The Trinidadians are the Caribbean's most serious party-goers and so carnival is important business. For months before the main event designers plot and plan the costumes and parades, and seamsters and seamstresses stitch feverishly. Even the national airline joins in at carnival. BWIA pilots have been known to give a wingtip salute as they fly over the crowds in Port of Spain.
The Trinidadians will also assure you that Rio and New Orleans are just fashion shows. The important thing about Mas, as it is called (from Masquerade), is that anyone can play. You don't have to join a club and rehearse like at other carnivals; you can literally turn up, buy a costume and join a band (a dancing band rather than a musical one). The costumes are on display in the various 'Mas Camps' around Port of Spain and they cost around US$100.
The official start of carnival is just after New Year, and from then until the Masquerade itself there are competitions - for the calypso singers, who sing spicy, satirical songs of life, love and everything Trinidadian, for the steel bands and for the Carnival King and Queen (the centrepiece mannequins of the bands, which can be 30 or more feet high). The preliminary rounds and regional competitions are held, culminating in finals held over the weekend before Mardi Gras.
Then the really serious action, the street parades, gets into gear. At two o'clock on Monday morning revellers spill out onto the streets for J'ouvert (pronounced Jouvay). They smear themselves in body-paint, mud, axle oil, even chocolate sauce, anything dirty, and they shuffle and dance, in a procession that snakes through the town, through dawn and beyond.
Driven by steel drums and soca music (provided by articulated lorries stacked 25 feet high with speakers, musicians sitting aloft), the crowds flows through the streets like a massive sea, heaving and falling in waves.
There's a special step in Caribbean carnivals, the chip: a flex-kneed, flat-footed shuffle: left, right, left, right... It's the most economic step you can adopt, and that's important if you'll be dancing for most of the following 48 hours.
After a hose-down and a quick snooze, players put on their costumes and head out for the main roadmarch. Trinidadian 'bands' can be a mile long, as mnay as five thousand strong, with sections of several hundred all dressed to a theme: pirates in silk pantaloons waving scimitars, djab-djabs (from the French diable) in red and black satin and sequins - the themes are endless but they are incredibly brightly coloured. At the rear of the band are the King and Queen of the band, models thirty feet high that shake and shimmer on the beat.
Soca (from soul calypso) is compulsive, high energy dance music. The conga, such a lifeless thing in the metropolitan countries, comes alive in Trinidad, a massive writhing snake. And the dancing is like a convention of pneumatic groins. Pairs of dancers glue themselves together from midriff to mid-thigh, thrusting and pulsating. I was a mite surprised the first time a strange woman pushed her bum into my crotch and moved it from side to side.
What can a boy do but hang on and shuffle in time...?
It is possible to dance 24 hours in 24 of course. As soon as the Monday parade finishes, 'Night Mas' continues in the suburb of St James. Here the music is steel drums and so you chip through the streets, carried on a wave of the sweetest metallic plinks, clangs and bongs.
And then, at nine o'clock the next morning on Mardi Gras, the players go out and do it all again, a nine hour marathon in the tropical sun. Bands are judged as they pass over four judging stands in different parts of Port of Spain. There's not much choreographing at Trinidad carnival, but it is an explosion of energy, colour and vitality.
That night, exhausted, dragging the remnants of their costumes, the revellers stagger into a series of parties called Last Lap, where they continue to dance. At the stroke of midnight on the dot carnival stops, and everyone goes home. They take a few days off, perhaps in Maracas Bay, or in Tobago, to chill out and relax after so much serious business. Then they begin to think of doing at all again next year.
