Mud and body-paint: J'ouvert!

We have a little over an hour to grab a wink and change before joining J'ouvert. An underworld, mad dance through the black night-time streets of Port-of-Spain. It's a topsy-turvy world where street urchins, school kids, mega-yacht sailors, and "Babette" with her new crew mingel in the body-paint and mud-splashed soca rythmns, greased with a can of Carib or a rum punch.
We must be mad! Are we really going through with this?

1am: We change into our, for the time being, white shorts and t-shirt sailor suit. With blue "Donald Duck" cap and sailor collar. Cute. Soon we're bus-loads of red, blue, yellow and black capped "sailors" at the Trevor Wallace Band headquarters.
3am: Breakfast is served. Body-paint, white, yellow, and red follows. We home-decorate each other. Soon no pristine white targets for mud are left! There is an enormous boom-blaster truck with bone-ratteling, eardrum-shattering soca songs repeated ad nauseum. There's a drinks truck, too. We are all equipped with "markers" to buy with, so no money about. Behind the drinks-truck is a special little trailer attached. With a huge oildrum full of muddy "porridge". When one man totally covers himself in mud we start wondering: a mud-hug? Do we really want to be exactly right here?
Any maxi-taxis to Chaguaramas around?!

Into the night off we dance. Soca-trucks booming, Drink-wagon, mud-trailer and a flock of dancing "Donald Ducks". (I'm starting to appreciate the dark.) Off into the black streets of St. James, and along Ariapita St., lined with chained and pad-locked restaurants and into Port-of-Spain. The city is alive! The streets are getting crowded. It's not the participants that are bombarded with mud, its the by-standers! As we meander down into town the sky grows light. The horison is now a black sillouhette against a lighter, greenish-yellow glow. Daybreak! This scary? Not a problem, mon. We dance on. Talking above the soca noise. A halfway break, just enough to stiffen up leg muscles, and then, all the way back to St. James. The bright morning light says: where are my sunglasses? And it grows hot, hotter in the sunshine.

Four hours of rythmic marching to soca! Back at Peake's we occupy a few showers for quite a bit, shedding layers of red, yellow and white body-paint, and lots of mud and road-dirt. A big breakfast at "Bight's" afterwards.
We all have a big day of carneval to digest! From the fabulous King's and Queen's costumes, sosial-commentary calypso, and our silly troupe of body-painted "Donald Duck" sailors!

And now a good day's sleep!