When in the fall of 1997 I proposed to Men’s Journal magazine that I do a piece called “The Caribbean of $25 a Day” – I persuaded them that it was actually possible to spend a week down islands on that budget – they gave me the go-ahead for a 4,000 word piece. Being a pro shooter, I’d do the photography as well.

The Caribbean on $25 A Day (make that $22.87, depending on how you figure the mayo)

Words & Pictures by Allan Weisbecker

Like virtually all down islanders, my gypsy cab driver Kesler was out of his mind behind the wheel, but he did me sane and right in leading me The Restrite Sea Gardens Guest House, notwithstanding the rear end collision we sustained just outside the little hamlet called Betsy’s Hope, on Tobago’s rural windward coast.

The purple blush of dusk is just now fading beyond my veranda overlooking King’s Bay, a deep crook in the island below the village of Delaford, which is perched high over the water on a steep escarpment. The full moon flood tide is lapping at the very steps to the Restrite Sea Gardens, an establishment I guarantee is not to be found in any guide books to the Caribbean; nor does it exist in the cyberspace fantasyland of travel agent computers.

You don’t make reservations for the Restrite; you just show up, which is what I did. I in fact have no reservations for any of the seven nights I’ll spend on Tobago. This is part of my plan, or non-plan, in proving that a Caribbean vacation can be had for $25 a day.

Wait a minute. The Caribbean on $25 a day. Whaddam I, nuts?

Maybe, but so far so good. Since touching down on the island early this morning, I’ve spent a total of $17.09, and that includes ground transportation, breakfast, lunch, my room for the night and dinner, plus two Carib beers to wash it down with.

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My room, by the way, is large, clean and airy, if peculiar in color scheme and appointments. The couch, I suspect, was salvaged from the back of one of Kesler’s former gypsy cab wrecks, its automotive provenance thinly disguised with a flowered antimacassar. There is a cavernous private shower in back, full kitchen out front, and neatly squared away double bed. The proprietress, Mistress Orr, a handsome lady in her mid-sixties, fed me to the bursting on stewed chicken, pelau rice, dumplings, plantains, sweetbread and callaloo soup, and seemed embarrassed when she said the meal would be an extra 15 TT (Trinidad & Tobago dollars), or $2.40 U.S., on top of the 40 TT ($6.42) for my palm-girded niche by the sea.

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Now I’m stretched out on my bed, cooled by the gentle nighttime trades wafting through my open door, contemplating my day’s exploration of the pristine shoreline of King’s Bay and Delaford proper high above it. I’m thinking about George, a young man of devout Rastafarian beliefs who shyly approached me on my veranda and was well read and opinionated about history and current world events. George was worried about the recent influx of land-buying foreigners, who “are stealin’ Tobago’s secret” – which I took to mean her culture.

But mostly I’m thinking about Miss Faith, wondering about her 97 years (or 96 or 92, depending on who you ask) here at Delaford. What kind of lady was she? What were her hopes and fears? Did she have a good life? A happy life? Was she loved?

I was the only non-local at Miss Faith’s funeral up at the church this afternoon (I just wandered in), and I viewed Miss Faith, diminutive but not shrunken in her casket, which seemed tiny as a doll’s. Her ninety-whatever years rested easy on a bituminous face, features soft though deeply lined around her mouth and eyes. I noticed that the borders of her lace dress and the soft lining of her coffin were the same shade of maroon as the uniforms of the schoolgirls just then skipping down the street by the church. I wondered if this was coincidence or a subtle, deliberate reference to her own youth so long ago, when she gamboled on this same sun-drenched street, pigtails flying in the sea wind.

Island People Interlude

Mister Davis

Ten AM the morning of my third day on-island, I’m in Speyside, just up the coast from Delaford. Recumbent on the roadside in the shade of an almond tree, my knapsack as backrest, I’m wondering if a car will ever pass this way. Not just a “drop” taxi (gypsy cab), route taxi or maxi-taxi (a van or mini-bus); any car.

I’ve been lolling here for an hour, maybe more. No cars. Mister Davis, a septuagenarian Seventh Day Adventist preacher, crosses the road from his Atlantic View Guest House, where I stayed last night. Newly renovated, with a huge kitchen and sea view veranda, I’d settled in after tactfully negotiating Mr. Davis down from 110 TT ($17.65) to 60 ($9.63). Mr. Davis fastidiously sits by me on the curb, all decked out in his Sunday best. His brindled, swaybacked old goat, tethered in the guest house yard (the perfect low-maintenance lawn mower) spots him and commences maaa-aaah-ing in recognition and concern, ears perked like a dog’s. . “Don’t worry,” Mister Davis says to the animal. “I be back ‘fore dark.” As I am, Mister Davis is going to Charlottesville on the northern tip of the island. He has a church service to attend, I remember from our conversation yesterday.

