Phagwa, a hike, and some temples

Sorry it's been so long since my last post, it's been a crazy couple of weeks.

On February 28 we celebrated Phagwa with the UWI Hindu Society. We left at 8 am and went to four different sites to celebrate. Phagwa is the Hindu festival celebrating the coming of Spring, and it also celebrates Holika Dahan. During Phagwa there are Chowtal competitions (type of music), but the main attraction is the spraying and smearng of abeer on other people. Abeer is colored liquid and powder that you spray people with and smear all over their faces and clothes. It gets insanely messy, but you wear white clothes so the color stands out. At the first place we went to we got fed doubles (but they were the spiciest doubles I've ever had, my mouth was literally on fire afterwards, which is not fun) and then the little kids started spraying everyone with the liquid abeer. They had these sprayers built out of PVC pipe, so they could spray large amounts of abeer across large distances. They mainly went for each other, but they would occasionally go for our group. There was one time I was refilling my waterbottle to go spray someone else with abeer, and a little kid who was also filling up his sprayer (which goes a lot faster than filling a waterbottle) just emptied his whole sprayer into my face. Candice had bought a lot of the colored powder for our group, so we had fun smashing into people's faces and smearing it all over their faces and hair (I had my hair mostly covered with a bandanna, but there are people who still have pink and green hair from the powder). The second location was mainly just chowtal singing, as many groups travel around to different sites to perform. The Hindu Society we were with had a song prepared, and we got to stand onstage with them when it was performed, but we all just stood around awkwardly because we didn't know the songs at all. Our third stop was the Tunapuna Hindu School, which has one of the largest Phagwa celebrations around. There were hundreds of people around with abeer, but we were already soaked and covered so we didn't really care anymore. Again, we stood on stage with our group while they performed, but this time we were performing for hundreds of people, and the chowtal songs go on for a long time, so we stood around and tried to look like we knew what we were doing. Our final stop was at one of the Savannahs west of Tunapuna, where there is a large rowdy celebration. We got there before it got too bad, but there were lots of old creepy guys who wouldn't leave us alone, so the guys we were with started acting more like bodyguards. Some of the men would just come up behind you and, with absolutely no warning, just smash the powder into your face, so you had no time to close your eyes or mouth, which is not fun at all. We tried to leave before it got too rowdy, but we were stuck for awhile because one of the vans was blocked in by a truck with the keys locked inside. We finally got out, but people like to stand on the side of the road leaving the Savannah with huge containers of liquid abeer (some of these containers took up the entire bed of the truck they were in), so we got drenched again, and one truck used a powerful hose that just hurt. But for the most part Phagwa was fun. It took forever to get the abeer off, and it doesn't really come out of hair easily. When I took my contacts out that night one of them was pink from the abeer. At one of the stops they fed us delicious Indian food, so when we got back to the lodge we continued our Indian day by watching Slumdog Millionaire.

On March 6 we went to Lopinot village, which is a settlement in the Lopinot Valley in the Northern Range. We went on a short hike, where our guide showed us several spice trees he had planted in his yard, including cinnamon, bay leaves, and coffee. We went up a huge hill overlooking the valley. After that hike we went to a small church with the only sunken baptistery in the Western Hemisphere, and then went and toured an organic farm. We got to eat some of a cocoa pod again (when you open a ripe cocoa pod there is a flavored jelly covering each bean that tastes really good to suck on) and see all of the differnet herbs and vegetables they were growing. Then we went to a historical house where we learned more about the history of the valley.
That night we went to the Kendra Phagwa and Holika Dahan celebration in Central Trinidad. There was a long Chowtal concert, and fresh cheap pholourie to eat, and then at the end they burned Holika to represent her demise according to an acient legend. We were just glad that there was no abeer at this celebration, and that the fire at the end warmed us up a little.

Then on Sunday we had the option of going on a hike to the Paria waterfall on the Northern Coast. We left at 6:30 am (so early!) but the trip was definitely worth it. We went with the Island Hikers, so there were around 200 people on the hike, but we got really spread out. We met at Maracas, but the hike left from Blanchisseuse. It was 5 1/2 miles each way, and there were a lot of hills, and it was hot, so it was a difficult hike. But there were gorgeous views the whole hike, we kept seeing little beaches along the way. We stopped for lunch and swimming at a beach just before the waterfall, and then it was only a 10 minute hike into the waterfall. The Paria Waterfall is a gorgeous waterfall, surrounded by jungle and tall rocks. We went swimming under the waterfall, and then ventured back behind the waterfall, which was fun although there was so much spray it was kind of difficult to breath some of the time. Several other people were climbing up some of the rocks and jumping into the pool, and I really wanted to try it, but I couldn't get up the rocks. Max was the only one from our group who could get up there, but the rest of us just jumped off smaller rocks.

On March 13 we had a tour of Central Trinidad and much of the Indian presence in Trinidad. We toured the Chaguanas Market, which is about triple the size of the Tunapuna market (I bought fresh basil and oregano!) and then looked at a little shop which had old tools Indians used to use to cook with and such. We stopped at a little Indian pottery shop, which had so much amazing pottery, and then we visited a big Hindu temple and a museum of the Indian presence here in Trinidad. My favorite stop was our last one, at the Temple in the Sea. Temple in the Sea is a Hindu temple that is built about 100 feet into the ocean. The guy who originally built it had first tried to build a temple on land, only to have it be torn down by some of the Africans in the area. He figured that no one owned the sea, so he spent the next 20 years or so building a path and a small mud temple out in the sea at low tide. After his death the government rebuilt the temple, and created a permanent path (the other one was only accessible at low tide). The temple is gorgeous, jutting out into the ocean, and there are Hindu prayer flags in the water all around it, and you can see Port of Spain to the north, and you can kind of see a hint of Venezuela to the west. What I found amusing was that there was a fenced in statue of Shiva along the path to the temple. Somehow a dog got in and was just laying right in front of Shiva (it was in the shade). Apparently the dog and Shiva are close friends. There was also a really cute puppy.

Yesterday we went to Jewels of Nature, which is a family who makes organic instruments out of bamboo, kalabash, and other plants they grow on their land. They build all these instruments by hand, and some of them sound exactly like birds you hear around here. They performed for us, and then let us try all their instruments.

Other than this life has been pretty normal, with class and lectures for the CCS course. It has pretty much been about 95 degrees and sunny every day, which gets really monotonous. But it rained today! I never thought I would be this happy for rain. It cooled down, and then I heard the rain and smelled it, but at first I just thought someone was just using a hose (which people aren't supposed to use, because we're in a drought). And then I realized it was pouring! It took me some time to put it together because it hasn't rained since January, so I'm not really used to it anymore. I ran outside to look at it because it just made me so happy. But when it rains here it doesn't rain very long, and it stopped in about 10 minutes. But it was glorious!