what Was, what Is, and what Will Be

To start, I must unfortunately preface this post by saying that as far as I know, there were no pictures taken of the events I am about to describe.  This is a shame, because we were awesome.  Overheated, sweaty, occasionally uncoordinated, but awesome.  The sport I’m referring to was aptly named…

Penultimate Frisbee.

In regular Ultimate Frisbee, or simply “Ultimate”, seven players line up on each end of a rectangular field just inside their respective end zones.  The frisbee, the disc that is to be thrown from player to player, is then pulled (thrown really really hard) from one team to the opposite team down the field, starting play.   The stationary player with possession of the disc can throw it to any member of their own team, running or not running, in an effort to move the disc from their end zone where it started to inside their opponent’s end zone for one point.  If at any time during play, the disc is caught by the opposing team or even knocked to the ground, the team that did not have possession of the disc at the start of the throw  (previously on defense) now has control of the disc (making them currently on offense) and can pick it up and start throwing it towards their opponent’s end zone to score their own point.  Once a disc is caught by a player in the player’s opposing end zone, their team makes one point, the loosing team walks to the opposite end zone, the disc is thrown to that loosing team and play starts again.

In review, the main rules are no running with the disc, the disc can be thrown from any player to any other player, the disc is turned over to the opposite team if it is intercepted or dropped to the ground during play, no being a jerk, and no touching.  Sound simple enough?  I think so.

The people who play this sport are generally divided between those who like to run long distances and catch things, called cutters, and those who like to sprint short distances and throw things, called handlers.  Each player must be able to play both offense and defense, as the players only leave the field when replaced by a substitute team mate between points.  Generally the play is continuous with breaks only after one team scores and at half time, and games mostly last a little more than an hour to an hour and a half.  Sports such as soccer, track, cross country, and lacrosse use Ultimate’s diverse range of physical activities such as cutting, long routes, short routes, jukes, fakes, stutter steps, pivots, lay outs, hucks, pulls, hammers, and hospital passes, as training tools to hone their athletes into perfect shape.  They don’t call it “Ultimate” for nothing, just ask the guys playing the sport in kilts (a not uncommon sight on the playing field).

However, when you now combine that sport with 8 to 10 hours of walking, sight seeing, and learning to the main part of the day, 80 to 95 degree F weather, sand gnat bites up the wazzu, pointy sensitive plants as the turf grass, fairly constant dehydration, and people who maybe have thrown a frisbee three times in their life, Penultimate Frisbee is born.

If Ultimate Frisbee is the epitome of sport, with highly toned athletes turning well defined skills into effortless excitement, then Penultimate Frisbee is just a step (or two) below that, with out of shape tired people turning newly acquired theories into brief bouts of excitement which are immediately followed by less brief bouts of wheezing and sweating.  Ultimate, to Penultimate, get it?  It’s just like taking a perfectly good sport like baseball and giving bats and balls to fat office workers during their time off, only if baseball involved 15 minute long stretches of constant sprinting and the hand eye coordination needed to stop a flying plate from hitting you in the face.

Needless to say, although we were a rag tag collection of misfits mostly trying hard not to cramp up too much while running (and then proceeding to be disgustingly filthy and smelly back at Pax), we had a great time.  Our pitch was the soccer / cricket field just down the mountain from our home away from home, easily accessible via a system of drainage gutters that made the walk to the games much faster than taking the switch back roads, while simultaneously making the walk back to Pax an arduous nightmare for some (i.e. me), where the hike went straight up the 60ish degree incline and involved the dodging loose rocks and vengeful sticks that often get underfoot.  Penultimate Frisbee became our wind down activity after the adventures of the day where we could use up all our remaining energy before hopefully taking showers and greeting the sweet sweet dinner gong that signaled supper.  I had fun, and I think others did too.

The lesson of this story, ladies and gentlemen, is ALWAYS CARRY A FRISBEE, and you’ll thank me later.  Enjoy the pictures of what college Ultimate is supposed to look like, brought to you by my 6 ish years in the sport.

