Tobago

Tobago is the smaller of the two islands of Trinidad and Tobago. A forested ridge runs twenty-nine kilometres down its length, and the lowlands at the south-west tip, around Crown Point, hold the airport, the guesthouses and the powder-white sand of Pigeon Point. Scarborough, the capital, is a low town of some seventeen thousand people, with ferries leaving for Trinidad.

Along the Caribbean coast the road climbs and falls between bays: Castara, its houses stacked on the slope above the fishing boats, then the empty curve of Englishman’s Bay. At the far north-east end, Speyside looks out to reefs and to Little Tobago. The dry season runs from January to May; from June the rains set in.

• Main Ridge Forest Reserve Set aside by ordinance in April 1776, among the oldest protected forests anywhere, with some 210 bird species recorded.
• Buccoo Reef and the Nylon Pool Glass-bottomed boats cross the reef to a sandbar in open water where the sea is barely a metre deep.
• Little Tobago An uninhabited island twenty minutes by boat from Speyside, where frigatebirds and red-billed tropicbirds nest.