Point Lisas isn't the only must-see that Trinis will point you to.
Southern Trinidad’s central tourist attraction is a few miles south of San Fernando, in the suburb of La Brea, which is called that for the exact same reason as the eponymous neighborhood of Los Angeles. It’s the "famous" Pitch Lake, the planet’s largest source of high-quality asphalt, what Trinidadians call the "eighth wonder of the world."
If so, I wonder about the other seven, because Pitch Lake really resembles nothing so much as a badly-paved parking lot. What’s the seventh wonder? Newark?
Hype aside, Pitch Lake is really neat, and worth visiting. The surface is soft and warm, with tar right underneath a fragile skin and methane bubbling up. Local kids bathe in the surphurous puddles—in fact, "swim" is a better word than "bathe," because some of the puddles are pretty damn deep—and workers dig up about US$50 million worth of asphalt every year.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that China buys half the output.
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