Trinidad is where calypso began, and where people first began making beautiful music by pounding on steel pans. It is one of the world's major exporters of asphalt--there's a whole lake of the stuff on the island--and it's a significant producer and refiner of petroleum.

There's one thing it isn't.

"It's not Caribbean," says Rory O'Connor, born an Irishman--the lilt persists--but long a Trinidadian. "Tobago is Caribbean. Tobago is coral, sand beaches and lying about in the sun."

Tobago is paradise. Trinidad is business.

That's the simple truth, the one that has kept vacationers stopping only briefly in Trinidad on the way to their Tobago hideaways, but it isn't the whole truth.

Trinidad has magic of its own.

"It's a very well-kept secret," says O'Connor, who handles the money side of his wife's ceramics operation. "There are people who come here from all over the world, very quietly. They don't tell anybody about it. They know they have a good thing here.

"It's wonderful."

So one is wonderful, and the other is paradise.

Nice grouping.

Here's a look at both.

Trinidad

I am for you a musical chap,

In America, you call it a `rap,'

Now mostly, I will push

You give my regards to President Bush 

--Calypso singer Keith Eugene Davis

The songs began in the 1700s among the slaves (abolition arrived here in 1834) who cut and processed cane in the days when Trinidad was largely a British sugar plantation.

The bosses found the improvised rhyming entertaining. In truth, many of the rhymes, in the beginning and to this day, were and are delightfully subversive--the lyrics being the workers' way of ripping the ruling classes without letting them in on the joke.

Mr. Davis' next verse is best left for another time.

Now . . .

Trinidad is gorgeous.

You really have to get out of Port of Spain to see that part of it, something relatively few actual tourists ever do. Typically, visitors who aren't here to work the oil rigs or do contracts fly to the capital, overnight at one of the three or four suitable hotels in town, then jet off the next morning to Tobago.

Which isn't a bad thing. It's just stupid.

(That's OK. Columbus stayed just long enough in 1498 to restock his fresh water supplies and get chased off by volleys of arrows.)

True, Port of Spain itself won't thrill everybody. It's a real city (pop. 46,000, nearly matching Tobago's total), it's overwhelmingly minority (primarily ethnic Africans and East Indians, plus Chinese, Syrians and the odd European along with indecipherable mixtures), and it has its scruffy parts.

Naturally, for those of us who like cities and minorities, the scruffy parts are some of the most interesting.

Take, for example, the neighborhood called St. James.

"We call it `the city that never sleeps,'" said Gerald "Mr. Nick" Nicholas, our driver-guide. "Any hour of the night, any hour of the morning, there is activity."

A lot of that activity involves sensual pleasures, and foremost of these, of course, is--food.

Along several blocks of Western Main Road are carts, storefront restaurants, folding tables and open bars selling coconuts, rotis (flatbreads filled with meat or vegetable curries), corn soup, ribs, souse (a Caribbean meat soup, the meat often pig's feet), hot dogs, burgers, beer, doubles (fried bread with curries), egg rolls, pelau (a sweetened meat-rice dish) and I'm probably forgetting something.

You can stagger into St. James at the ungodly hour of your choice and never go hungry.

"A lot of cooking takes placed on this street," said Mr. Nick. "And everybody puts shado beni on everything."

In Trinidad, this local herb that everyone puts on everything grows everywhere.

Here, too, is limin' at its most sublime. Limin' is a social pursuit whose name is somehow related to the practice of olde-tyme British sailors sucking on limes to combat rickets.

In Trinidad and Tobago, it means just hanging out, ideally while sipping something chilled, with or without citrus.

"If you and a friend sit on the side of the road and have a little drink," said Mr. Nick, "while you're sitting there, you're limin'."

They play a lot of cricket on Trinidad, and some soccer and basketball, and there's even a softball diamond near the U.S. Embassy in Port of Spain, but there's no question that limin' is the national pastime-in'--and you're welcome to join in.

Then there's pan.

You might know this as steel-band music or the music played on oil drums or the music that's played at every cruise-ship landing in the Caribbean--but here, where it all began, it's just pan. And except during Carnival (March 3-4 this year), when dozens of bands mass in Port of Spain for competitions, it's best experienced at pan yards in Port of Spain neighborhoods like St. James. Chances are someone will be playing somewhere during your visit.

We heard the Silver Stars Steel Band in their own pan yard, little more than a concrete slab between buildings in the Newtown neighborhood illuminated by string lights, with tables, dance area and a makeshift bar.

