Our trip to Trinidad & Tobago was summed up shortly in the last entry, but here is a more throughly resume of our first week in the caribbean.
As noted in the previous entry, our trip was pretty poorly planned, like most of our other travels so far. It´s been a great, relaxing way of travel so far, but this time though, being pretty far of the backpacker track in south america, problems arose already at arrival in Port of Spain. Immigration made it pretty clear that we had no proof of onward travel, and by law were not alloved in the country. Luckily, some immigration-officers have been equiped with common sence, and understood that after travelling through 7 countries in 5 months and carrying mastercards and visa-cards from Norway we probably wouldn´t stop here to settle down. Next challenge: finding a place to stay without ruining our fragile economy. Not very easy in rich-resort land. After some back and forward we were directed to a guesthouse called Fish Tobago in Buccoo, and got a reasonable price there.
Our "what-to-do-lsit" pretty much just contained diving, snorkelling and maby some surfing. We soon figured out that diving was way to expensive (even worse than Galapagos) and that the surf was pretty bad actually. Which left us with an open itinarary.
From the second we checked into Fish Tobago we were bombarded with offers for fishing, party-boats, diving and so on. All being way above our price-range. They just didn´t seem to understand the concept of backpacking, and couldn´t grasp the fact that we were perfectly happy to just spend a week swimming, snorkelling on our own, eating coconuts in the hammacks by the beach and eating in. That´s not how holidays in Trinidad and Tobago are supposed to be apparently. We declined most offers, but during the first day I, Eirik, joined a couple of guys from the guesthouse out in a glass - bottom boat on the big coral reef just of the harbor. We also got to ride a 1800cc Jet-Ski, which was totally insane. Almost to fast even for me..

We filled the gap days with loads of card-playing, snorkelling of the beaches in beautiful coral reefs and trying to enjoy the relaxed carribean atmosphere, although we had some trouble finding it.. People were less friendly than we both presumed, and at times even a bit rude. Off course we ran into the occational jovial rastaman yelling from the other side of the street "Hay man, all good man", but far to seldom.

One of the days we rented a jeep to sightsee the whole island. Tobago being an old British colony, they drive on the left side of the road, which gave us a pickle or two in the start. Luckily, we adjusted, and had a marvellous day seeing the lovely villages and beaches around the small island with our Subaru Jimmy!

After declining a couple of offers for open sea fishing we got a pretty good deal and decided to go fishing for Marlins, Barracudas and big tunas on our last sunday in Tobago. The owner, Brandon, had bragged about his big fish guarantee all week and we thought we where doomed to catch something. Turned out that his just got a big mouth and we spent the day catching tiny tuna and big rocks.

After we´d spent some time in Buccoo it became pretty clear that something shady was going on around us. By shady, I mean sex-tourism. And not the "usual" type, like in Oipaquque, Brazil, but females travelling here to "meet" caribbean men. We asked around a bit and it turned out that we were actually in the midst of it all.
Luckily, by our first weekend a group of young british travellers appeared and we had a nice weekend cheking out the night scene in Tobago, including the infamous "sunday school" in Buccoo.

Monday morning we were set to leave Tobago behind when I found out that my passport, about 300USD, Mastercard and vaccination card had been stolen from my backpack, in our room, during the night. What happened or who took it, I don´t know, but it wouldn´d surprise me much if the owner of Fish Tobago is currently in possesion of a brand new norwegian passport and some spending money.
Loosing the passport was actually a pretty interresting experience. I´ve wondered several times what I would do if this happened, and it turns out that as long as you don´t panic and have some time to spare it really isn´t to much of a big deal. After reporting the incident to the police I simply went over to the airport, talked to immigration and got some good advice there. Only an hour or two later we were of for Trinidad, were there is a Norwegian consulate. A night at the airport eating Subway - food and playing cards later we were at the consulate. The norwegian representative was very helpfull, and my timing was excellent. Turns out there is a norwegian citizen in Trinidad who´s in big trouble with loansharks and whatnot. She was supposed to get an emergency passport and go back home, but she had again ran off and the emergency passport was just laying there, up for grabs. So, a prosess that usually would have taken days took me a couple of hours.

Emergency passport in hand, we booked our once a week ferry tickets and were off to Venezuela and the Norwegian Embassy, were I´ll get my permanent passport in a couple of weeks, by wednesday morning!