See Mt. St. Benedict in Trinidad on my YouTube Channel!
Hello friends, we are going on another road trip today to the monks in Benedict’s Abbey or monastery let’s start out here on the Eastern Main Road and look at that pink poui tree flowering I wanted to start there look at how the flowers are dropping on the sidewalk / pavement if you haven’t seen it I have a video exclusively on the pink poui make sure to check it on my YouTube channel JB’s Man Cave
so like I said we are on the eastern main road we are heading east and soon we will turn on Saint John’s Road this area is called Saint Augustine
it’s just before Tunapuna you can see there on the map now interestingly enough according to google maps the abbey, the monastery is within Saint Augustine as far as I can read but I see on some sites government sites heritage sites they’re listed as Tunapuna I’m not too sure about that but anyway we are tuning left here this is Saint John’s Road
and this road will take you all the way to the abbey do you see those buildings on the mountain where the arrows pointing that’s the monastery
now one of the first things I recognized when I turned on this road besides that one glitch that is the road is more or less well paved and maintained with actual white lines on it road markings yeah there are some potholes here and there but compared to other places I have been if you’ve seen some of my videos the roads here are not too bad
now this area, Saint Augustine, is more or less a residential area to the left is more of the well to do and the further up we go less well to do
housing in Trinidad is kind of um
funny compared to other areas in the world you get patches of well to-do’s or well-to-do is mixed with not so well-to-do people so you may get a big grand house and right next to the person that doesn’t even maintain their house
now you may not be able to tell well but we are ascending this mountain there’s another poui on the right
it’s a gradual ascent until we reach mong saint Benedict’s Road
and you you will know when we reach there because it’s a sharp tune and it immediately starts to
go into a steep incline
now the the monastery interestingly enough was started I believe in 1912 by some monks that came from another abbey in Brazil so as you can see you know Trinidad and Tobago is a melting pot of different cultures nationalities races and so forth so these monks came from Brazil and they started this abbey
and blessed the land according to their rights
and up to today it’s still maintained I don’t know exactly how many monks still live there but there are some
now the trip to here is a trip that a lot of schools make when I used to go to school in Trinidad I’ve been up here at least twice as a pupil normally would come up here and look around maybe attend the church that’s there because most of the schools I went to were Catholic
or maybe just you know take in the surroundings the peace and so forth
there are guest houses and so on up there hikes that you can also do when I came on school trips we would go on a hike in this road trip we won’t be going on a hike but we will be looking at the abbey and other surroundings
now this is Mount Saint Benedict Road and you can see how steep the incline is we go slow
and on the left you can see as we climb home everything at ground level begins to get very small
unlike most areas that you would visit Mount Saint Benedict is well maintained
more or less clean free from the trash and limers and so forth and sometimes you know when I come up here I almost feel like I’m in a different country
it’s just so nice so peaceful
if you’re Catholic it would be very serene and sacred for you
you can see a bit of the
east on the left don’t worry we will get some good shots later in this video
it’s one of the churches on the right you can’t see too well on the lens
the other beautiful thing about being up here is the mountains you get to see a lot of the valleys the mountain ridge
you know videos it doesn’t really describe how nice this the fresh air the breeze you can see how the trees sway it’s a very strong breeze in here
and I don’t know about you but and I have have not been to Italy yet but from watching pictures I sometimes look at this and feel like if I’m on a mountain side of some Italian
countryside place you’ll see that especially when I bend around this corner the way it is just reminds me of maybe something I would have seen about Italy
if you go straight I will take you to the hike
I’m gonna come back here and walk all along here so that you get an idea and this is a part of saying that almost reminds me like being somewhere in Europe, Italy see how it’s on a mountain sides and you’re driving up the mountain
and when you see this you know you’re close to the abbey
and this is the parking lot
so I’m gonna park here reverse park and then I’m gonna take out my lens my extension rod and give it a view that
you would see if you were here and that’s what JB’s Man Cave is about I’ve been used to see things in a way that you may not have seen before but also keeping it real you know not editing not putting myself in front of the camera but giving you giving you eyes through my lens
