I can be, at some point my trip
to Trinidad really was a summer vacation, and all I wanted to do was fall asleep
in the sand of a pretty beach while listening to the same mediocre song on
repeat because I am too lazy to make a playlist on my iPod. So I decided to go
to Tobago.
Even though taking the bus to the airport instead of a taxi
required waking up 3 hours earlier, walking 2.5 miles in the blazing hot sun,
enduring a bumpy ride along some beaten paths, and…riding the bus (I hate buses), I decided paying 1/30th of the price was well worth the
effort. Those of you who know me have probably realized that I assume it takes
30 minutes to get anywhere, regardless of the distance, time of day, traffic
patterns, whatever. Ergo, in predictable fashion, I left myself 30 minutes to
walk to the bus station even though I had done the same thing the two previous
days and knew it would definitely take 40 minutes.
So I missed the bus. To kill time before the next one came,
I decided to go to the Trinidadian equivalent of Starbucks and get a donut the
size of my head. Nothing like loading up on sugar right before you take
pictures of yourself in a swimsuit. Of course whereas the first bus I tried to
catch left precisely on time, the second bus came 15 minutes late, putting me
45 minutes behind the arbitrary schedule I had calculated in my head. But no
matter, after successfully appropriating an entire row of seats to myself, I
determined I still had 30 minutes of leeway.
Riding the subway in New York is an Olympic sport. Between
hauling all of your things up and down staircases meant to accommodate a
fraction of the people underground, nauseating performers demanding money for their
ridiculous songs, and tourists who fail to understand why the city does not
stop because they think they’re going the wrong direction, riding the
train requires a good amount of physical agility. That’s why old people rarely
ride the subway; they take the bus. New York City buses are certainly more
forgiving than the subway, but buses in this fair concrete jungle still require
a lot of flexibility. Are you handicapped? Too bad, you still might have to
stand. Forgot your metro card? Too bad, you have to go buy another one and wait
for the next bus. Missed your stop? Too bad, get down and ride the return bus
back. There are simply too many people in New York for anyone to make special
accommodations because you or the driver screwed up
Apparently this is not the case in Trinidad. Not 20 minutes
after I settled into my row of seats with my head-sized donut did I hear a
woman start screaming for bloody mercy.
“You
missed my stop! You didn’t STOP!! YOU HAVE TO GO BACK!!!”
But the driver kept going, arguing that the stop she so
vehemently demanded was only an actual stop going in the other direction. So
the screaming continued for another five minutes, with each second finding a
new bus passenger echoing the concern. My happy little picture of Trinidadians as
a peaceful people was abruptly spoiled with a full out screaming match between
the other passengers and the driver. I, on the other hand, was a happy New
Yorker with a giant donut, and could care less if this woman missed her stop.
It happens all the damn time in New York – take the next bus back! Missing a
stop is so not a big deal. Besides, I thought, I now only had 25 minutes of
leeway and that driver continuing on was saving me time. Right? Ha.
A few hundred feet from the next stop, the screaming woman
began walking down the aisle to jump straight off as the bus doors opened. As I
was about to go in for the next bite of donut, I heard a loud thud right next
to me. Looking down, I saw the woman was not in her mid-30s as I had guessed
from her voice, but was much older – like 60. She was also face down in the
aisle. I know by now that my first reaction to these situations is to freeze,
so as I sat there stupidly with sugar crumbs all over my face, I heard a set of
panicked passengers crowd around her and begin to pull her tight grip from the
row of seats I had appropriated for myself.
From my cardiologist father, I know all of the heart
buzzwords; it wasn’t until someone plopped the woman down in a seat and she
muttered “nitroglycerin” that I realized what had happened – this woman had had
a f**king heart attack! Suddenly my donut was not so delicious.[1]
By then, one other passenger in particular had made tormenting the bus driver
her personal vendetta. Somewhere in the middle of her threatening to pull out a
knife and cut off his testicles, the driver fortunately had the clarity to call
an ambulance.
I have to hand it to Trinidad – though the ambulance and all
of its equipment were positively filthy, the EMTs made it to the bus in under
15 minutes. Sadly, they worked as fast as a blind monkey. After ten minutes to
finally get the gross oxygen tank out and operating, it was clear that the woman
who had the heart attack would be fine. She was breathing almost normally, was talking and moving, and I knew she could easily make it to a
hospital to rest. Unfortunately, the second woman had returned to her “batshit
crazy” mode and had resumed making death threats against the driver. I did my
best to curl up into a ball and stare out the window, but could not completely
avoid the scary moments of eye contact this woman made with me. On the third of
such occasion, she looked straight at me said,
“This bus driver should die! This
bus is for the people, it is not his bus! Yes!?”
Of course in my head, I was thinking something like,
“Why me?! I’m going to miss my
flight! Sand! iPod! Beeeeaaaaach!”
But all I said was a garbled,
“Yeaasssh!...Die!”
Thankfully, Trinidadian Indians have some common
characteristics with us American Indians, namely – work before all else. After
the other EMTs had finished fumbling with the oxygen tank, the Indian origin
EMT took one look at the other passengers and forced the heart attack woman off
the bus, explaining,
“These
people need to get to work.”
Normally I would have been in full echo of the EMT’s
concerns, though I could really only think about one thing:
“Beeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaacccccccchhhhhhhh!!!!”
Very happily, crazy woman decided to go with heart
attack woman to the hospital, leaving the bus driver with his testicles intact
to take us to the rest of the stops, and finally, the airport! I had planned to
save half of my head donut for the plane, but the unnecessary drama of the
incident forced me to eat the rest. That is not a logical statement. But shut
up. Beeeeaaaaaaaaaaaccccccccccchhhhhh!
As we pulled into the airport terminal, it was my turn to
shove my way to the front of the bus, though I managed to avoid having a heart
attack in the process. It turns out the flights to Tobago from Trinidad have
their own little dingy security area, so showing up a full two minutes before
check-in was scheduled to close was 30 minutes earlier than absolutely
necessary. The (Indian origin) airline employee even gave me a slight pat on the
shoulder of reassurance before handing me a napkin to wipe off the sugar
crumbs. So sweet, literally.
In case you’re curious about whether I had an amazing time
that day once I got to Tobago – the answer is no. Five minutes after I got to
the beeeeeaaaaccch, it started raining like crazy, like batshit crazy. But the
next day was amazing! Look at the picture I got below!
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