It’s an oft-repeated piece of tourist blurb (and therefore one ripe for verification), that Tobago has the oldest forest reserve in the world. It dates, we are told, from 1764, which at 100 years before John Muir, the father of conservation, was active, is very impressive – if it’s true of course.
Looking at Tobago – steep, rough and staggeringly lush – it’s hard to imagine it’s forest was ever under threat but 250 years ago the island was developed right into its heights. Almost the entire island was planted with sugar, cocoa and other crops.
My guide, in pursuit of the truth of this claim was David Rooks, a white Trinidadian who, after a working life in the oil business, has been guiding walks into the Tobago forest for about 20 years.
He arrived like a whirlwind, in a battered jeep, talking 19 to the dozen, apologising for lateness and lamenting his absent-mindedness. Ritalin would improve things, he reckoned.
Any possible absence of short-term memory didn’t stop him from dredging up an extraordinary number of facts about the island. As we sashayed around hillside bends on the island’s southern coast, he ran through the geology of Tobago, which in spite of its proximity (just 40 or 50 miles) is unconnected to that of south America, and the island’s flora, which is. And he propounded a few of his own theories on human subspecies, homo politicus and its variant homo bureaucraticus, and how they frustrate the hell out of him.
Our route was to be the Gilpin Trace, a long-distance footpath that links the remote north-eastern coast to the rest of the island. After hiring some wellies, we set off, following a cleft into the hills. The forest closed around us in a subterranean green.
Inside, the ringing of cicadas fills the air to bursting. A tangled floor of ferns explodes into palm trees and bamboo. Between them the tree trunks soar and splay into canopy. They are hung with a network of lianas and used by other plants as a climbing frame. A bird flashes past and bounds on to a branch nearby. Rooks stops: “Oh, look at the lovely mot-mot.”
Mot-mots have a cheeky beak, a wonderful turquoise crown and narrow tailfeathers ending in “raquets”. They nest, ingeniously, in embankments, in holes a metre long to make them impenetrable to snakes and other raiders.
With 210 species of birds in its 116 sq miles, Tobago has the highest concentration of species in the world. Among them are manakins, which true to their name, spend a huge proportion of their time displaying. This involves a wonderful ritual of strutting, dancing, even somersaulting, accompanied by a volley of pops, fizzes and clicks.
The trail winds in and out of gullies, past massive bamboos that creak even when there is no wind. Before there were roads, the track was the main route across this part of the island. Then it was important enough to be repaired daily, nowadays the pilings of old footbridges are only just visible in the undergrowth.
Rainforests hold limitless secrets. We passed extraordinary anthill avalanches and a tree, known as horseflesh, whose wood is so dense that it sinks in water; and we heard about the manicou crab, the western hemisphere’s only marsupial. There were stories of poisonous plants, of creepers that strangle trees and how the trees fight back. Words resurfaced that I last heard at school – gymnosperm, angiosperm and epiphyte. They mean something when you see them in action.
Whole cycles of life – plants and insects on one side, the water and nutrients on another – were revealed. The process of tropical life is so quick. You see leaf litter in every stage of decay – green, parchment brown, blotched and curled by fungal breakdown and finally a skeleton of filaments, flesh already reabsorbed into the earth. Everything is used, then recycled and used again. Seventy-five per cent of the rain that falls originates in the forest itself.
And this, as it turns out, was the reason the forest won protection in 1776 (in the Tobago House of Assembly, on King George III’s instructions). It is true after all. A scientist connected transpiration and rainfall and lobbied the king in 1764 to make the 14,000 acres of untouched forest a crown reserve. Inevitably the motivation was not altruistic. The legislation was designed to protect the plantations, to make sure that they would never suffer drought.
In the 1800s Tobago lapsed into debt and its plantations into disrepair, so the forest was simply left, relatively untouched. Amazingly though, the original legislation is still in force, just (with adaptations). Unsurprisingly it does not stand the test of modern legal scrutiny. Pressures on the forest have changed. Now it is under threat from logging and hunting, over which there has been a general unwillingness to prosecute. Conservation has fallen victim to bureaucracy and nature – human nature.
Recently though, the forest has returned to the agenda with interest in the forest from some important institutions. And again, if it is not altruistic, it is at least in enlightened self-interest. The World Bank seems set to fund conservation but only if the national parliament of Trinidad and Tobago passes an act governing National Parks. A first draft has been thrown out, another is close to presentation. “Then they won’t dare not to protect the forest,” says Rooks.
Rooks undoubtedly feels a certain frustration with homo bureaucraticus here but, perhaps, after years of effort by him and by other island conservationists, the island may finally get the conservation legislation it needs.
Rook’s other theories, on the other hand, have a habit of returning to haunt him. Not long ago, one of his guests, smiling, handed over his business card. Sir Kevin Tebbit, one of Britain’s most senior civil servants.
James Henderson was a guest of ITC Classics (tel: +44 (0)1244-355527; www.itcclassics.co.uk) and British Airways (tel: +44 (0)870-850 9850; www.ba.com).