Our first stop near after the museum was to see the two original cacao drying houses which had roofs that completely rolled back off the foundation to expose the rafters where the cacao was laid to dry.  According to the Ghost Hunters episode intro, the bottom part of the drying houses were used as a jail for slaves, but we were mostly told about the cooler parts of the town’s history.

There were still cacao trees around the city, and the students finally got a taste of real chocolate.  Cacao (simply called coco by the Brits, Theobroma cacao by the sciency types, and is where the beautiful chocolate comes from) is hard to describe.  What we think of as “chocolate” is a far cry from its original form.

Cacao pods, which do indeed grow on trees (directly from the tree trunk to be specific, Hallett is tossing a pod that Arthur had just harvested from the tree to the group in the picture above), contain a core network of beans the size of polished river rocks surrounded by a delicious white pulp.  I’m cheating ever so slightly with the cover picture, it’s actually cacao from Costa Rica, but it better illustrates the crazy “from the trunk” growth that is indicative of the species.  Surprisingly, it’s the pulp that’s the best part of a ripe pod.  Each variety of cacao has slightly different tasting pulp, but they all are really sweet and very very tasty.  The seeds, as they are in the ripe pod, are fantastically biter and also fantastically purple.

To make chocolate, the seeds are separated from the pod and the pulp, dried (like in the cool houses in the village), then roasted.  Ok, there are a lot more steps in making what we think of as chocolate than just that, all of which I’ve learned in a number of classes, but we didn’t see that here.  Point is, raw cacao pulp is absolutely heavenly, and not something that can be reproduced by anything outside of my imagination.  For a slightly less confusing description of cacao, see the pictures, and I guess Wikipedia.  Sorry, the visual aids don’t contain any tastes.

Arthur then proceeded to walk us around his farm, showing us one entrepreneurial endeavor after another.  The farm had everything from a full vegetable garden, tons of crazy tropical flowers, fruit trees (including the wonderful cacao and coffee), a tilapia pond, and a new church that looked out onto the beautiful rectangle of a fish pond.  Hallett said that most of these developments were new in the two years since he had been there last, showing the resolve that Arthur had for his projects.

In an effort to save time and maintain readership, I will summarize lunch back at Mariposa via pictures and two words – fried yucca.  Mmmmmmmm.

After the feast and a good tropical fast start / fast stop drencher of a rain storm, we were led on a nice little nature walk up the side of a mountain.  Keep in mind it had just rained when you see some of us slipping…  We went up back and forth via switchback foot trails surrounded by greens of as many shades as you can dream, tree seeds that look like dolphins once you carve the eyes, and lots of fauna that probably saw us far more than we saw them.  Point in fact, our first brush with the illustrious Bothrops asper.  For those not familiar with herpetological taxonomy, this would be the fantastically poisonous pit viper better known as a fer-de-lance.  I tended to stick to the back of packs when we were walking like this, mostly so I could assuage my fears that I would loose a student at some point on the trip (and judging by the pictures I’ve scavenged from the students, I maybe wasn’t that far off, I’m really glad that only about two people got hurt on the whole trip), so I was the last in line to pass a bowl in the rocks next to the trail.

We had been told about the snakes in this area ever so briefly, and mentioned that they do tend to like curling in crevices just like that one, so when I walked past it, I looked in.  Thankfully, I don’t have a picture (of this one…), because my choice was to pause and get out my camera, or keep walking and not risk getting lunged at.  It’s diamond patterned body was coiled nicely back in the whole, but I’m dead sure that I saw it’s triangular head with black eye stripes raised above as if to say “yes? what do you want?”.  Needless to say, I walked slightly more carefully (but also slightly faster) down the rest of the trail back to the cafe.

Ok, I’m fairly tired of writing at this point, and if you’ve made it this far, you’re probably tired of reading.  We did a few more things that day, specifically our inaugural game of penultimate frisbee, but that will have to come in the next post.  Thanks again to the students I’m stealing pictures from, (the labels on the picture files correspond to the initials of those who took the pictures, btws).  The flower pics from Lopinot this time around were from Chris, our resident plant hugger, and a lot of the walking / misc pics came from Abby and Brittaney.  I suppose I should introduce the students at some point…  Think there are some nice group shots from the next day, perhaps I’ll do it then.  But first, penultimate frisbee!