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We talk in the gathering heat of mid-morning. I want to ask about Miss Faith, whom Mister Davis knew. I’m concerned because Miss Orr at the Restrite hadn’t attended Miss Faith’s funeral and when I’d asked why, she’d shrugged and turned away, as if there’d been bad blood between them. I want Mister Davis to say something nice about Miss Faith, but all he’ll say is that he intends to live to be older than she had.

A maxi-taxi blows by, Charlottesville-bound. Riding low, packed solid, it does not stop.

Time passes. Shadows shrink. No more cars come. I sit by the standpipe on the roadside, stick my head under the cool stream, drink my fill of sweet Tobago water.

David breezes by in the back of a pickup, on his way home from his morning’s work, going the other way. He yells out an effusive greeting. I met him yesterday when that same pickup had taken me from Delaford to Speyside. “No charge fo’ dis mon,” David said to the driver. “We got to take care of our visitors.”

David led me down to his waterfront cottage – just one small room but with a million-dollar view – to meet his wife Annis and two daughters, Cheyenne and Swan, beautiful little girls. He pointed out the best, cheapest local restaurant, aptly named The Paradise – full island style fish dinner with trimmings and beer for about $6 on the rickety wood open-air porch overhanging the harbor. After dinner I met up with David again and we’d bought each other Caribs at The Boats Men’s Pool Hall, and the “limned” (a cross between hanging out and lurking) with his buddies. Played a game of 8-ball. (I blew the boys away with an incredible three-bank combination that would take four million tries to pull off again.)

Back on the roadside now, still waiting. Finally a drop taxi pulls up, but with room for only one. I gesture for Mister Davis to take it.

Mister Davis’s old goat watches, straining against his tether as the cab accelerates down the narrow, lushly fringed road. He lets fly a booming Maaaa-AAHHH, timbre rising sharply at the end like a question.

Another Island People Interlude

Charlottesville waterfront

When I finally arrive in Charlottesville via a wild ride in the back of a fisherman’s pickup – I contributed 4 TT ($.64) for gas, which is what a drop taxi would’ve cost – my hunt for accommodations is tough going at first. All the waterfront rooms seem to be in the 100 - 120 TT ($16.05 - 19.26) range, which is beyond my means if I expect to eat, never mind drink and be merry, on $25 U.S. a day. Nobody is in a bargaining mood. A kindly fellow named Solomon takes me under his wing and leads me down a narrow, labyrinthine path past rooting pigs, brooding hens and scratching mongrels to a rooming house right on the edge of the seawall to the north of the village pier. “Dis place is cheap,” he says, but the rooms are all occupied.

I’m getting discouraged, but Solomon says not to worry. He points me up some stairs a half block off the waterfront and I soon find myself in conversation with a spry, kind-eyed gentleman I take to be in his mid-sixties, Mister Alleyne. I ask him how much for a single room. He tells me 100 TT ($16.05). When I sag visibly – it’s no act – he asks how much I can afford. Sixty TT ($9.63), I say, with an apologetic shrug.

“Jus’ you needs dee room?” Mister Alleyne knows I’m traveling alone, but I smile and play the game and say, “Yes, just me.”

Mister Alleyne

“Then sixty be all right.”

“Did you know a lady named Miss Faith, from Delaford?” I ask as Mister Alleyne shows me my clean, spacious room, the full kitchen adjoining it.

“Only to say ‘good-day’ to, “he replies. “I hear she die.”

I’m hoping Mister Alleyne will say something more about Miss Faith, but he doesn’t.

I nap for an hour or so in the heat of mid-afternoon, then take a swim off the pier. I’ve crossed to the island’s leeward side now and the cerulean waters of Man O’ War Bay are unruffled like a lake.

Back at my room I shower and dress, then hit the streets for a little Sunday afternoon walkabout. I’ve been to Charlottesville once before years ago and remember it as the quintessential small Caribbean town, with it’s fishing-based waterfront activity somehow at once bustling and indolent, the anchorage a winsome mix of net-laden dories and world-voyaging yachts. I pass by the bargaining clamor of the fishermen’s co-op, then wander inland toward the lush high valley wall that nestles the town on three sides. Following a narrow trace skirted by a panic of untended yellow and orange hibiscus, I find myself watching an assemblage of formally dressed local folk filing out of a little church cantilevered into the verdant hillside, and singing the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

I spot Mister Davis in the throng as he descends the church steps, head bowed. He looks up, notices me, and smiles. The congregation promenades by, then on down the flower-fringed path. I fall in behind and find I’ve unconsciously joined in the singing.

