Port of Spain

Port of Spain is Carnival's engine room, and the engine never fully cools: steel pans ring from panyards on any given night, mas camps sew feathers in July for February, and the whole apparatus of the planet's most musical festival idles at a low, happy hum all year. Around the world's largest traffic circle — the Savannah — the city keeps her colonial mansions, her coconut carts and her unhurried pride.

The sensible traveller circles the Savannah at dusk with coconut water in hand, reading the Magnificent Seven mansions like a shelf of eccentric novels; eats doubles from a Curepe stand at an hour respectable people call breakfast; and finds a panyard rehearsal — free, open, and the closest thing music has to a foundry. In season, J'ouvert at dawn: paint, mud and joy before the light.

The Guide's honesty: Carnival books flights and beds a year out and prices triple — plan like a campaign or come in the sweet quiet after —; the city asks normal port sense at night: ride, don't wander; and Trinidad is the working island — for the postcard beach, Tobago waits twenty minutes by air, guilt-free.