Our hotel rooms had AC which is super nice given it was close to 30 degrees outside. We had breakfast by the pool and walked to a park. Walking through the streets of Trinidad is such an eye opening experience. The tiled roofs that haven’t been cleaned with tiles missing and street cats wandering over them. The amount of stray dogs and chickens everywhere is crazy, practically one on every sidewalk. The traffic is another difference from Canada, motorbikes make up 90% of vehicles. They also have right of way, so crossing streets is more difficult than Canada.
Once we got to the park, we had to pay a 5 boliviano entrance fee per person. I was thinking that it was a little strange because all I saw was a weird assortment of playground equipment strewn about. However, we paid so I’m going to enjoy it. We walked through the park looking at the same equipment repeated everywhere until we took a turn and saw a big pond with lily pads in it. This was much better. These lily pads were huge 1-2 meters across with sides that folded up. We saw turtles on the bank of the pond slowly moving around. On the other side of the path we saw what we took to be a statue of a cayman (alligator. Kind of). We looked at this for a solid 5 minutes and it didn’t move a muscle. We could see others in the water and assumed that this one was showing what the enclosure held. We moved on, continuing down the path and saw cages, when we got closer we saw birds in the cages. A toucan, a green bird, and a bunch of blue and red parrots. After we finished looking at those there were some small kind of capybara things, monkeys, a fox, and a cat. There were some snakes, a deer, and some capybaras. We got to the end of the zoo and walked past the statue of the cayman and found that it had moved. It was real.
We had some lunch and had a siesta back at the hotel during the hottest hours of the day. We explored Trinidad some more, and saw maybe twenty wild capybaras in a swamp. We finished looking around and had dinner. We tried some cayman and some fish. The meat was very tough and salty but it was eaten. We got back to the hotel around 10 and went to sleep.
