Tuesday 26th November
How the time flies when you’re on holiday. This is our last day and we’ve still got some exploring to do.
We talked to reception to see about getting a taxi to the Eco Adventure Tropical Gardens & Nature Reserve at Plymouth. It was nowhere near as grand as it sounds but was only 30 TT$ admission and has the most amazing humming birds (the taxi was 160TT$).
You walk up the drive to a private house, where the owner meets you and takes the modest admission fee. He then shows you round to a veranda where they have 5 or 6 humming bird feeders set up. We sat there for about 25 minutes watching these amazing little birds flitting about including a very rare albino, which I managed to catch on the video and posted on Vimeo. It’s listed as ‘Tobago Hummingbirds’ https://vimeo.com/80620601
They also put out some fruit and bananas to attract other birds too like a pair of barred antshrike and various tanagers.
After we’d seen enough hummingbirds, we walked around the grounds accompanied by one of their dogs but didn’t see many other birds.
The taxi driver took us to Fort James before going back to the hotel. It is more of a cannon emplacement than a walled-in fort but it was still interesting. It reminded me very much of Fishguard Fort back home in Pembrokeshire, with 4 or 5 cannons pointing at the sea and a solitary magazine building. A guy was selling some carved bamboo souvenirs for 40TT$, which Mrs TT couldn’t resist. Sorry Mr taxi driver, that was your tip….
We were talking to the taxi driver about restaurants on the way back and before he driver dropped us off at the hotel he showed us the Karriwak Resort & Restaurant. It was fantastic and not somewhere we’d have found on our own. It was down a little drive next to the bar/shop that sold the awful wine.
They have a daily-set, fixed-price, four-course menu. We had tasty pigeon pea soup, a delicious grapefruit and cucumber salad, sesame coated fish (there was a chicken option) and cake with ice cream to finish. Mrs TT had a vegetarian bean and couscous alternative for her main course. My meal was 210TT$, the veggie option was 200TT$. A bottle of Pino Grigio was 195TT$.
I understand that Friday and Saturday nights are buffet nights with their own band playing, which would have been great if we’d known about it. It looks like a good place to stay too but no you’d need to use the public beach at Store Bay.