On Saturday afternoon, we rented a car.

The rental car parked in the boat yard.

On Sunday morning, Tony, Gayle and I set off to see some of Trinidad.

Tony had read about an area where the East Indians who came as indentured workers had settled. We set off with a goals of eating some Trini-style Indian food, doing a little shopping, and seeing the Hindu temple on the sea.

We well exceeded our goals for the day, thanks to our good fortune of meeting the amazing Harripaul. Just south of Chaguanas, we stopped at a roadside place that looked popular. We ordered three aloo pies and one each of the other delicacies.

Savory delicacies from Harripaul’s Hut Fry: saheena, bhagani, and khachorie. There were delicious aloo pies too but we ate them before I thought to take a photograph.

While we were ordering our pies, the owner quizzed us about our plans to see Trinidad. He was sufficiently horrified by our lame answers that he offered to show us around the next day.

About half an hour later, he called us with an idea. His sister Sylvia was hosting an Eid-ul-Fitr (end of Ramadam) feast; would we like to go? I wondered if it was appropriate to go since none of us has fasted during Ramadam. However Harripaul reassured us by saying that most of the family is Hindu so only his Muslim brother-in-law had fasted.

Sylvia and Tawhed have a lovely home and big enough to accommodate a crowd. Even so, we ate in shifts. Everything was delicious. There were so many dishes: curries of chicken, goat, mango, cassava, pumpkin, roasted aubergine and tomato, and potato and channa, and mixed vegetables, green salad, addictive homemade pepper sauce, and piles of hot roti bread.

The dining table.

We enjoyed dessert in the back garden. Special Eid dessert was sawine toasted vermicelli in a sweet, rich, spiced milk sauce — a perfect finish to the meal. When the fruit cake and sweets appeared we cried uncle. And were given both in bags to take home. (We later discovered that Trini-Indian sweets are even tastier than the direct-from-India kind. I’d never seen Tony enthusiastic about gulab jamun before.)

Tony and Gayle. Tony is holding a bag of sweets and mine is on the empty chair — don’t touch it.

Harripaul is second from the left in the green shirt.

After the meal, Harripaul and Maria took us on a driving tour… but that’s another post.