Jamaica 360º, 414 miles in 60 hours

This is a long post, my full account of driving 360º around the island. Jen always warns me that no one wants to read something so long, but I can't help it. There are some who like all this detail (retirees, I am talking to you!), so if you want to come along on this virtual tour, click the "Listen" link below for musical accompaniment and jump on in.

Listen: Jamaica 360º Playlist

St. Andrew / Kingston Parishes

Just a few of the butterflies in Kingston

Right now, Jamaica's capital is alive with millions of pale yellow butterflies that seem to hatch periodically. I watched the butterflies in the lot across from our place, getting ready to go, drinking Blue Mountain coffee while, behind me, the sun came up over the Blue Mountains. The lot is empty now since it was sold and cleared; no more corrugate-roof house, no more pit-bull chained in the 12-foot circular rut of his tracks; no more men slapping dominoes. There's a familiar old mutt that is still there, looking a little confused, inheritor of the lot.

My goal was to make it around the island and get a taste for each parish along the way. It was 6am when I left and Good Friday as well, so the city was particularly quiet. No banana vendors at the intersection, no people squeezing into taxis, none of the locals that Jen sees every morning on her walk to work: the 3 friendly dudes on bicycles ("Mawnin!"), the man with daily sexual innuendo ("I just want to get with you, pretty lady!"), the lady who sells papers and after a year still says nothing. I headed out towards the west, through some of the rougher neighborhoods still bedecked in color-coded election flags, green or orange, signifying their political allegiance. I went past the old colonial fort and the cement factory, along the sea's edge, and I was away.

St. Thomas Parish, Morant Bay (39 miles)

St. Thomas is scrubby and windswept until the Morant Bay area, where canefields take over. I turned in at the town, asking after the famous courthouse that was at the center of the 1865 rebellion. Now just a small ruin fronting a patch of asphalt, it was the spot of a bloody confrontation between angry locals and authorities, the destruction of the town center, and the extensive official reprisals that killed hundreds including national hero Paul Bogle. For context, this rebellion was 30 years after emancipation, but still 80 years before universal suffrage. There's a pedestal for a Bogle statue, but the statue is gone. In fact, the only company I had in the square was a man sleeping rough behind the church... and goats. There's always goats. After Morant Bay, the road gets rough going around the extreme eastern tip of the island, no tourists and just cane communities and little mongooses darting across the potholes. People were waking up in the few little communities, turning on the music, even calling out to me, "Hey, white boy!"

Portland Parish, Reach Falls (25 miles)

