Chipping down the Road in Trinidad

 

by Dev Sharp

It is sunrise on Carnival Monday, February 4th, 2008, and we have been chipping with our band, Nautica, for two hours. Chipping is the street dance that Trinis do to music. A good chipper will always have one foot on the ground and the other foot barely above the ground; forward motion is surprisingly fast. Chipping is hard on the soles of your shoes, especially around the ball of your foot.

I chip over to the beverage truck and one of the guys holds up a beer. I mouth “water”. I just can’t face a beer at 6:20AM. J’ouvert is the official opening of Carnival. The past three weeks of partying was just the warm-up and competitions — really a three-week party.
The band Nautica has a nautical theme and the overall J’ouvert theme is “Shipwrecked”. What a poor name for a bunch of yachties! I am wearing a very tight orange tank top, skimpy shorts with a gauzy orange wrap and an orange headband. My husband, Hunter, is wearing an orange T-shirt and shorts. The men’s outfits are very baggy and the women’s are three sizes too small — obviously designed by a man. We are both wearing about a cupful of paint on the exposed parts of our bodies. This is “dirty mas” and paint, mud and oil are part of the scene.

Chipping is broken up by wining and jumping up. Wining is short for “winding your waist” and is performed by gyrating your hips in three dimensions. Wining can be done alone, but most often ends up with two people wining against each other. This is not something the North American pelvis is accustomed to doing, nor is this something you would ever see on North American streets. I can kind of get the wine, but cannot get it in a forward direction. I join Hunter in chipping. We dodge the mud man, who is covered with mud from head to toe and has a pot of mud so he can share and decorate others. Paint and mud are fairly innocuous — at least compared to the used motor oil.

Oops — too close to the sound truck. Think boom box on a semi truck. Yes, 18 wheels of sound and we try to keep a bit of distance to keep the sound comfortable. We are “playing” J’ouvert with about 500 others in our band. There are several other costumes with the Shipwrecked theme and all are skimpy. When we picked up our costumes we were a bit surprised to kind five condoms in each of our bags. These were explained by newspaper articles as an effort to reduce the November birth rate.

We chip our way to our rest stop, where we grab a bit of food and look for toilets. In the full light we examine our arms and legs — plenty paint. Hmm… hand prints on certain topographical features on my chest. Hunter’s hands are the same color.
The road is speckled and splattered with paint and mud, and shows the evidence of a giant street party. There is a paucity of trash cans and Hunter speculates that the standby used 50-gallon oil drum is not considered excess in a country whose national instrument is the steel pan.
Our chipping sags as we return to our Mas camp where we are greeted by Jesse James (the logistical and transportation wizard). Jesse hands each of us a large trash bag with a hole in the bottom and instructs us to put the bag over our head, wear the bag with our arms inside and take a seat in the bus. Jesse has years of experience and we do not argue.

We return to the sailing club (TTSA) where we are anchored and find notes asking us to kindly wash the paint off at the outside shower before entering the inside showers. By 10:00AM we are back aboard our boat and ready for a nap.
Trinis are proud to host one of the best Carnivals in the world. The preparations for Carnival for the upcoming year start just after the current carnival is put to bed. The festivities for the next year’s carnival start moments after the Christmas wrapping paper is put in the trash. The word carnival is derived from “carne vale” or farewell to flesh, and the actual Carnival occurs the Monday and Tuesday before Lent. The month before carnival is a frenzy of costume, music, Calypso, Soca, limbo, competitions and is every bit as much fun as the actual two days of Carnival.

I need to tell you that neither Hunter nor I are big partiers; we do not like large crowds, loud music or staying out late, but we loved Carnival in Trinidad. We sailed back to Trinidad in early January to enjoy the competitions and festivities that culminate in the last few days of Carnival. Our first outing was to Mas Camps and pan yards. “Mas” is short for masquerade. Carnival "bands" are organized groups made up of participants who pay for costumes fashioned by a designer. The costumed participants dance through the streets to the sounds of a steel band or music from a truck with a DJ — this is called “playing mas”. A unique feature of this parade is that locals and tourists alike participate in the parade of bands.

The Parade of the Bands takes place on Carnival Tuesday. The streets are closed off and the bands march through the streets of Port of Spain before the judging stands and past thousands of people. The bands are vying for the prestigious Band of the Year title. There are lots of “bikinis and beads” as the Trinis say, but there are a few bands with a serious message. The winning band for this year, “Earth Cries of Despair and Wings of Hope”, featured the world’s ecological disasters, such as oil spills, and used the children’s band to highlight the hope of the future. 

