The tweets begin just a few yards into the forest, come-hither calls that are the signature cry of the male blue-backed manakin, a colorful, chickadee-size bird with a mating boogie that would excite a Dancing with the Stars judge. My guide, Newton George, follows the bird song through the undergrowth and then points to a unique jump-up on a nearby branch: a pair of male manakins, a captain and his wingman, repeatedly leapfrogging each other on the perch in the hope that their choreography will attract a willing female.
“You don’t get this on Trinidad,” says George. Score one for the little guy.
Spend any time wandering the Caribbean’s multi-island nations, and it becomes apparent there’s usually an alpha partner: St. Kitts overshadows Nevis; St. Vincent calls the Grenadines’ tune; Antigua outweighs Barbuda. And Trinidad? For many travelers, the island’s ampersand associate, Tobago, is the “silent T” in T&T.
Yet the sun-blessed sidekicks, usually dwarfed in size, population and political influence by their name-above-the-title masters, typically serve up the most authentic, memorable encounters. They are the tranquil yang to the bigger islands’ bustling yin. Fortunately for Trinidad, it has the ideal valet in Tobago: serene, secure and too unassuming to demand the spotlight.
Just don’t expect the Tobago to remain an afterthought much longer. Not with a stacked lineup that can satisfy beach lovers and culture vultures, divers and snorkelers, active-adventurers and bird watchers, history buffs and foodies – nearly anyone who yearns for a kinder, mellower Caribbean hideaway. It comes as no surprise that Daniel Defoe set his castaway classic, Robinson Crusoe, on an island inspired by Tobago. When settlers did arrive, they planted cotton, then coconuts, sugar cane and cocoa. But in 1963, just a year after Trinidad and Tobago gained independence from Britain, the 120-mph winds and torrential rains of Hurricane Flora flattened most of Tobago’s forests and farms.
With its agriculture-based economy in tatters, Tobago took stock of its natural attributes and recast itself as a low-key, value-for-money eco-tourist destination. It wasn’t a radical makeover: The 116-square-mile island had essentially gone “green” in 1776, when the British government set aside 10,000 acres of tropic wilderness as Main Ridge Forest Reserve. Later augmented to 14,000 acres, it was the first such preserve in the Western Hemisphere. And since the 1930s, fishermen have taken visitors out in glass-bottom boats to witness the underwater wonders of three-square-mile Buccoo Reef.
Caribbean Parks and Reserves...
The coastline flanking Buccoo in southwestern Tobago remains the island’s tourism hub. Small resorts, villas and guesthouses (there isn’t an internationally flagged hotel on the island) sprout just beyond Crown Point International Airport, while seaside bars, grills and dive shops at adjacent Pigeon Point Heritage Park cater to the whims of beachgoers.
Truly tapping into Tobago, however, means abandoning these temptations and heading east. Just a 15-minute drive along the southern, or Atlantic, coast stands Scarborough, the island’s administrative center and terminal for the high-speed ferries connecting from Trinidad’s capital city, Port-of-Spain. Walk the streets on a Friday night, and you’re likely to meet Albert “The Lonely Cowboy” Allen, a retired sanitation worker given to Wild West attire, from Stetson hat to crocodile-skin boots.
“Every day, going out from my home, I dress like a cowboy,” says Allen, 72, a lifelong fan of Roy Rogers. “That’s my style.”
While Allen has stopped strolling Trinidad (“they crazy down there”), there’s likely to be a Lonely Cowboy sighting at nearly any event on Tobago, from the annual goat races in Buccoo Village to the Blue Food Festival, a Bloody Bay celebration of dasheen, or taro root. On live-and-let-live Tobago, there’s also a good chance the Two Distinguished Gentlemen will saunter by. This pair – father, William Hamilton, age 72, known as Dandory, and son, Derrick Hamilton, 32, called Playboy – is prone to bespoke, mack-daddy suits of royal blue, cardinal red or bone white and bowler hats, canes and goblets.
“They’re trying to teach the young people how to dress,” explains Hugh Browne, a Scarborough taxi driver who, like most Tobagonians, seems to know everybody and their business.
These living-out-loud characters probably deserve a special display inside the Tobago Museum, which occupies the former officers’ quarters of Scarborough’s hilltop Fort King George. Along with the museum’s collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, colonial-era maps and weapons, and even a taxidermied greater bird of paradise from New Guinea, they celebrate the island’s multilayered heritage and quirky contemporary manner.
“The islands are inextricably interwoven,’’ says Vernella Alleyne, a Scarborough native who heads the Minstrels of Tobago, a group that each year during Carnival re-creates – in whiteface – the blackface minstrel shows once popular in America. “On a social level it is very friendly. But when it comes to sharing the national purse, there is a lot of tension.”
But every now and then, the little sister steals the spotlight. A cozy black-sand beach just two miles east of Scarborough caught the eye of filmmakers scouting the perfect desert-island setting for the 1960 Disney classic Swiss Family Robinson.
“I’ve been all over the world to shooting locations,” recalled actor John Mills, who played the family patriarch, “and I don’t think I’ve ever been to a more lovely location.”
On a bluff above the beach stands the old-line Blue Haven Hotel, which put up Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum and Jack Lemmon during filming of Fire Down Below, a 1957 Hollywood melodrama set in a fictitious Caribbean backwater. Mitchum was so smitten by Tobago’s charms that he soon recorded one of the all-time great novelty albums, Calypso – Is Like So ... .
If an island can reduce a film noir icon to crooning “Mama, Looka Boo Boo,” resistance is futile. I follow the serpentine Windward Road hugging the Atlantic shoreline, passing small villages of pastel-colored homes and churches echoing with the rattle of tambourines and the wail of gospel hymns. Thirty minutes beyond Scarborough, a side road takes me through a Roxborough estate once owned by Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones. After killing a man in self-defense, Jones fled Tobago for America, where his sailing prowess quickly earned him a commission in the upstart American Navy.
The legendary skipper also had a fine eye for real estate – the Roxborough property is fed by Tobago’s prettiest cascade, three-tiered Argyle Falls, where I meet Newton George, one of the island’s most accomplished naturalists. The retired game warden constantly scans the thickets of bamboo and towering trees for signs of wildlife, especially birds.
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