In Portland, wooded hills roll into the ocean, framing little azure coves. The town of Manchioneal seems to be the border, and I was happy to get out of the car at the old anglican church and stand among the graves looking out towards the distant rocks where breakers were crashing, somehow, inexplicably soaring at least 50-feet. On weekend and holidays, roads in Jamaica are peppered with church ladies walking to and fro. One flagged me down, a retired obgyn nurse in a B&W flower-print dress and matching church hat, and we chatted as I took her up the road a piece. She used to go to the anglican church I had just passed, but switched over to one of Jamaica's many Revival sects because, in her words, "More joy!" Jamaica as a country boasts the most churches per capita and, indeed, everywhere I drove over the weekend: well-scrubbed kids going off to services, tent revivals in the grass, cinderblock chapels echoing with either fire & brimstone or reggae-flavored gospel, depending on the proclivities of the sect. My first stop, however, was Reach Falls. At the turnoff I was flagged down by a young man who pointed out that the falls were closed for Good Friday, but that he could guide me along the local's trail for a fee. Marcel was true to his word, taking me up from where the river winds below the falls, through crystal clear pools sitting prettily under the overhanging greenery...more beautiful, in fact, than the falls themselves. Best of all, because of the holiday, I was the only tourist splashing around, scraping my shins on the slippery rocks, trying to keep my phone dry. The photo here is just one of the small pools on the way upriver. Portland Parish, Blue Lagoon (18 miles) One of the loveliest lagoons, Portland's Blue Hole, is remarkable because perfectly clear freshwater from the mountains wells up from below, mixing with the saltwater, creating a magical deep blue portal between a saltwater world and a freshwater one. I threw on my snorkel and swam across, even though a local boatman called out that there's nothing to see inside the lagoon. But I was there to feel the strange shifting temperatures of the mixing waters, and I was surprised by the unusual optics, at times crystaline, at times strangely blurry like vegetable oil in water. But on the whole, things were so clear that diving down and looking up at my fins, I felt like some toy man frozen in an acrylic paperweight. And, just when I thought the boatman was right about nothing to see, I happened on a little barracuda hanging around a submerged tree. Scrawled Filefish (from google pics) Back on dry ground, I found the alpha rasta, King Saba, the man clearly in charge of the parking area and managing the tourist trade at the spot, and asked about the snorkeling outside the lagoon, in the sea. Before all was said and done, there was some dickering, some tension between competitors, a misunderstanding or two. In tourist spots that are not run by a single business, feeling like a fatted calf can be disconcerting, and it's easy to feel assaulted by vendors and guides and boatmen. But if one shows respect, makes a self-deprecating joke, and shows a genuine love of what Jamaica is...well, everything goes OK. Don't get me wrong, King Saba still ripped me off, but it was the funniest, most honest, one-love ripoff ever. That's what I get for wanting to snorkel at a tourist hotspot. And it was great. The boatman took me out and abandoned me past the reef, so it was a long kick back to shore...but beautiful. I did not have the GoPro with me, so I am using a google photograph here to show the Scrawled Filefish I saw, something completely new to me. Portland Parish, Boston Bay (backtracked 6 miles) Jamaica is known for jerk BBQ, and Boston Bay is the capital. Jerk is a spice mix handed down from the indigenous Taíno and later perfected by the maroons (Africans escaped from slavery)...but it was also originally a manner of cooking in secret, developed to hide from the British, meat and embers buried together to suppress the telltale cook-smoke. At the roadside stand in Boston Bay, diners sit around the pit of embers and the cutting boards. The spiced meats are laid on palettes of branches, above the pile of coals: chicken, pork, spicy sausage, seafood. I ordered pork with a roast yam and a Red Stripe beer, the meat being cut from a sizzling, fatty slab. The lunch was complete when the lady outside sold me a re-used overproof rum bottle now filled with her sharp, hand-rendered pineapple-ginger juice. [Hint: do not leave a bottle like that in your car for overlong in Jamaica...I am still trying to get the ants out of the dashboard]. St. Mary Parish, Annotto Bay (34 miles) Roadside pepper shrimp I rolled on into St. Mary parish, a stretch apparently half-forgotten by the tourist trade. It's common on roads in Jamaica to see men wandering with Jamaica's perfect tool, the machete, but in St. Mary I also saw many young men carrying their home-made spear guns. A man on the road sold me a bag of peppered shrimp, addictive and super spicy. Leaving the pineapple juice in the car may not have been overly bright of me, but trying to eat peppered shrimp one-handed while driving trumps that for idiocy. In the town of Oracabessa, I checked whether