if you’re on a big screen you would have seen that bird just swinging in the wind this is one of the first things you see when you reach the abbey don’t worry I’ll be showing the actual so wrong things on the grounds later but usually I like to come right here this is a valley and it’s really breathtaking to look at this so peaceful
the smell of the nature and the fresh air is really good
and the surroundings by the way are sacred in nature so people here are whisper quiet
there’s usually you know a chapel church going on
now you get to see all the buildings up here I’m gonna go 360 so that you get an idea of everything
and of course if you enjoy my videos feel free to become a patron of JB’s Man Cave you can always visit my website
underneath whatever you feel is worthy of these videos
i don’t do this for me and particularly but for my boys on the spectrum
all right let’s…
let’s begin to walk around a bit
and as you know JB’s Man Cave there’s no rush the idea is for you to get a feel I mean if you were here you wouldn’t be running up and down looking at stuff you would be going at this space and going slow allows you to pick up more than what you would have otherwise seen if you were just running through things or seeing an edited video by keeping it more or less real ground level as unedited as possible
helps you to get a picture of the area
it’s a beautiful bougainvillea
sometimes too when I am recording the the elements of people walking up and down and it doesn’t allow me to go too close so I try to pan as much as possible so the focus is on the people but the surroundings
by the way there’s no fee to come up here this is all free unlike most of the things in Trinidad you want to come over here and look it’s all free you don’t have to pay a fee and there’s no restriction nobody tells you oh you can’t record that you can’t film this you can’t whatever you know it’s it’s a welcoming place it’s one of the few places in Trinidad that you really feel welcome and you can feel at peace and you can just relax
so we’re going to descend a bit and as we descend we will take in more of the surroundings move the vegetation
and having an extension rod as long as mine is allows you to get really close and I wouldn’t be able to get so close to these trees it makes you think these trees are short but they are very tall and they’re very far away
but the rod has pushed the camera right next to it closed it or beyond where I could go
so it may actually make you feel sometimes like I’m climbing the tree
it’s a beautiful bird there
on the left or straight ahead I should say that area would probably be Tunapuna
maybe Trincity
Tacarigua those areas
probably you can see Saint Helena too
now my father once stayed at this
monastery and no, he was not a monk, but he had a
problem with drinking he liked to drink a lot and he came here and stayed a couple months I believe as a way to help him
try and recover
he always talked about it as being very peaceful but he said the monks never talked and he wasn’t allowed to talk
they were praying and what not
but it was a time for him to get a lot of meditation and reflect I guess
straight in the center of your screen or we just passed it but as I panned if you probably pick it back up see that um smoke rising on the right to your screen there going up in here those are bush fires
and later in the day I actually went more or less to that area and have some other video footage that I won’t show here in this video but in another video that’s something we get a lot especially during a dry season that is in the screen to the right now let’s head into the center you can see the smoke
and if you’re driving through that sometimes it can be like going through fog
I love the foundation of this place it’s massive very strong I just love how the area is kept so clean and neat
and if I stay in a place for a while it’s the idea again is unlike other videos it’s to reflect take in things that you may not have noticed so I may go silent some for some of the time and just let you look
so
in case you’re wondering we’re looking at the south of Trinidad it’s not as mountainous as the north
if you’re a bird lover you would love Trinidad and Tobago just such a variety of birds and they come so close sometimes and sing the beautiful melodies
uh the kind of camera I have I can’t zoom into it so I can only hope that they come to me
I’m using a Gopro and with Gopros you’re allowed you know the way it focuses you can see everything in focus so something close like that stop sign is sharp while the building on the mountain also remain sharp that’s the unique thing about Gopro cameras and I’m not an agent for Gopro but I’m just saying you could see everything sharp at once but with other uh you know video cameras you you you more or less have to zoom if you want that zoom feature some things are really out of focus and I don’t care for that too much so that’s why I haven’t gone that way but I may have to get one for other applications especially like bird watching
wow
