Driving through Tobago...

You couldn't drive far in Tobago without picking up extra passengers. First there was the man in the leopard-skin hat and multicolor waistcoat who was waiting at the roadside, seated on a gleaming white toilet. The bowl, freestanding and clearly not being used for its proper purpose but as a perch, rocked as he waved at us.

"Bloody Bay? Bloody Bay?" he called out.

Bloody Bay happened to be just where I was going. "Yes, yes, mornin', mornin'," he announced as he lifted first the toilet bowl and then himself into the back seat. "Thank you, thank you."

He introduced himself as Mr. Parrotman Curtis, so-called, he said, because he was the island's leading expert in the art of parrot-catching - not for his habit of repeating everything. "I does climb tree and all kinda ting," he explained as we bumped off into the narrow hinterland, away from the coast.

The Caribbean jungle shone around us in all shades of green, from yellowest to bluest, while birds fluttered across the sky in twos and threes - screeching parrots, fluting corn birds, and cackling cocricos, large brown birds with long tails that are the national bird of Tobago.

Next came Ian Baptist, a boy of 11. When we stopped for him, he declared, "This my best friend!" He stooped to pick up a bewildered mongrel bitch and dangled her into the back of the jeep, climbing in after. "I does love she," he announced with a big smile and fell silent for the rest of the journey.

Finally that morning there was Bryner, known, I would learn, for his penchant for shaving his head, though today short black curls covered his scalp. He wore nothing but a pair of tattered blue shorts, baring to the sun a magnificent bronzed belly, which gleamed with sweat. The jeep sank when he climbed aboard, though that may have been due in part to the giant gasoline can he was traveling with.

"I gets my jeep fix up," he told me. "So I coming back so."

By "so" he seemed to mean by hitchhiking. He had an authoritative voice, a voice that issued from deep in the chest of a man who knew what he was about.

"You going Parlatuvier?" he asked.

Parlatuvier was the next town after Bloody Bay, a place about which I knew nothing, bar that it had a splendid French name. Why not? I thought.

"Well, you come by me for a lunch," he offered. It turned out Bryner had the best restaurant on the north end of Tobago.

We swung back and forth through the Tobago Forest Reserve, across the middle of the island, and dropped down toward the far coast in big wide bends.

All of a sudden Parrotman Curtis let out a shriek, "I stop. I stop."

A house stood huddled at the roadside, behind some bushes cut into topiary, amid a plethora of plastic sun furniture. He lifted the gleaming white addition to his domain out of the jeep. A sign intrigued me: MR CURTIS SHOP.

And below that, "Rubber boots for hire."

"Boots for hire?" I asked.

"I take tourists into the rain forest. They wear my boots." After their trip, the tourists could sit in his garden and drink aloes wine. That was why he had so much sun furniture everywhere. He was even going to build a lavatory for tourists. Hence the new toilet bowl.

It was hard to imagine busloads of visitors pouring into Bloody Bay. It was just a little town in the forest. But Curtis was convinced.

He offered me a glass of aloes wine. I declined; it was morning, and I had passengers. He stood at the roadside beside his new purchase and waved us off. I had a feeling I'd be back.