Rising at roughly the same time as yesterday, I roused Matt and went down to breakfast to find out precisely what had happened the night before. It had been eventful to say the least, and he had taken a girl (I would never find out whether she was from the party or elsewhere) down to the beach and had sex with her while a taxi waited nearby with the meter still running. A not unsurprising development but mutterings later in the day about how he might now be a felon gave me the impression that in this instance, the less I knew the better for all concerned. This would be the second and greatest Mattastrophe.
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My dreams were fractured that night, strange visions of scorpions adorned with space-ships and the character Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I awoke before seven and managed to wash and shave before waking a lethargic Matt up for a seven thirty breakfast and an eight o'clock departure. Being Sunday, the supermarket was still closed which meant our daily ration of water would have to be postponed. The egg-shaped, motorised tricycle of a coco-taxi whipped us towards the beach, the fractured asphalt mere inches away from exposed skin. The sun had barely risen meaning the beach was desolate, the sand cold and the water even colder as we sat and waited for Leo to arrive and open the shuttered dive hut.
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To say Matt had a hangover the next morning would be insulting to how unwell he both felt and looked. With the best intentions, he had set his alarm for 0730 but proceeded to turn it off and sleep through until 0830, at which point he pushed himself to get up despite being next to non-functional and barely managing to dress himself. We ventured next door, our final casa for our stay in Trinidad, for breakfast which was as healthy as always but seemed more like a chore for Matt rather than an enjoyable meal.
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The good thing about having a fully working and modern air-conditioning unit in the bedroom of our casa was the micro-climate it created. The bedroom could be a cool and calming zone, while even venturing into the en-suite bathroom meant you were faced with a not insignificant wall of heat. The bad thing was when the unit was right above your bed. This meant when I slept with the air-con on I had to press myself against the wall so that the cool air missed me as it was being blown out; regardless, I spent a lot of the night fumbling in the dark trying to turn the unit onto a lower setting which usually resulted in me turning it onto timer mode or switching it onto high-power.
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The bus had stopped at various places along the way, primarily to give the driver a break but it also let the passengers mill about in a half-dazed state. My main problem was that I was unsure as to whether the bus had a toilet or not or whether to brave getting off the bus and looking for a toilet in the rest stop. Finally plucking up enough courage, I wandered the length of the bus and found what could well have been a toilet, although in the half-light it could have been a luggage rack. Someone emerging from the formless box confirmed it was a toilet, but in my dopey state, I managed to stumble backwards and hit my head on the overhead storage shelf, much to the amusement of the young man who was trying to get past me.
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