creole@wow.net

From last wilderness to Beach Camp north

As if by a kind of economic poetic justice, the beaches and other watering spots of a hydrocarbon-rich state bear signs of despoliation by downstream products of natural gas.

Tonnes of plasticky, packaging materials, mostly indissoluble, remained in the post-Easter days as the signs that thousands of beachgoers and river limers had had a time.

Clean-up crews and bulldozers were summoned to clear the detritus from the “four-day littering spree,” as the Guardian called it, at Tyrico Bay and elsewhere.

At Caura, a tide wrack of unsinkable cups and bottles, the plastic and polystyrene refuse from weekend river limes, had dammed the stream.

As at Carnival, people were partying too hard to clean up after themselves.

Days before, the Tourism Development Company had published appeals for public “co-operation and support” in following “guidelines” for camping at Maracas and Las Cuevas.

The dos and don’ts included paying caution money, wearing wristbands, and refraining from digging pits, washing or bathing in the river and making noise.

The TDC clients were held responsible for supervising their children and removing their own garbage.

By a wry turn of fate, one day later, the Energy Minister was signing off on plans or hopes to build an ethylene plant using natural gas. Here, indeed, would be a likely source of more of the non-biodegradable materials likely to end up as refuse causing further degradation of the beaches and the rivers.

So the crude message is: Trinidad and Tobago can’t have both a booming energy economy and a viable tourist industry.

It’s something Tobago has long known. THA Tourism Secretary Neil Wilson once tracked the rise and fall of national interest in, and active support for, foreign exchange-earning tourism with the fall and rise in the fortunes of the energy economy.

When, like today, surging in high tide, oil-and-gas dollars float all boats.

Most literally, the foreign-used fast ferries, expensively leased, become affordably available to move Trini visitors to make up for any shortfall in Tobago of foreign tourists.

For now, nobody feels any pain. Tobago is content to be the upmarket playground for the Trinidad all-inclusive set.

The picture is perfect: the partygoing President, fresh from his royal box at the North Stand and the front lines of the high-end soca fetes, assumes his place of honour on the deck of the fast ferry.

And the rules of T&T high style, at a time of oil and gas boom, are well and truly set. From here on, everyone knows what to do, where to go, and where to be seen.

It’s the first day of parliamentary business after Easter. Tobago, however, has yet even to begin the wind-down.

The Local Government Minister, performing as a role model for contemporary style, chooses the crab and goat races at Mount Pleasant and Buccoo over the EBC Validation Bill standing in his name in the Senate Chamber at the Red House.

In his absence, other senators muster for just seven minutes before the Leader of Government Business calls it off.

The point is taken that business-suited legislators should all instead have dressed down like Senator Dumas, and be seen to share the culture and laid-back lifestyle at what he called “the extremities.”

The point is that in the T&T state today, all this is affordable and forgivable. Parliamentary business may, without cost or loss, await the end of the crab races.

The long Easter holiday weekend should really be longer. Tobago has already got this right.

Still, for the energy-driven state of T&T, the preparation and care of public playgrounds and resorts enjoy hardly higher preoccupation than afterthoughts.

The Beach Camp bungalows, made posh and ready for Petrotrin executives, have now been pressed into service for Cabinet ministers.

Anxious swimmers and others who prize, and feel proprietorial, about Macqueripe and other parts of Chaguaramas feel a sense of dread occasioned by signs the Government’s attention may be turning to the north-western peninsula.

The Housing Minister has planned to transform green Tucker Valley (of all places!) into a 400-unit government housing settlement.

Nor will Macqueripe and the rest of the peninsula remain untouched. In the name of the Ministry of Planning and Development, notices last year went out, announcing plans for an 80-room hotel at Macqueripe; a 100-room hotel at the nearby tracking station; and an 18-hole golf course in Tucker Valley.

Chaguaramas, in some ways the last frontier, has enjoyed the status of a near-wilderness in reserve, reachably close to the capital. Having been liberated from the US Navy, Chaguaramas has largely been left alone, escaping the incorrigibly spoiling hands of the T&T Government.

Now, however, Macqueripe regulars read ominous signs that the minimal care once shown by the Chaguaramas Development Authority has turned into an attitude of cynical neglect. Uncollected parking fees; unmanned rest-rooms and changing rooms; unrepaired potholes: these, plus the press notices and the rumours stirred by them, impart an apprehensive sense of dreader things waiting to happen.

Indeed, the CDA has bigger things in mind. It has invited joint-venture developers and investors to bring bricks and mortar and infrastructure to reorder the landscape, and hotel guests; the Housing Ministry plans for thousands of residents to transform the land use.

Having fallen under covetous eyes, Chaguaramas may never again be the same.

In the absence of any popular movement once again to liberate the peninsula, the future of Chaguaramas could well be that of a Beach Camp North—an even higher-grade, Shangri-La place of retreat for Cabinet ministers.