Listening to pan music on a CD or radio cannot compare to watching a pan band play live for Carnival. The band is alive. The music is full and the group leader is directing the band and is one with the music. At times the leader looks like an aerobics instructor. One of the joys of pan music is just watching the musicians. They are animated and move with the sound, they are also very diverse. You see men, women, boys and girls. At the Panorama, the most prestigious steelband competition in Trinidad (and the world?), the youngest player was a nine-year-old girl. She played flawlessly. The players smile a lot and clearly love playing. We brought binoculars to the events so we could watch the players up close. Watching the audience is also great fun. There is a lot of what I call “seat dancing”; heads are bobbing, chairs are rocking and arms are waving. We just could not get enough of the live pan band music and attended the Panorama Semi-Finals as well as the Panorama finals.

The steel pan is the national instrument of Trinidad & Tobago and Trinis claim that it is the only new instrument invented in the 20th century. Drums and a variety of percussion instruments have been around for a long time, but it was only after World War II when oil drums littered the ports of Trinidad that they were cut down and pounded into shapes that produce distinct tones. Pan music is such an important part of Trini culture that children learn to play the pans in grade school. Small bands and pan yards can be found in every neighborhood.

We went to 11 Carnival events and it is hard to pick a favorite, but I think I will always remember the Red Cross Kiddie Carnival. This is a costume competition fund-raiser for the Red Cross and the opportunity too for kids to start their carnival career. The contestants under the age of three, called “Babes in Arms”, were very cute but clearly did not get why they were being tortured by hot suits, bright sun and a crowd. Some of the next group, three- to five-year-olds, got it and were having a great time dancing to the music and showing off for the judges and photographers. The older kids were clearly having a grand time and enjoyed being on stage, in costume and dancing. Don’t be thinking Halloween costume — none of us ever trick-or-treated in costumes this elaborate or grand. These are not bed sheets and fluffy boas. Each costume had a name and often they depicted characters of Trini mythology and history: creatures of the sea and other animals were popular themes, as were the different cultures and roots of the people of Trinidad.
Dimanche Gras on Sunday featured the climax of the competitions, as the Kings and Queens of the various bands vied for the title of King and Queen of Carnival 2008, and the Calypso artists competed for the title of Calypso Monarch 2008. We had seen the preliminaries and felt it was time well spent to see the full field of competition. In the finals, several of the costumes had added pyrotechnics and lights. The costumes of the Kings and Queens are larger-than-life displays of colors, sequins, feathers, foil and glitter. Most of the costumes had an added infrastructure of two or three wheels to help the wearer move about.

Several of the events were held at the Queen’s Park Savannah, which has a large stage and covered grandstand seating. There was food available and plenty of portable toilets and you could leave your seat and walk into the staging area. It was really fun to see the kids get ready for the stage for Kiddie Carnival and to listen to the pan bands warm up. I found this to be a very comfortable venue.

The price of the tickets varied from as little as US$15 (per person) including transportation, to as much as US$40. The street parades during the daytime could be as little as the cost of a maxi taxi. We chose to get seats and transportation for the Parade of the Bands on Carnival Tuesday and the cost was US$15.  
Next year, Carnival will be February 23rd through 24th. The marinas have special carnival rates and they do book to capacity, so it is advisable to do your research and book early. We stayed at the Trinidad and Tobago Sailing Association (TTSA) at anchor and easily found a place to drop our hook.
The carnival events start about three weeks before the actual Carnival date. You can find a calendar and list of events on a variety of websites that will come up in a simple internet search. During the time leading up to Carnival, the local newspapers are a great source of information for upcoming events.  
Transportation to evening events is a challenge because we were advised against taking public transportation at night. Going with a group in a hire van is far more economical than hiring a car and driver for the evening. There are at least two services in the Chaguaramas area, Members Only Maxi Taxi and Trump Tours, who help cruisers with Carnival logistics.

If you listen to the VHF net on channel 68 at 8:00AM you will hear news about Carnival events.
We went to several of the daytime events by maxi taxi (public transportation) and used Jesse’s service for the evening events. Jesse James owns Members Only Maxi Taxi service and spent quite a bit of time helping us decide which events to attend. Jesse will buy the tickets for the events in advance and tries to get groups to events early to claim good seats. He also goes to great lengths to ensure the safety of his clients. I never felt unsafe or uncomfortable.
Trinis were always friendly and eager to answer our questions and clearly delighted that we were enjoying their Carnival. We tried not to carry much cash, but always had some money for bake and shark, corn soup, snow cones or whatever great street food we could find.  

Devi and her husband Hunter are currently exploring the Caribbean in their sailboat Arctic Tern.