Mount St. Benedict

Mount St. Benedict was one of those places I only went to because Lia insisted, and then spent the whole drive back apologizing to her for doubting it. It’s a working Benedictine monastery, the oldest in the Caribbean, built into the side of the Northern Range above Tunapuna, and the road up is steep enough that our little rental complained the whole way. What you don’t expect, coming from the traffic and noise of the East-West corridor, is how fast the air changes, cooler, thinner almost, with the kind of quiet that makes you realize how loud everywhere else has been.

We arrived mid-morning and the monks were mostly out of sight, but a novice pointed us toward the guesthouse terrace, and that’s where the trip earned itself. The Caroni Plain spreads out below in a way that makes the whole flat middle of Trinidad look like a green quilt, rice fields and sugar cane and the Caroni Swamp somewhere out past the haze where we knew the scarlet ibis roost every evening. You can’t see the birds from up there, but knowing they’re down there somewhere adds something.

We poked around the small museum, which is unpretentious almost to a fault, some old photographs, a display on the monks’ beekeeping operation, and a chapel that smells like every old chapel I’ve ever been in, wood polish and candle wax and something harder to name. I lit a candle for my grandmother out of habit more than faith, and Lia bought a jar of the monastery’s own honey from the little shop, which we finished within a week and regretted not buying two of.

There’s a trail behind the monastery that climbs further up toward a smaller retreat house, and we followed it partway before the heat and my own laziness turned us back. What I took from Mount St. Benedict wasn’t anything religious exactly, more a reminder that Trinidad, an island I’d mostly experienced through carnival and traffic and steel pan, also has this other gear, slow and green and monastic, sitting quietly above it all.

When to go: Weekday mornings, when the monastery is calm and the plain below hasn’t hazed over yet; avoid Sunday mass hours unless you’re there to attend.