Up at 5am, then breakfast in our room before meeting Dennis our driver who took us on the 50-60minute drive to the airport. For the whole journey we listened to him telling us the woes of trying to get a new generator and generator parts to Rock View Lodge; Colin was beside himself as, just prior to a busy bank holiday weekend, another generator had broken down! A lorry had refused to carry a new generator and the plane was being difficult with taking the parts .......having dropped us he was going to see what else he could do!
Check in opened at 7.15 and the whole process for our flight to Trinidad was relatively smooth including paying our 4000 Guyanese$ departure tax. Once in the departure area we had a coffee and spent the last of our Guyanese dollars. With what now seems good Caribbean airlines practice, we boarded our flight early and left early - although we were due to land in Trinidad at 11.25 we were already in our taxi and enroute to the Asa Wright centre by then!
After a drive through a winding hilly route we checked in at the Centre around 1220ish -fortunately for us the lodge we were assigned had a late check out so was not ready; instead we were assigned a lovely big room in the main house with an enormous bed! We immediately went to lunch, which had started at noon, before being briefed on our itinerary. In addition to the planned trips we requested an additional trip to see leatherback turtles nesting - hopefully that will be on Friday. Having sorted out our luggage and put our dirty laundry in for washing we went to the veranda to watch the birds at the feeders - I asked for a quick lesson from the guide and now know we saw- male and female sliver beaked tanagers,male and female purple honeycreepers,male and female geeen honeycreepers, male and female white-lined tanagers, palm tanagers, bananaquits, crested oripendular - going in and out of their nests, several different species of hummingbird and several American agoutis feeding beneath the feeders.
After tea we wandered down the road to see the freshwater pool you can swim in if you fancy it!
At 6pm we had rum punch on the veranda before watching an excellent DVD on the natural diversity of Trinidad and Tobago- I don't think I will be having more rum punch - it has a kick - which knocked my head off!! After dinner there was a night walk which we declined - a combination of the rum punch and travelling called for an early night - and no sooner had my head hit the pillow than I was out for the count!