i’m using natural songs here and if it sounds like if somebody’s blowing into the mic it’s because the wind is fairly strong sometimes and I’m not using a
buffering or sponge or anything to help mitigate that
also because I have a stabilizer and it needs freedom
so from here we’re looking at probably what would be Mount Hope
the Bamboo
and again showing you how to Gopro look at how we could go straight into this see this little big black bar
and yet still everything behind if you notice is also sharp
that’s the way I like to take my videos to you
you know if you walk in here you wouldn’t just pick up everything that looks beautiful but you pick up everything that isn’t so beautiful but like again I want to give you the view of you know what if you were there this is what you would see
in this direction you would be looking at
Mount Hope and San Juan
and you can actually well it’s actually pointing towards your corners but with all that smoke you won’t be able to see it
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I have lots of other stuff on JB’s Man Cave covering all the areas of Trinidad
and some of them are walking like this some of them are road trips it depends and I have a lot of what’s called let’s watch videos which is me simply staying in one area and watching
like a street a park a tree you know things that you would like normally take in if you were there but you don’t have the opportunity because you’re abroad or you’re elsewhere you’re busy
you can continue watching I am going to
allow you to see the rest of the abbey with some peaceful music you can meditate and when we begin to drive again I will come back
so we are continuing on the road trip we’re going back down the mountain as we do so you’ll get a different angle on everything but we are not going to go down St John’s Road we are going to take a different road to Tunapuna Road it’s kind of like an extra bonus if you keep watching this video you would be able to see some of tuna puna I have other videos on tuna puna but I thought you might like to get an idea of what’s connected to the area around the abbey
so continue to look and you’ll be able to see everything
just going down the mountain is a beautiful in itself because as you do you get to see the trees the flowers but especially the mountain sides
going up doesn’t look the same as going down
and if you see us stop a bit it’s because we’re taking in the scenery
I thought they would have more pink pus we passed a couple of them back there but there aren’t many here at the moment
probably they have other colors
because the poo is they each each color seems to come out as a different time right now in a pink season
it must have been something up for those monks from Brazil to come all the way up here and start building could you imagine the amount of effort it would have taken to bring materials bills and whatnot
they probably didn’t have such a nice paved road to work with
all right so I think this we’re back on Saint John’s Road and at some point here we’re going to turn left I think on Fairview Drive
and it will take us to Tunappuna Road is the back of Tunapuna it starts over the residential area and then um goes into the more commercial side most people know one area of its commercial side
the interesting thing about these road tours as well is it’s new for me because you know I would not normally come in areas like this back here
mostly because I have no reason to
but sometimes you miss some really nice stuff
I like looking at trees flowers nature only hall and unfortunately you have to have trash too so you you can always know you’re out of mountain Benedict’s area because you start seeing trash again the area is unkept as people like to dump stuff here and it’s so unfortunate because the country is so beautiful and it just will not keep it clean look how much trash is littered on both sides of the wood
now you know if this was a tourist video or made for tourists the video would have been edited and kept back you know as soon as we reached mount Saint Benedict’s Road and we would have cut right there and say you know wow this is Mount Saint Benedict but again JB’s Man Cave is about giving it a raw
so you’re seeing all that’s around the area the good the bad the ugly
so went to the road and we are heading south
we’ll go all the way to Jackman and then we will look at his surrounding area so you can keep looking at this video all the way if you want to see the rest of Tunapuna and then I’ll be going down the Eastern Main Road and a little bit into Saint Augustine and then we’ll end it there but keep on looking if you’d like to see the area I always appreciate you watching please make sure to like subscribe let your friends know your family know about JB’s Man Cave I have a immediate goal to reach 10,000 Subscribers right now I believe I’m around 4500 which is pretty good I appreciate your support but we need to reach 10,000. so do subscribe and let your friends do as well thanks for watching keep watching Tunapuna
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NOTE: The above text was taken from audio and may not be accurate. Please see the video.