Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown

There's Trinidad

and Tobago.

One country,

two very different islands,

two very different places.

One island is what you expected when you arrived

wearing flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt,

all greased up with cocoa butter.

The other ain't about that at all.

Many visitors come to Trinidad for one thing

and one thing only, Carnival,

which locals say is the biggest party on Earth,

a pre-Lenten festival of costumes,

food, copious drinking, and the kind of dancing

you'd better be good at before trying in public.

It's almost two months before the party officially starts,

but here in Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain,

the Carnival season has already begun.

I thought it was a pity that you weren't here

during the peak of the Carnival season.

I'll tell you something really terrible about myself.

Like, I've never been to Mardi Gras, Carnival in Rio,

any kind of Carnival. Okay.

Like, large numbers of strangers...

That is very interesting.

Swarming through the streets dancing in uniforms?

- Doesn't do it for you? - No. Some of my deepest fears

are having to dance or sing in public.

Either of these would be terrifying,

so this seems like a situation

where that might come up, you know?

Queen's Park Savannah will be the epicenter of Carnival,

but tonight it's still Trinidad's street food center.

My dinner companion for some fried snapper

is La Shaun Prescott,

who's here to tell me about two essential skills

necessary for the proper enjoyment of local nightlife.

Turns out I am very good at one and suck epically at the other.

What is liming?

Liming is, like, our version of hanging out, you know?

- Right. - You're with friends.

You're chilling. That's liming.

Is there alcohol involved? Chances are if you're liming...

Of course, probably.

Well, I mean, you can lime without beer.

What about the rum? I haven't had any rum here.

How does one drink rum here,

and which rum should I be drinking?

Does one drink it on the rocks or mixed?

- So one drinks it with Coke. - With Coke?

Yeah, rum and Coke.

But the rum's supposed to be really, really good here.

Yeah.

Okay, so we've established what liming is.

What is wining?

The technical term is the circumduction of the hips,

and it's a style of dance.

And if you're not used to the culture,

you don't understand what it means,

you can interpret it the wrong way.

When you see it for the first time,

you can think it's seductive, you can think it's sexual.

But people can wine on each other

and not really mean anything. Right.

I could wine on you, and it doesn't mean

that I want to take you home, you know?

It's something that's really about freedom

of expression of self,

and it's something that crosses ages, races,

ethnicities, especially during Carnival time.

You see people from high status and people who are,

you know, lower class, they both wine together.

You know, the barriers are no longer there.

It's all just a mix of all different ethnicities and stuff.

The faces you see in the streets are African,

Indian, Chinese,

Middle Eastern in features

and every shade of mix in between.

This patchwork of ethnic identities and colors

is a direct legacy of Trinidad's colonial past.

Located at the southern end of the Caribbean Sea,

seven miles offshore from Venezuela,

Trinidad and Tobago have long been

important ports of call.

Like a lot of islands in the area,

everybody's been through here at one point or another.

The usual European hunters of fortune.

The Spanish came looking for gold.

Then the Dutch, French, and British took their turns

at the real money of the time, sugar,

an economy built on plantation labor and slavery.

Finally, the island hit the big money...

oil.

During World War II,

a pair of seemingly unrelated events

had a big impact on the island's musical culture.

The U.S. Navy built an oil depot

to supply overseas strategic needs.

And the ruling British banned drums

made from traditional-style animal skins

after a series of riots

they insisted were inspired by African drumming.

One improvises in such circumstances,

and all those oil drums were repurposed.

This is Phase II, one of only 11 large steel bands

taking part in the worldwide competition, Panorama,

that happens in a few weeks.

Winner gets 150 grand.

They've taken home the prize seven times,

in no small part due to this man,

Lennox "Boogsie" Sharpe.

The rehearsal space is called a pan yard,

and if you're lucky, somebody nearby is making this,

corn soup,

split pea broth,

dumplings, and, of course, corn.

Kim Johnson is a local journalist and historian

who knows about this stuff.

It's far more complex than you think.

Wow. I got to tell you, that was incredible.

I heard a lot of, you know, little steel drum bands

around the Caribbean, but nothing like that.

All percussion, right? 100%? Yes.

How did your interest in this develop?

I grew up here. Later I became a writer.

I discovered there just hundreds of stories.

Because in the early days,

up until the '60s the steel bands

were partly like... Like street gangs.

They would fight one another,

the "West Side Story" kind of thing.

The steel bands doubled as that.

So I just got fascinated

by tracking down all of these pioneers

and getting their stories of how they got involved.

I'll been 64 years this year.

I play music since I was a kid.

And his story is that he grew up with them

in one of his back yards.

When he was about three years old,

he was going out playing with them.

Boogsie composes his pieces

by layering different types of drums

on top of each other.

Engine Room, made of unpitched percussion,

lays down the groove.

Next, a section of six bass pans drops a bass line.

The guitar and cello pans add harmonies

that sound like strumming.

And the frontline pans play the melody.

The result? A symphonic wall of sound.

I'd like someday to marriage this

with a big orchestra, symphony orchestra.

Yeah, that's... that's my dream.

It's because of the music Africans survived slavery,

not just physically, survived psychically.

It's a question of just improvising instruments.

Thanks so much.

Holy crap, okay.

This is a challenge.

People keep coming up to me in the street.

The first thing they say is,

"Have you had doubles yet? Did you get a doubles yet?"

So I'm eating doubles, all right?

Doubles are a Caribbean take

on the Indian chana bhatura,

two floppy, tender pieces of soft,

Indian-style bread