Trinidad and Tobago in 8 days: Carnival, scarlet ibis and the oldest rainforest reserve

Day 2 — Steelpan and the north coast

• 09:00 — A panyard visit. The bands rehearse in open yards and in the Panorama season you can walk in and listen; outside it, several arrange visits and demonstrations. The steelpan was invented here in the 1930s and 40s, out of discarded oil drums, and is the only acoustic instrument invented in the twentieth century.
• 11:00 — Over the Saddle to the north coast — Maracas Bay, where the road drops out of the forest onto the beach.
• 13:00 — Bake and shark at Maracas, which is the national dish in practice: fried flatbread, fried shark, and a table of sauces you assemble yourself.
• 15:30 — Las Cuevas further east, quieter, or back over the hill.

Day 3 — Birds: Asa Wright and Caroni

• 06:30 — Up into the Arima Valley to the Asa Wright Nature Centre, a former cocoa and coffee estate turned research station at 360 metres. From the verandah you see hummingbirds, honeycreepers, tanagers and oropendolas at arm’s length before breakfast.
• The trails hold manakins, bellbirds and — on a booked tour — the oilbird colony in Dunston Cave, one of very few accessible in the world. Oilbirds are nocturnal, fruit-eating and echolocate.
• 15:00 — Down to Caroni Swamp, on the west coast.
• 16:30 — By flat-bottomed boat through the mangroves, past caimans and boa constrictors, out to an open lagoon.
• At dusk, the scarlet ibis come in — thousands of them, in strings and then in clouds, settling onto green mangrove islands until the trees look as though they have flowered red. It is the single best hour in Trinidad.

Day 4 — Pitch Lake, or turtles

Either — the south-west:

• La Brea Pitch Lake, the largest natural asphalt lake in the world — about forty hectares of slowly circulating bitumen that you walk on, with a guide, past pools where the surface has split. Raleigh caulked his ships here in 1595 and it still supplies asphalt.

Or, March to August — the north-east:

• Grande Riviere or Matura, where leatherback turtles nest in some of the highest densities in the world. Up to five hundred animals a night at peak. Permits are required and the beaches are patrolled by community groups.

Day 5 — To Tobago

• Morning — Fly to Tobago, twenty minutes.
• Afternoon — Pigeon Point, the postcard beach with the thatched jetty, and the Buccoo Reef glass-bottom boat out to the Nylon Pool — a waist-deep sandbar in the middle of the sea.
• Evening — Store Bay for crab and dumpling from the stalls.

Where to stay in Tobago (three nights)

• Mid-range: Crown Point for the beaches and the airport, or Castara on the Caribbean coast for a fishing village rather than a strip.

Day 6 — The Main Ridge

• 08:00 — Into the Main Ridge Forest Reserve, protected by ordinance in 1776 on the argument that cutting the forest would reduce the rainfall — which makes it the oldest reserve of its kind in the western hemisphere and a remarkably early piece of ecological thinking.
• With a guide for the Gilpin Trace trail: jacamars, motmots, and the white-tailed sabrewing, a hummingbird that was thought lost after Hurricane Flora in 1963 and turned up again here.
• 13:00 — Argyle Falls, three tiers and a swim.
• 16:00 — Down the windward coast through Speyside, looking across at Little Tobago.

Day 7 — Speyside and the reef

• Morning — Diving or snorkelling at Speyside. The channel between Tobago and Little Tobago carries nutrient-rich water off the Orinoco, which grows brain coral the size of a small car — one colony here is among the largest recorded — and brings manta rays.
• Afternoon — Little Tobago by boat for the red-billed tropicbirds nesting on the cliffs.
• Or a quiet day at Englishman’s Bay, which is the best beach on the island and usually empty.

Day 8 — Fly out

• Morning — Tobago to Port of Spain, then connect. Leave real margin between the shuttle and a long-haul departure.