The bands you hear on the docks typically have two or three or four players. The Silver Stars had 25. Chestnuts like "Begin the Beguine' and "Amor, Amor, Amor" sound dreamy played by a quality 25-player pan band.

"That's nothing," said someone next to me. "During competitions, some of the bands have more than 100."

Port of Spain also has some excellent unscruffy restaurants, a huge park (Queen's Park Savannah) in the heart of town that once doubled as a racetrack, a zoo, botanical garden and "The Magnificent Seven," a parkside strip of remarkable mansions that have been re-purposed but lovingly preserved.

It used to have a U.S. naval base and a bandstand where the Andrews Sisters sang "Rum and Coca-Cola" for the boys in the 1940s. But, maybe alas, the base is gone, the bandstand was just wrecked by vandals and the song, purportedly snatched without royalty from a local troubador, remains a thorn in the side of U.S.-T&T relations.

Many elements of Trinidad come in threes, which is cool for an island named, by Columbus, for the Holy Trinity.

The southern third is Trinidad's industrial region, with little of tourist interest except, perhaps, for Pitch Lake, for those of you who find tar fascinating. The island's midsection has two wildlife refuges that lure birders--Nariva Swamp, a key wetland that's a bear to get to unless you're an anaconda; and the more-accessible Pointe-a-Pierre Wild Fowl Trust, near the city of San Fernando.

Port of Spain is in the northern third of the island, and so is more good stuff, much of it especially attractive to anyone who appreciates feathered creatures.

About 30 minutes' drive below Port of Spain is Caroni Bird Sanctuary. Here nest great blue herons, snowy egrets and other favorites, but the star is the scarlet ibis, Trinidad's official bird (it's on the currency). At dusk, waves of these brilliantly colored birds fly in from wherever they've been all day and gather--thousands of them--on selected mangrove trees, turning them into giant poinsettias. It is a sight.

In the mountains about 40 minutes from the capital via winding, daytime-only roads, Asa Wright Nature Center (its hotel has 24 rooms, if you can get one) has been getting people and birds together for 35 years. Now nearly 1,500 acres, this is one of the Caribbean's prime eco-touristic sites, home to hundreds of species from hawks to hummingbirds to oilbirds, which once (but not anymore) were stuck on the ends of poles, set on fire and used as torches by local tribespersons.

Just a few minutes above Port of Spain and abutting the Pax Guest House (18 rooms), more natural glory: Trails extending up Mt. St. Benedict from this small hotel and a neighboring monastery lead into more bird-heavy forest, making this a closer-in rival to Asa Wright for anyone to wants to be awakened at dawn by chirps and screeches.

At both Asa Wright and Pax, bird-feeders help attract the winged critters to within camera range. I asked one guest at Pax, an Englishman, how many species he'd spotted behind the house and up the hill so far. He'd been here three days.

"193," he said, without hesitation.

"That astounds me," I said. "Does it astound you?"

"No," he said. "I'm wondering where the others are."

Thirty minutes later, according to his wife, he was up to 201. The island has more than 400. Now, at dinner, he was openly plotting a predawn raid to catch one particularly elusive species. The poor woman took another sip of wine, then looked back at me.

"He was even worse in Costa Rica."

Then there are folks like Rory and Bunty O'Connor. We met Rory earlier in this tale. Bunty is the artist-side of Ajoupa Pottery, designer of the fabulous plates and tabletops and sculptures whose subjects (primarily birds and tropical plants) and colors scream Trinidad.

They live in a 150-year-old plantation house that, aside from relatively recent additions such as telephones and a PC, looks like something out of "Swiss Family Robinson."

"It can be very damp," said Bunty, of the good life in the natural garden that is a rain forest. "If you don't like mosquitoes, it's not a very nice place.

"If you like a lot of bush--lots of trees and stuff--and birds, then it's an idyllic place. That's what we love."

Their daughter Nancy, her husband and three sons (the oldest is 4) live in a house behind her parents'. The house is on stilts and is, essentially, wide open.

"We find we have a happy balance with bugs," Nancy said. "The cats have been helpful. The chickens have done wonders with the tarantulas."

This is not an island in the Caribbean with a shoreline dotted with superior beaches, but there is one: Maracas Beach, not far from Port of Spain. It's broad, clean, popular and home to a couple of casual restaurants that feature bake and shark, a local delight: fried shark on a hearty fresh-baked roll, accompanied by a tableful of condiments.

Even that beach is forgettable. What lingers in the mind, though, is the diversity of this island--of its people ("I have friends," said Christa Morgan, an eighth-generation Trini, "who I don't even know what they are. They're just beautiful."), its foods, its sounds, its life.