anyone was around the marine sanctuary building who might want to take me out to the coral, but all I found was a dog to growl at me. I remembered one of the ubiquitous pieces of Peace Corps advice from the volunteers: always have a rock in your pocket for just such moments. The shadows were getting long, so I retreated back to the road, driving past the beach where last fall we helped 140 baby hawksbill turtle hatchlings find their way to the sea. St. Ann Parish, Runaway Bay (52 miles) Dinner at Sharkies. By the time I hit Runaway Bay, an area the family enjoys visiting, it was supper time. Columbus was shipwrecked near here for a year, and the ruins of the first Spanish capital are close by. I pulled in to a beachside place I know called Sharkies, where I was able to enjoy some shrimp rundown (a hearty vegetable, coconut milk stew). The view there is nice, the waitresses harried and the customers happy. But it had been a long day and I was ready to retire. 2 days prior, I had called to make reservations at a cheap guesthouse, but because of the Easter weekend they referred me to their neighbor who "rents rooms too" and took my reservation. But when I arrived, road weary and salt crusted, it turns out they had given away my room. Further, the place proved to be a house built at the back of a roadside rum bar, and I believe several of their rooms were available by the hour, if you know what I mean. To their credit, they did not want to send me off to sleep in the manger on Easter weekend, so they offered to push aside the construction material in the house common area and lay down a mattress for me. Feeling rather defeated, I found a considerably more expensive room at Jewel, the embassy's resort of choice, where I quickly ran into several people I knew. If my day had made me feel proud and adventurous, spending the night at Jewel mitigated that conceit.  The next morning I went next door to the SCUBA concern that I like. The dives took us down to the a some intentionally sunken wrecks and then over to the beautiful sponge garden where bioluminescent azure sponges glow softly and giant barrel sponges are bigger than oil barrels. There were also quite a few invasive lionfish, more than I've seen at once before. I found myself wishing for those spearguns the guys in St. Mary had. Red lionfish Azure sponge Barrel sponges St. Ann Parish, Green Grotto Cave (4 miles) Strangler fig (left), grotto lagoon (right) If you are wondering where the runaways of Runaway Bay probably hid themselves, the Green Grotto cave is probably the answer. Its exploration has apparently gone as far as 28km, though its true extent is unknown. The tour, however, circles around one particular area...an underground circuit with people laughing nervously about the bats and a lot of canned jokes from the tour guide. Still, it's fun to imagine the days when it was an indigenous sacred site or a pirate hideaway, or picture the 17th century Spanish governor of Jamaica making his escape out a secret side tunnel while the British came in the front. Bats flit around the stalactites, squeaking and fluttering, and the dark is broken up by beams of light and strangler-fig roots dropping down from holes in the ceiling. We dropped down a narrow shaft to the deeper levels, with a still lagoon of clear water and, when the guide doused the lights, a dripping perfect darkness. Probably the most significant use for the cave was the runaways from slavery, hiding out there until they could make their way to the Maroon communities in the mountains. Profound, but no so profound that the cave wasn't later used as a disco for a while and, if you've seen Live and Let Die, you will have already seen the cavern. Remember when James Bond was about to be shark food? Trelawney / St. James Parishes, Greenwood Great House (30 miles) I drove on, passing by a place called Coral Gables and thinking about it being Easter weekend. Many rastas call the Friday before Easter "Bad Friday"; it's the anniversary of the 1963 deaths in Coral Gables and a subsequent clamp down on rastafarian communities directly after Jamaica's independence. It was only mid-afternoon, so I figured I had time to stop near the border of the next two parishes and see a Jamaican great house. The island is dotted with these plantation homes, some artfully restored and repurposed, others with nought visible but crumbling pillars and rusty hinges hidden in roadside ivy. Of course, not being Jamaican, I can not testify to the nuance and meaning of these homes, the seats of slave-owners and anchors of the island's colonial system of oppression. Also, history is history, it is what it is no matter what I may think of it, so I resolved to see Greenwood Great House as passively as possible and consider it's meaning only afterwards. Clockwise: veranda, shackle, mantrap, ballroom A significant part of that history happened in these parishes, the Christmas Rebellion of 1831, during which hundred of slaves were killed and summarily executed. The rebellion burned down many great houses, including Greenwood's more famous neighbor, the fully restored Rosehall (famous for it's spooky legends and scene for the novel The White Witch of Rosehall). Not so Greenwood; it was not destroyed, it still sits