Before I talk about Trinidadian food, I’d like to write a little ode to the Dinner Gong at Pax (thanks to Abby for the pic).  Each evening we spent at our home away from home, regardless of the crazy adventure that we’d had during the day, or how disgusting everyone was from hiking, swimming, penultimate frisbeeing, or general “learning”, we could solidly count on one thing; the Dinner Gong.

Since Trinidad sits about 10 degrees above the equator, with the day and night length at an almost even 12 and 12, the sun sets fairly consistently at about 6:30 or 7 pm year round.  As this nightly milestone approached, chances are most of us would be freshly showered and chilling on the veranda reading, writing, napping, right up until we heard that sweet sweet note that signaled dinner.  What followed the slow, rising escalation of sound was nothing short of a civilized stampede.  We weren’t juggling for the best seat, but the honor of being settled first and ushered by Gerard to start the queue for the delicious feast at hand.

Just think of the anticipation, the wait, the GOOONG, then the food.  Beautiful.

It’s amazing the difference a night will make.

After the evening rain cooled the morning and the sun poked its head above the hills, our imaginings of the day before came to life.  The rooms we stayed in were on the second floor of Pax, affording us an even more spectacular view of our mountain home.  The nebulous of stars and lights that greeted us the night before had turned into what you see above, a palm tree laden paradise as far as the eye could see.  Although it might not seem a paradise to you, there is after all no beach in sight, I saw it (and still see it) as such.  For an example why, here’s the story of the rest of that first day.

When you wake up in a new place after having arrived during the night, the next morning is always an interesting experience.  Although we had already spent the night there, everything I saw was fresh.  Pax lived up to its description.  Its colonial feel, view of both the mountain green to the back and the city blue to the front, and service that can only be described as “Radar-like”, made us all truly feel at home.  Breakfast was relaxed and scrumptious, with the students straggling in as they woke up.  Our illustrious professor, Dr. Steve Hallett, was one of the last down (this will become a theme…).  Breakfast was served to us by a wonderful woman, who had a kindness that matched the mood of the morning.  We had toast, eggs, and (most importantly) fresh fruit and fruit juice, all of which was enjoyed in front of birds zipping around between avacado trees, lizards running up and down the trunks, and a wind lifting the sounds up from the city and down from the mountains.  One flit of the bright yellow tail with steel blue eyes of a crested oropendola hinted at the wonders yet to be seen (click on the wonders below to see them in a slideshow).

Eric pulled up to the driveway right on time in the red and white bus we’d really get to know in those two weeks.  Everyone piled in, me with my bright orange bag of medical supplies and muted blue bag of camera supplies (both equally important, but one used thankfully far more than the other).  Our first official learning trip was to one of the last remaining anthurium farms in Trinidad.  Being an island nation with natural gas and oil reserves, farming is not top on the list of governmental funding in Trinidad and Tobago.  This particular farm was started by a Canadian family to take advantage of currency control which allowed freer trade between T&T Dollars and other foreign markets.  The output of the farm was more than the local market could accommodate, with a breeding program that backcrossed Dutch varieties with local jungle pinks and reds.

This program, conducted in conjunction with the University of the West Indies, worked to breed against the bacterial wilt that plagued naturally grown anthuriums and allowed the Flying Dutchmen (an obviously European horticulture company…) to outproduce most other nations with their greenhouse grown flowers.  Unfortunately, these rare and small tropical farms are not competitive with the large international corporations, what with the increasing rarity of the coconut husks used for the bedding of this semi-epiphyte and the propensity for disease transmission through slipping knives, so Hugh and his family have been transitioning into hydroponic tomato production.  In the next few years, his farm, any many like his, will have completely moved away from anthurium production, despite the impressive 2 million stems and 12,000 new varieties they produced in the farms heyday.  Well anyway, the family was wonderful (a set of talkative transplants that have made their home on this island nation), and it was a good first adventure into the economy of the nation.

Ok, so I’m long winded.  Who knew.  This is what I get for taking detailed notes!  I’ll finish this story tomorrow, so get ready for capuchins, coconuts, and climbing!