Haven’t pudublogged in a while, but I suspect they’d enjoy the island
I just spent a week exploring.  (Rough life, I know.)

Until I actually
get around to writing up my thoughts, here are a few pics for the
curious:

Tobago from the air, yesterday morning, facing south, from an airplane passing over the Buccoo Reef.

Englishman’s
Bay on the island’s leeward coast.  If you ever need to stare into
space for a few hours, thinking about nothing but how the air feels on
your back, this is a very good spot for it.

French angelfish near Store Bay, flanked by what I believe are
immature clown wrasses.  But I know very little about tropical fish, so
I should really write “blue-faced servingtrayfish, plus a bunch of
yellow panicdarters.”  That’s what I actually called them when I was in
the water.

Americans rarely visit Tobago for some reason, but
it’s a fairly popular destination for folks from Canada, Europe, and elsewhere in the Caribbean.  There have been some serious
concerns lately about safety in the news (scroll down past Jamaica, which is also kinda how you find Tobago itself) and in various government travel advisories (e.g. Canada, Australia, the UK),
but the major problems seem mostly to be on the sister island of
Trinidad.  (Which, you notice, I reluctantly decided not to visit.)

For now, Tobago still seems cool if you don’t make yourself a target by large displays of wealth or perhaps by screaming “I curse you, steel pan music!” at the top of your lungs.  I walked alone all the time and never once felt my feelers twinging.  Obviously, the tourists mentioned in the government advisories had a different experience.

That
said, many of the reefs are in real trouble, American-style franchising
is on its way, and the inability of the police to handle increasing
drug-related crime is so bad that they’ve actually asked the Colombian
cops for advice.  Oy.

So I did have a sinking feeling the whole time,
sensing that I was seeing an island which won’t be the same in the
not-too-distant future.

Somewhat like Earth itself, the way things are going. 

More later.  Gotta unpack and stuff…