atop its hill, built of whitened coral blocks and whitewashed timber. The rutted lane eventually dropped me in the empty parking area; I was the only visitor. In fact, the gate was locked, so I pulled the rope of a large bell and the guide soon came down through the bougainvillea to let me in. I was ushered into a dim space in a side building that, to my surprise, looked to be an authentic old English pub. My guide, a middle-aged black woman, stood off to the side while a spectral old white lady said nothing to me, just took my entrance money, seemingly frozen and unable to calculate my change. A man sat in a dusty corner, dimly backlit by the yellowed window behind him, and murmured "Enjoy your tour." The vista from the veranda is spectacular, encompassing what was once huge holdings along the coast and back into the hills. The tour highlighted many fine pieces of old furniture: pianos of inlaid mahogany, carved chairs, a blue ballroom, pink bedrooms, all roped off to protect several centuries of elegant bric-a-brac on display. The guide activated an antique polyphone, a kind of music box taller than myself, playing perforated metal disks that look like lumber mill saw blades. The tinkling music rose up and, along with the slanted afternoon light coming from the sea, spun a kind of genteel enchantment. The allure felt uncanny and a little alarm went off in my head. The guide took pleasure going behind the ropes to reveal a large screen TV cleverly hidden in the bedroom furniture, and I realized that the ghostly white lady actually lives in the house, the ropes coming down after the last tour. The other surreal realization was that Greenwood plantation was the source of wealth for the Barrett family (whose famous daughter, Elizabeth Browning Barrett, wrote "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."). Barbara, our housekeeper in Kingston is named Barrett, which could simply be a coincidence, but even the possibility that I was standing where her ancestors had been enslaved...well, my resolve to remain passive was rapidly crumbling. I exited out through the pub, barely stopping to see the iron mantrap and the ankle-shackles on display. Even though I knew that this was one of the few great houses that referenced slavery at all, my heart could not congratulate them for it. My guide locked the gate behind me and though I fear it may be a white-boy's over-eager expression of race-consciousness, I want to tell you that I could not help but spit on the ground before driving away. That's just how I felt. So much for passivity. Hanover Parish, Samuel's Bay (51 miles) After the tourist entry-point of Montego Bay, my route rolled me down around onto the western tip of Jamaica, where the swampy muck of the Great Morass is on one side of the road and the ocean on the other. I was pleased to arrive at Samuel's Bay before sundown, checking into a casual spot called Rhodes Hall Plantation. Apparently, this bay is where the owner of The Bounty sheltered his fleet (did you know that Captain Bly brought breadfruit to Jamaica?), and the next bay down is where the pirate Calico Jack Rackam's crew was too deep in their cups to notice the approaching British that destroyed them and took Jack back to Kingston for execution. Side note: it was Calico Jack that gives name to Dead Man's Key in the waters off of Kingston, for the authorities left his body out there for years in an iron box as a warning to other pirates. Anyway, the place I stayed was mellow, with a peacock named Kevin roaming the grounds and, other than two Jamaican families, one extended American family that all seemed to smoke weed, from the teenager to the grandma. I am not a lover of the herb, but I was well pleased with a tasty steamed snapper for dinner, despite having spent a good deal of my morning diving with his brethren. My morning snorkel was sublime, with the waters like a bathtub. It was so nice that, after breakfast, I went again. I saw a lot of great stuff, but at one point I was puzzled by an area in the coral where the perfectly clear water was cloudy...sometimes I am kind of slow, I remember thinking "It's almost like something big over there is kicking up sand." Sure enough, a big old stingray was over there, feeding and blowing sand, 5-foot in diameter and longer than me if you count the tail. Which you should. Westmoreland / St. Elizabeth Parishes, "Border" Foodstands (40 miles) I've spent time in Westmoreland parish before, so I did not have plans to stop there, though I love the area. But right at the border to the next parish is a place, not coincidentally called "Border", with food stands along the road. Each stand has a fire or two going and I was quickly offered a giant, beautiful platter fried fish. I was in the mood for conch, though, and shouts went down the line and I was sent person by person until I was introduced to the conch man. He sat me at a stool and I perused his setup: his embers flamed inside an old car's wheel rim, which was kind of genius...it allowed for air to feed the coals and created a platform for water to bubble in a baking sheet. The conch and veggies were folded in foil packets and steamed along side the water, catching some of the smoky flavor of the fire. He served it and when I