“I’m with the K2K band. You have to follow us. We’re going to be fabulous!” she said, and sent me down to the park under the protection of her husband, Earl Wells, a field surveyor who was wearing an antlered headdress, face paint and head-to-toe tie-dye. Soon I was in the midst of several hundred people twirling around in elaborate fabric wings, or getting down to soca music with sparkling suns on sticks attached to their backs that shot up 20 feet in the air.

Karen and Kathy Norman, Trinidad-born twin sisters living in New Jersey, designed all of the band’s costumes, and to join, all Ms. Wells had to do was sign up and pay for her costume in advance. This was her second year with K2K and she was sure she’d be back. “They’re so different. In Trinidad, you mostly see people in two-piece bikinis. But K2K, it’s about the fashion. You don’t see anyone wearing anything like that. I like the elegance, and you’re covered up! We’re old. We need it!”

Technically, Trinidad had not been on the original itinerary of the yearlong, worldwide trip I’m on for The Times, visiting each place on the 52 Places to Go in 2018 list. In an effort to convey to readers that the Caribbean, large swaths of which had been hit by two hurricanes last year, shouldn’t be avoided as a travel destination, my editors had put the entire region at No. 4. Working with data scientists from Kayak, the online booking site, we crafted an itinerary that would take me to two islands that hadn’t been affected by the hurricanes (Trinidad and St. Lucia) and one that very much had (Puerto Rico, which I’ll be writing about next week).

That lineup scratched a few itches: the desire to experience Carnival; to island hop (to me, another defining Caribbean experience); and to go somewhere that had sustained damage and see for myself what being “back open for business” really looked like. What would it mean to be a responsible visitor to such a place, and how could I both encourage tourism while accurately conveying the situation?

What followed was a visit to the Caribbean at a breakneck pace that I would advise no sane person to mimic. For complicated logistical and cost-related reasons that made sense at the time, I’d mapped out a plan with Kayak to go to St. Lucia, then to Trinidad and back, then off to San Juan — all in four days.

Traveling to Trinidad during Carnival turns out to be stressful even when you’re not on a 24-hour, please-don’t-try-this-at-home marathon. The Brits I shared my taxi with showed up only to find out that their hotel had given away their reservation (common, apparently), so they came to my place, President’s Inn, where we all encountered the surprise that the front desk only took cash. (For me, that meant a trip to an A.T.M. on a dark and isolated street. Our heroic taxi driver refused to let me go alone.) Still, as simple as our hotel was, it was in an ideal location close to the action. Just three blocks away, I found a calypso show called Pandemonium in a dirt lot and featuring incredible steel-pan players from as far away as Paris.

I had good luck finding that show, and the K2K band, while walking around, but nearly everyone I ran into seemed horrified to see me on my own. When I strayed from the show to look for something to eat, a young man raced up behind me. His name was Kadeem and he wanted to warn me that I had just narrowly escaped a robber who had been casing me, and who was blocking my way back to the show. “Be careful of that guy. He’s not a nice guy,” he said. “He won’t bother you, but he looked like he wanted to get someone at the corner.”