"Yes," said Gerard Ramsawak, manager of Pax Guest House, "Tobago has beautiful beaches. But that's it."

We went anyway.

Tobago

What I want you to know,

Make your husband take you to Tobago,

Because if I give you my view,

Our sister island is beautiful too.

Not counting pirates, including Henry Morgan and other notable brigands who operated out of coves as if they owned the place, this island has changed hands at least 22 times since the 1600s.

Eventually, the British outlasted the French and Dutch and, in 1814, it became theirs by a treaty that stuck. In 1899, the island--now unprofitable because of the drop in sugar prices but still a colony--became a ward of the much-larger Trinidad. Economically, if not politically, it still is.

"There was a time, many years ago," said Doyle Louis, a former cop who was my driver-guide, "when Tobago used to provide Trinidad with agricultural products. But things have changed.

"Tobago couldn't make it on its own. Where would we get our finances from?"

All that aside . . .

Tobago is gorgeous.

Unlike its partner on the other side of the ampersand, it doesn't take long in Tobago to find the natural beauty. You can walk from the airport to the beach at Store Bay. Pigeon Point, which may be home of the most sparkling strand on the island, is a bike ride away.

Only 27 miles long, the length of its Caribbean shoreline is a series of lovely bays and beaches, some with hotels but most left as they might have been when Daniel DeFoe beached Robinson Crusoe here. The south side, the side facing the Atlantic, is windier and less swimmable but, with its rain forests and waterfalls, no less enchanting.

There are traces of history here. History and lore.

Ft. King George, which overlooks the provincial capital of Scarborough and Bacolet Bay (as well as the reborn Blue Haven Hotel), is undergoing restoration but is already worth a stop for its museum and viewpoint.

At Plymouth, the inscription on a slave's "mystery tombstone" has long intrigued locals and visitors: "She was a mother without knowing it, she was a wife without letting her husband know about it, except by her kind indulgences to him." Theories abound.

Not far, near a cliffside in the village of Golden Lane, is another grave.

"It belongs to a witch," said Louis. Her name: Gang Gang Sara. "There's a legend that says there was this witch that flew from Africa to Tobago. She ate salt and tried to fly back to Africa [salt, as you know, impedes witches' ability to fly] and she fell, and they buried her on the spot."

Near Golden Lane is Arnos Vale, a former sugar plantation whose waterwheel is a key relic and whose grounds can be toured, if you don't mind being buzzed by bats the size of chihuahuas.

And there's this one huge cotton-silk tree, off the road to Castara. It's huge because no one dares cut even a branch . . .

"If you are superstitious, you won't go near it," said Louis. "Certain times of the year, this tree will bear pods, and inside the pods is cotton. It is useful, but no one will use it, because it is taboo."

Things like that.

Eco-tourists will revel in tromping through the Tobago Forest Reserve. Oldest protected rain forest in the hemisphere (the Brits did it in 1776, figuring an intact forest would help generate rain for the sugar crop), it was badly damaged by Hurricane Flora in 1963 but recovered. Today, its 14,000 acres are home to parrots and other wild things, and visitors are welcome. (Trained guides gather at the Gilpin Trail trailhead; their services, recommended, along with rental boots, also recommended, will set you back about $17.)

There is snorkeling and diving here. Speyside is the base for much of it, with its excursions to the reefs off Little Tobago and Goat Island. (Heavily promoted snorkeling off Buccoo Reef and the "Nylon Pool"--the latter essentially a sandbar--will disappoint all but children and novices, unless you really like dead coral and guppies.)

Tobago lacks Trinidad's ethnic mix, but folks looking to pick up a little Afro-Caribbean culture will find it in places like the Golden Star in Crown Point, where pan bands and calypso artists regularly perform for locals and any tourists who drift in. Local foods--rotis, crab and dumpling, bake and shark, goat--along with happy badinage with the cooks, can be found in booths at Store Bay and elsewhere on the island.

Those of us who sometimes tire of being pampered will find basic lodgings in relatively unspoiled fishing villages--Roxborough, Charlotteville, others--and enjoy laying back and limin' with the locals over a cold Carib, or watching the dinghies go out and come in . . .

But most visitors to Tobago--many from the United Kingdom, a smattering from Germany and here and there a Yank--seem satisfied to cling to their resorts, with their all-inclusive plans and spas and proximity to other Yanks, Germans and United Kingdominians.

That's OK too. It's their vacation--your vacation--and Trinidad and Tobago, united but very different islands in the sun, welcome you.

By Alan Solomon