asked for some spice, he brought over a 3-gallon vinegar bucket, full of marinating scotch-bonnet peppers and onion, and he ladled the firewater on my conch. The Red Stripe could not put out the fire in my mouth completely, so I bought fresh bammy, clearly another local specialty. Bammy is a cassava (yucca) pancake, something Columbus discovered the Taíno preparing when he arrived in the New World. I had sampled bammy before, unimpressed, but this bammy was amazing, hot off the pan, toasty on the outside, soft inside, making the perfect post-spicy-conch delicacy. St. Elizabeth Parish, Accompong (30 miles) For the first time on this journey, I cut away from the coast and headed into the hills. I was heading for Accompong, the main Maroon community in Jamaica. I have mentioned the Maroons before and, again, I need to be careful about trying to abbreviate their history here. Maroons, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, are those that escaped slavery and lived separately, often mixing with indigenous populations. Jamaican Maroons are intensely proud that they fought the British to a standstill, forcing a treaty in 1739 that allowed them to govern themselves and maintain language and customs from West Africa. The story is not all feel-good empowerment, though, for this treaty also specified that the Maroons would help suppress future troubles with the still enslaved population. Indeed, of the 3 main Jamaica rebellions that I know of, Maroon militias played a significant role in their suppression: Tacky's War in 1760 (not far from Accompong), the Christmas Rebellion of 1831 and the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. Not a lot of travel goes up to Accompong on Easter Sunday, so the road was as lonely as it was challenging, with steep dropoffs. I had a great view through papaya trees to the valley far below, a world away from a wide stretch of canefields below, though not really far as the crow flies. I was able to measure it's remoteness because, as I got farther in, kids were more and more likely to holler out to me. As with country roads everywhere, salutations are the minimum politeness. But the greeting upon rolling into Accompong was more particular; there's no official border checkpoint, but I was not 2 yards into town before a young man jumped up and hollered at me to stop. Visitors to Maroon territory must check in and be escorted. To my chagrin, I realized I had spent almost all my cash and did not have the $15 price of the tour. I had come to pay respects, and I had come some distance, so I offered to trade a hand-worked calabash bag that I am very fond of. But one of the men slung it back on my shoulder, saying, "This is your heart. I feel that. We can't take that." I had $8, so they agreed to give my half the tour...skipping the the best parts like the "kindah" tree, a mango tree that is the spiritual heart of their resistance, or the cave where the treaty was signed. But I did not care, it was a half hour of time, learning and reasoning with my Maroon tour guide, Biggy. He pointed in various directions, naming different clans that seemed loosely affiliated with the specific West African people their ancestors derived from. He identified their camouflage vine ("we invented ambush"), the "poco" sacred ground (or "pukumina", a mixture of African spiritualism and revival Christianity), and spoke of current political concerns for the the Maroons. When Jen's work with Peace Corps came up, Biggy was pleased to tell me that there had been a volunteer in his home a few years back. "We need to get another one of those," he said. Manchester Parish, Mile Gully (25 miles) Driving back down the hill, I was conscious of wanting to be back in Kingston by nightfall, but the beautiful afternoon and that country road just would not let me feel hurried. The wide stretch of canefields I had seen from above proved to belong to the Appleton Estate rum distillery. Other than that, it was mostly rolling, forested hills, with the trees making a tunnel and sunlight dappling the asphalt ahead of me. At one lonely crossroads, I was surprised to come across a spooky, abandoned church slowly being reclaimed by the brambles. Sure enough, I was later informed that locals know it as the "duppy" church (ghost church), where uncanny organ music is sometimes heard. People chuckle, but that doesn't mean they would be caught anywhere close at night. St. Andrew Parish, Kingston (60 miles) In Manchester parish, the big modern toll road takes over and it is clear sailing back to Kingston. Unless, of course, one has given every last cent to the Maroons in Accompong...in which case, one is left at the last toll booth, 10 minutes from home, rooting around in the cupholders and finally begging to be let through. And so it was that I came sliding sideways into Kingston, precisely 2.5 days after departing, with knots of clothes still sea-damp in my luggage, detritus of shrimp and bammy and peanuts in the floor mats. I came back to an empty house...Jennifer and Carter would be away another 6 days, looking at schools in the U.S. as we try to strategize our imminent return to the States. The last 60-hours, though, had put in stark relief those things I am going to miss when we leave Jamaica.