Mud volcanoes – and kittens at Devil’s Woodyard

I’d seen, and marvelled at, the large (relatively speaking) volcanoes of Moruga Bouffe, the miniature perfectly formed bubbling volcanoes, the mud seep and the mud glacier at Beach Camp.

This completes my tally of mud volcanoes of Trinidad (saving the one that appears and disappears at intervals of half a century, more or less, off the South Coast).

Our first stop on the tour was the Iere Memorial Presbyterian Church of the Canadian Mission with a rather puzzling memorial tablet that I leave Newsday readers to decipher for themselves while we remember the early missionaries and teachers who may be said to have kick-started the education of many doctors and lawyers in the East Indian community century in the late 19th and the 20th centuries.

Next stop was the Iere Village Masjid (Mosque) dating back to 1868; the original structure was replaced by one seen in the photograph with heritage tourists – and is today undergoing more restoration and renovations.

Once there was a railway serving Princes’ Town (please note, not Princess – as we shall see). The walk down from the road to the tunnel was a bit too much for this columnist who stood on the roadway to photograph the more adventurous inspecting the railway tunnel that went under the roadway.

Then came (where I was concerned) tragedy when we stopped at the Devil’s Woodyard as three tiny kittens, two white and tabby, one tabby all over, emerged from a drain, mewing and playing around our feet.

They couldn’t have been more than three to four weeks old for their eyes were still blue.

I couldn’t help myself, I picked one up; he at first protested but calmed down when I petted him behind the ears and under the chin. I put him down to play with his siblings, but he insisted on running beside us up to the mud volcanoes where he tried to drink from the mud seep until a young man in our party poured some water in to the cap of his water bottle and offered it to the kitten.

I leave the photographs of the mud volcanoes to speak for themselves – and the kitten.

I couldn’t really enjoy the rest of the tour, to beautiful, brand new (well, almost) Holy Cross Church, the site of the Amerindian Mission to Sangre Grande.

Our last stop on the tour was to see the ancient poui trees planted by the two princes, Prince Albert and Prince George in 1880 outside St Stephen’s Anglican Church.

The church appeared to be shut up, the stained glass seemed to have suffered the attacks of vandals, but the trees and plaques remain – if, indeed, these are the original trees; in which case they must be two of the oldest pouis in Trinidad.

To commemorate the visit of the two young royals (and the miraculously surviving puois trees they planted) the name of the town was changed from (if memory serves) Mission to Princes’ Town – the town of the two Princes – hence the apostrophe after the “s” which is, of course, the correct spelling of the name of that crowded, busy town since no princess, to our knowledge, ever visited the town or planted a tree there.

All through the rest of that tour, lunch, and back to Port-of-Spain I worried about those three kittens.

Would they survive out there alone? If they did, might they turn feral, become a menace, contract and carry disease, threaten native wildlife? Or would they die a lingering death from thirst and hunger?

Why won’t people who have female cats put a few dollars aside to have them spayed, or, in the case of a male, neutered? And why abandon them so callously when the TTSPCA and Animal Welfare and Animal Alive will either find someone to adopt them (provided they agree to have their pets spayed or neutered) or give them a painless, stress-free exit from this vale of tears.

Travelling in a maxi with no container I just wasn’t able to rescue them, but I called Animal Alive as soon as I got home and hope those three adorable kittens haven’t been left to fend for themselves, as best as they could, in the Devil’s Woodyard.