After a dinner of fish and chips, salad and beer in a local bistro down by the pier (28 TT – $4.97), I’m sitting at my kitchen table with Mister Alleyne as he describes what Charlottesville was like in the late 1920s, when he was a teenager; how over the decades it has evolved from a plantation economy. Turns out Mister Alleyne isn’t in his mid-sixties as I’d guessed, he’s in his mid-eighties. His memory is clear, his imagery detail-rich and enchanting.

He tells me how his mother’s father came to Charlottesville in the mid-nineteenth century and bought the land upon which his guest house now sits for the equivalent of $50. How he himself had rebuilt after the family’s original little wooden shack was severely damaged in a hurricane in the 1950s. He sighs but his smile lingers, eyes bright. “Dee houses and dee boats and dee people come and go but dee island, you know, is dee thing dot stay.”

I’m experiencing history, largely unrecorded except in the minds of the few like Mister Alleyne. These things he’s telling me are -- as my Rastafarian friend George back in Delaford would say -- the secrets of the island.

One More Island People Interlude

Hauling seine with Jungle and the boys…

Two mornings later I’m down the coast in the tiny fishing village of Parlatuvier -- maybe eight miles as the booby flies from Charlottesville -- raising some mean blisters as I help Jungle and his crew haul their seine net to the beach. It’s tough work – the drag of the huge semi-circular net is such that the six of us gain only inches with each heave – but I like the hell out of Jungle and anyway I owe him one, for the time he’d put in finding me a place to stay. So I’ve canceled my early workout swim and pump some net instead.

Jungle and I met yesterday morning and come sundown sat sipping Caribs on the steps of the beachfront elementary school. We’d fallen into a conversation about haul seining, a method of fishing used by fisherfolk all over the world, including my baymen friends back in the States on eastern Long Island. “It’s interesting,” I opined, “that the methods and equipment have evolved identically in far-flung places, over many centuries.”

Jungle smiled and nodded. “It’s said dot Jesus Christ hauled a seine net.”

“He’d take one look at your gear and know exactly how to handle it.”

Jungle

Now, early next morning and after a good two hours hard labor, we haul the net ashore and extract the catch, which is a meager one basket of tiny herring and baitfish, and which must be divided up amongst the crew. The harvest, by anyone’s financial calculation, was hardly worth the effort.

But Jungle grins philosophically, slaps me on the back and thanks me for my help. “We do better tomorrow,” he says

But I say goodbye to Jungle and move on that afternoon, to another little fishing village, Castara, a few miles further down the coast. I had trouble finding a cheap room at Parlatuvier and ended up paying an appalling 80 TT ($12.84) at Chance’s Guest House. After two hours of friendly haggling, with me crying poverty and going off with Jungle then coming back and sighing that I guess I’ll have to leave town, Mister Chance came down from 120 TT. I get lucky in Castara. After roaming the beach facilities, talking up the local fishermen, I’m steered to a young fellow named Roger Wallace, nicknamed “Teacher”. (When pressed, he blushingly divulged that the local girls hung that one on him.) Roger sets me up in a spacious, airy room with living area and full kitchen for 40 TT ($6.42). Like most of the better guest houses (clean, roomy, well situated and CHEAP) I’ve come across in my travels, no reservations are expected, or indeed possible, at Roger’s, since there is no phone.

It’s early dusk now and I’m at Hazel’s little eatery on the beach having a stupendous “vegetarian delight” dinner (comprised of too much stuff to list) and a beer for 30 TT ($4.83). It’s been a good day, I’m thinking. I explored the rain forest behind Castara (Roger’d offered to come as guide, no charge, but I’d gone on my own), then bathed in a deep water pool under a waterfall up the little stream that empties into the bay. I rambled my way through the late afternoon photographing the doings of the waterfront in the sweet light of that time, then walked down the strand to Hazel’s for this fine and tasty meal.

It occurs to me that apart from glimpsed pale faces in fast moving rental cars in a fervid rush to see the island in a day then get back to their air conditioned, satellite TV-wired hotel rooms down on the south coast, I have hardly been subjected to another of my kind (a tourist) since arriving on the island five days ago.

Tomorrow will be different, I know. I’m nearing the end of my tour and have no choice but to head for that south coast. I have decidedly mixed feelings about abandoning the charm, grace and serenity of the island’s hinterland.

