Preliminary Kings and Queens Competition

The Carnival in Trinidad takes place over two to three weeks with the final days being a holiday for the weekend and Monday and Tuesday. anyone can take part in the festival. You can pick your favourite band and then get dressed up and go along with all the parties and support them at the competitions. Every band has a King and Queen, the band group itself, and then hundreds to thousands of supporters dressed in their colours and costumes.

The only event we managed to get to was the Kings and Queens Preliminary competition. This was great fun to watch the Kings or Queens in the huge costumes parade across the stage. Some of these costumes are up to 20 feet across and 40 feet high. They are made of many materials, bamboo, wire, cloth, plastic, tinsel, glitter, lights, etc. The larger costumes are allowed to be based on small tripods with three little wheels to help carry the costume across the stage. There were also those on very high stilts. They all had to walk across the stage, turn around, do a dance in front of the judges, and then walk off. Here are a few pictures

Here are a couple of YouTube videos of the finals Kings https://youtu.be/Q_qcHBdyRQ4?si=iXTz_KRu8VqVgVxd Queens https://youtu.be/o3eLYCFE8hQ and the wind effects https://youtu.be/EjCUNVE-dU0?si=F2BEfMfVf6r3qAvr.

We were very sad not to see some more of the carnival especially the music as it is a highlight of the year there https://visittrinidad.tt/things-to-do/carnival, but we decided that we needed to move on as there was some rough weather coming so if we wanted to go to Tobago we should get going. So the next day we checked out and got some more diesel and off we went.

I thought we should get in early to the check out but there had been a crash on the motorway so I needed to wait for the person with the key to turn up. While I was doing so I watched the flowers around the marina – and there right next to the boats was a bush with hummingbirds in it. Watching them was a way to fill in the time.

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