Steve says when we hit the road, it’s not a vacation, it’s a trip. For us, the best trips blow our minds; expand our consciousness. We don’t come back rested, as many vacationers do. But if we’ve filled in some of the blank sections of our mental maps of the world, we’re happy.
Despite our rough start in Jamaica, I was more than happy with the 6 days we spent there. The morning after we settled into our beachfront digs in Negril, Captain Jace Allen drove his glass-bottom boat right up on the sand in front of our hotel, then he motored north along the coastline, cluing us in about the various resorts we were passing. Most titillating was the notorious Hedonism II, where guests sunbathe naked and sex is a more important group activity than beach volleyball. Then we headed for the local reef, donned our fins and snorkels, and swam through the teaming aquatic life, guided by the watchful captain.
I didn’t have an underwater camera with me, and we weren’t allowed to photograph the naked hedonists, but walking along that beach later in the day, Steve and I took in many sights we don’t see on our local sands back home.
Because we’d abandoned our three nights at the Negril home-exchange, we decided on impulse to spend only two nights at the beach, then drive to Black River, a town on Jamaica’s southern coast about half the way back to Kingston. This allowed us to visit the most important rum distillery on the island, Appleton Estates (established in 1749, and still Jamaica’s toniest brand.)
After more than two hours of driving on terrible roads, I was braced to find it closed. Or no longer giving tours. But it was not only open. It proved to be a slick, commercial operation. Ironically, we pulled into the parking lot on the heels of a busload of Illinois parents on the island to see their soccer-playing kids face off against some Jamaican players.
The tour was okay. We watched a donkey driving a press that squeezed juice out of the cane…
…and it was fun to taste the impact of aging on rum.
Somewhat short shrift was given to the suffering endured by all those folks who were kidnapped in Africa and brought here to cultivate cane sugar on these grounds.
I also was disappointed that we learned nothing about how sugar cane is grown and harvested today. We only glimpsed the fields.
Still the rum stop was moderately entertaining, and even better was our next stop: YS Falls, one of the world’s more impressive displays of water cascading downhill.
If we’d been channeling our inner Jamaicans, we would have spent several hours swimming and drinking and “liming” the hours away. But we needed to find the place we’d booked for the night: a two-bedroom house in a gated community called Brompton Manor.
When I hear the phrase “gated community,” I think of neighborhoods in La Jolla. This wasn’t like them; the entrance looked more like it was guarding a work camp.
But the house was fine, albeit a bit isolated. We’d seen nothing like a restaurant or market as we’d approached it. We finally figured out that a fishery with great scores on Tripadvisor was less than a 15-minute drive away, just beyond the town of Black River. At Cloggy’s, a friendly lady named Joann emerged from the kitchen to explain what they could offer us. She opened up her freezer and showed us our choices for the fish. We picked a snapper, to be cooked in brown sauce and accompanied by “bammy” (fried cassava bread). We took the hot bags of food back to the house where, washed down with Red Stripe lager, it was delicious.
It felt like a victory to turn in the rental car, unscathed, at Kingston’s airport Saturday afternoon (June 8). We Ubered from there to a good hotel in “New Kingston” for our last two days, and online reserved spots on a three-hour walking tour of the city Sunday morning.
I was relieved to learn we wouldn’t be walking for much of it. At 9 in the morning, the day was already sweltering. Instead our guide, a bright, articulate guy named Everton, took us on a sweeping odyssey through the city where he’d lived for more than 20 of his 36 years. We passed a large squatter community that reminded me of places I’d seen in India. Then we drove into one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city, the deceptively named Tivoli Gardens. It surprised me that all our windows were down. I asked Everton is that was that safe. He said what would be dangerous was having them up. The tough young men we saw everywhere acting as informal sentries might assume we were drive-by shooters, with unfortunately consequences possible. Instead Everton seemed to allay their wary looks with chatting with them briefly; alerting them we were just tourists.
In the heart of the city, we parked and strolled through streets that normally crackle with commercial activity but were quiet because it was Sunday morning.
We finished by driving through Trench Town, the neighborhood once home to Bob Marley and other reggae legends. By then I’d decided to move to Kingston and open a combination bar and boutique, where I could get my portrait painted on the facade to draw in customers.
The truth is I doubt I’ll ever go back to any of the six islands we visited. Aside from losing my iPad, however, this trip could hardly have gone better. Now I feel like I could use a vacation, but I won’t get one of those for a while. Steve and I will head to Carlsbad Airport tomorrow (Wednesday, June 12) to pick up Vanessa, the 12th Canine Companions puppy we’ll be raising. That’s a different kind of trip altogether.
At home and abroad 