A Spiritual Baptist service

It’s my last day on-island and I’m up before the sun — at “first chicken,” as the local saying goes. I’ve never slept in a church before, which, aside from financial considerations, was why I approached Mother Cleorita Robinson of the Spiritual Baptist Church in Black Rock for my last night’s accommodations. The church is nestled in a banana grove on a bluff overlooking Grafton Bay, a stunning stretch of strand, notwithstanding the two mammoth tourist hotels that dominate the slope above it. Like those $150-$250 rooms, my little chapel-niche has a water view and is within steps of the beach. I also have access to a full kitchen — which those rooms do not — in the adjoining rectory. The 60 TT ($9.63) I donated to the church included a sumptuous dinner last night with Mother Cleorita and her quick-witted, vivacious daughter Audrey.

As I sit on my mattress before the altar’s gold tapestries, brass chalices, bells and votive accouterments, a symphony of crowing cocks, warbling songbirds, maaa-aahh-ing goats and laughing children on their way to school lends perspective to my final fiscal tally.

Did I do the Island on $25 a day?

I notice that I still have half-full containers of mustard, mayo, peanut butter, guava jam and coffee. I subtract 50% of their cost from the total, since, having decided to bring them home with me, they fit my (admittedly loose) definition of souvenirs — and therefore are not counted in my outlay total. This saves me 21 TT ($3.37).

The grand total is $160.09 U.S., or $22.87 a day.

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As I’m packing up my knapsack, Mother Cleorita calls out my name as she enters the church with steaming coffee and warm sweet rolls. She sits by me and we talk.

I’ve broached the subject of my manner of travel with many of the locals I came to know over my time on-island and I do so again with Mother Cleorita. “I only wish more folks would visit us dee way you have,” Mother says in her mellifluous down island accent. “You stayin’ ovah at Grafton (the nearby tourist hotel), you think we be sittin’ heah talkin’ like this, gettin’ to know each othah?”

There is a bit of silence between us, but which is not uneasy. Waves break on the shore down the hill, people walk by the church; there is laughter.

“Did you know a lady named Miss Faith from over at Delaford?” I ask on impulse.

Mother smiles. “Yes, I knew her a little,” she says. “I hear she die.”

I nod, thinking of Miss Faith, her tiny coffin with maroon lace.

“She was a kind person,” Mother says quietly. “I remembah her fo’ dat.”

Postscripts on the next page

Note: In the ten years since 1997, Tobago has changed, yet it hasn’t (I spent a month there this past winter). It’s still possible to do what I did, but prices have at least doubled.

Postscripts

The above is the piece I submitted to Men’s Journal, about 4,000 words, as they asked.

For what it is, I liked my little story – the stuff about Miss Faith is nice, I think.

To the right is the piece they ran – about 1,200 words.

You be the judge as to which is more worthwhile.

The month after my butchered piece ran, MJ published a reader’s letter saying that I’d inspired him to quit his desk job and take off traveling. I happened to mention this to the features editor I’d been dealing with during a phone call about something else.

“What an asshole,” was his response.

The September, 1998 cover, which I shot in Costa Rica using a remote triggering device. That's my old pup Shiner with me.

Looking back, I take this to mean that his contempt was not only for writers, but for readers as well.

In spite of the butchering of my Caribbean piece, I would go on to do other work for Men’s Journal. My investigation into the murder of American expat Max Dalton – the long version of which is in my new book – went from “a potential award winner” to being killed because, the features editor said, “Men’s Journal does not solve murders.” (During my four month investigation he had told me by phone that I was doing “exactly the right thing” in solving the murder myself, rather than just reporting on it.)

This guy’s many weeks of delay in paying me expense money owed for the Dalton assignment (gas, food, ammunition for my 9mm, money paid to the alpha whore who semi-raped me in the course of the investigation, etc) resulted in my threatening to beat the shit out of him. (That story is elsewhere in this issue.)

That pretty much ended my relationship to Men’s Journal.

One more thing, though. In the fall of ’97 – while living in my camper in Costa Rica -- I had suggested to the features editor that I continue on south and do an article about the trip, the culmination of which would be my standing on “the last rock at the bottom of the world.” He said he’d think about it, then ultimately nixed the piece.

A year later, in November of ’98 an article appeared in the magazine in which the writer traveled all the way south on the continent and “stood on the last rock at the bottom of the world.” The same features editor oversaw it.

He was soon promoted to editor in chief.

Now I have my own magazine: If I'm going to get screwed, I'll do it myself.

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Why Bob Woodward Is Going To Rot In Writer Hell The Natural World