20-February-2010

The road to Tobago’s “Sunday School” is long. Spanning the two-mile stretch between the island’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts, it cuts a narrow path through mountainous rainforest and dusty, cluttered villages.

It isn’t a route many foreigners travel alone—not with rumors circulating through the touristy sections of Crown Point that some locals had taken to shooting motorists from the bush. Certainly, rumors weren’t enough to stop me and my friends, Susanne and Ferdinand, from making the trip. But they still piqued my nervousness as we raced past abandoned cars and shadowy ravines.

Soon, however, our rented Kia Rio plunged out from under the road’s bamboo canopy, and the lonely drone of the island’s nocturnal wildlife gave way to the clamor of steel drums. Ahead, vehicles sat double-parked along Buccoo’s two-lane thoroughfare, and rows of stadium lights sent a glowing pillar into the night sky.

Ferdinand quickly parked along one of the side streets, and I followed him and Susanne past several open-air barbeque stands into a crowd of tourists in well-cut sundresses and summer suits. Knowing I was worried about my digital camera, Ferdinand suggested he head through the crowd to the beer vendor. It was a kind offer and freed me to relax a little and take in the sights of Tobago’s famed street party while Susanne and I waited on the outskirts of the throng.

Everywhere people were gyrating and grinding to the melodic tintinnabulations coming from the pavilion. In one corner, a heavy-set white woman standing well over 6 feet jiggled jauntily with a local man obviously half her age; in another, two well-to-do 30-somethings I took for honeymooners slow danced, the woman resting her head on the man’s chest.

There was no rhyme or reason to it. The island’s indigenous music genre, Calypso, seemed to resonate with traditionalists and debauchers, islanders and visitors alike. And standing there I couldn’t help but appreciate the originality of a culture whose music was so inclusive. It was this different perspective, I thought, that was likely at the heart of the very reason I’d come to Tobago: The spirit of the island’s ethnically African majority offered a different take on every aspect of life, not the least of which was gambling games.

Within minutes, Ferdinand returned with three well-chilled bottles of Carib—Trinidad and Tobago’s Corona-like contribution to the beer world—and we turned our attention to the two rickety gaming tables behind us. Both had colored sections painted across their surfaces and a multicolor assortment of fishbowl stones scattered across them. But, besides this, the two games couldn’t have been more different.

The first featured a horizontally-set wheel in one corner; in the center of the second sat a small tower with several steps leading down it to a miniature boxing ring. Without a doubt they were unlike any games I’d ever seen, but their strangeness didn’t seem to have an effect on the large groups standing around them. Like the music beating at my back, they appealed to everyone.

My first experiment would be with the wheeled table. Stepping up, Ferdinand and I each placed a few Trinidad and Tobago dollars, or “TT,” on the table and asked the operator for instructions. The game, the croupier explained, was “Island Roulette.” Its object was to place money on the color the wheel would select before he spun it. Each color had its own triangular section of the table to place our bets on, and each triangular section corresponded to a colored interval on the wheel.

The colors paid out according to their likelihood of turning up, with most paying 4-to-1. The two exceptions were gray and pink, which paid 6-to-1—presumably because their intervals were little more than thin lines. That was to be expected. After all, as the old saying goes, “The greater the risk, the greater the reward.” But looking at the layout, it was pretty obvious the House advantage came from the fact that gray and pink each occupied far too small an area on the wheel to make their payouts equal to their true odds.

Continue to Part II...