Sundown

60

April 18, 2016 – We were up early today, and down to the lobby for pickup just before 9am. Our tour guide, Rasheena, joined us to wait for the bus and we chatted. Then the security from the front door came over and politely gestured her aside to speak with him and when she retured she said that she had to go outside and wait, that tour guides were not allowed to wait inside, that she had not been told this before. Apparently air conditioning is not to be wasted on tour guides 🙁

So we picked up our things and joined her on the bench outside as a bit of rain started to develop.

Our bus showed up with two other people on board, a beautiful young African American couple from Minnesota. They had each taken a window seat, even though they were together, and we decided to do the same. If there were many more people, we’d change and sit together, so I plunked myself down behind Kirk after a bit of musical chairs and some laughter as I tried to decide where I wanted to sit for the trip. I apologized for acting like a four year old that couldn’t sit still, and the other couple started to laugh and said they’d done the same. After stopping at one more hotel, our number was only 10 adults and one little girl, so we could all have a window seat!

Our driver for the day was Finney (short for Finley), and he was a mellow fellow compared to Pearson. The drive up was laid back, and the scenery quite different than what we’d seen so far. The vegetation was more lush along this stretch of the coast, it would seem that rain is more plentiful up this way, the floodways that I saw along the road in a few spots would seem to support that notion. The rain came down hard at times, and the goats, so plentiful along the roads, looked cranky as they sought shelter under the trees and bushes they were near. There are goats everywhere, far more goats wandering the sides of the roads than cats or dogs, although those are here and there too. We were told that the goats are far smarter than the dogs and cats, and that it is extremely rare to see a goat dead at the side of the road. We were told that they look both ways before they cross, and they don’t dally when they do.

Finney wound our bus through the coastal towns and more than the vegetation differed up this way. The towns seemed more prosperous – still poor by Canadian standards, but there were more local retail stores, there were banks (Scotiabank??), gas stations….and there were more smiles. As I peered through the glass as we passed, I received smiles and a few waves. Between Montego Bay and Negril there are few resorts, these towns are not tourist towns, they are populated and visited by the locals, were these the middle class? They were certainly better off than many we’d passed to the south and interior the other day, many of those had not even had running water.

Rasheena broke the ice and made everyone introduce themselves Jamaican style, and then she told jokes that got racier as we went. She was a lively guide and she pointed out many things along the way. Having been on an all day tour previously, we’d heard some of the information she passed on already, but there were new bits of cultural information that gave us new insights.

She pointed to a building and said “That’s the Human Repair Shop” (The hospital) and pointed out nice houses along the bay. She said the houses were owned by doctors and lawyers and some were owned by “street pharmacists…..” And later she said …”and over there we have the locals all-inclusive resort…” I turned my head to see the police station for the town we were passing through.

When I’d first heard the minimum wage was $60US per week, that wasn’t apparently quite correct. According to Rasheena, after taxes, the take home pay is about $45US per week. Even worse. Over 20% of the population is unemployed and they try to make ends meet any way they can. As we passed through downtown Montego Bay we saw people selling wares, offering to wash car windows, and begging for change, in the traffic.

She pointed out a school and told us that school is mandatory for children in Jamaica. The law is that all children, no matter how poor, must be educated.

Sounds great, until you hear that the government offers no assistance and families must pay to send their children to school. The government only offers scholarships to exceptionally gifted students.

Every student in every school must wear a uniform, and each school has a different uniform. And parents must pay for those too.

I asked Rasheena how that was possible given a 20% unemployment rate, how did parents do it. She looked sad and said that they had to find a way, but that, in extreme cases, government officials might come to your house and assess your poverty level, and may, in exceptionally rare circumstances, they might offer some small assistance for the child’s school expenses, but that the expectation was that the parents would find a way to pay.

She told us that people didn’t shop the way we westerners so. She pointed at me and said “You can go to the supermarket and buy a dozen eggs, we can’t afford to do that, so we buy one or two eggs when we need them.”

She told us about the national bird, the national tree, the national food dish – codfish with ackee fruit – and pointed out the Ackee tree. The fruit will make you vomit if eaten before it pops open on the tree she said, until it breaks open, you can’t eat it, but after that it is safe and highly prized.

Our bus pulled into a little place called the Boardwalk Village, a little tiny resort with a couple of small local craft and t-shirt shops and a bar and restaurant, sitting on the edge of the Caribbean Sea on seven miles of white sand beach. A very pretty place.

When we arrived the place was relatively quiet and we found a couple of wooden beach loungers under a massive almond tree, where we were safe from the blistering sun. It wasn’t long before streams of people started to arrive and chairs and space became prized. We glanced at the menu and saw a disclaimer at the bottom, “Prices subject to change” we noted that because our bill items were always more than the menu pricing.

I looked over at the couple from Minnesota, sitting a couple of loungers down from us, and smiled as he held out a fancy Canon camera and was trying to take a selfie. I stood up and walked over and gestured for him to give me the camera and tried to take a photo of them. The LCD lit for a moment and then went black, but it didn’t take a photo. I looked the settings over, I’m a Nikon user and the camera I have with me isn’t a point and shoot, so the dials and buttons were different, but after a few moments I realized he was in video mode and when I said so he told me it was his brother’s camera and he’d sent it along with him as all he had was an iPhone. So I set the camera in auto mode and told him to leave it on the green box on the dial and his pictures should turn out well. Then I went to take a photo of them and looked through the viewfinder, but the view was strangely foggy. I turned the camera over and saw that the lens was smeared, probably with suntan lotion, and cleaned it up so the images would be clear. I laughed and apologised for commandeering his camera, took a couple of photos, and then showed them how to use it. In other words, I made a friend 🙂

I was cagey sitting still for so long, I’m not a beach sitting sort of person, so I wandered off with my camera, intending to take a few shots and go get harassed at the little craft shops. I took a few photos of flowers and then was hanging over a little turtle pond filled with small black fish and a couple of koi. A young man stopped to say hello to me, he asked if I was enjoying myself. I replied the affirmative and then pointed at the fish and asked if they were tilapia, “yes” he said, “but I can’t remember what the gold ones are called, something Japanese I think.” I told him they were called koi and he told me all about how tough the fish all are and that when they clean the pond out, they only ever find a few dead. We talked fish for a few moments before he waved his arm around the little grounds and asked if I had been taking pictures of his flowers. Clearly he’d been watching me. I said yes, and tugged him over to ask what a yellow flower was. Freeman (the name on his badge) told me he was a landscaper at the little resort. I got a smile from him when I said “Yes, I gathered that when you said ‘my flowers’.”

He couldn’t tell me the flower name, he’s only been working there a year and is still learning. He said …”some of the names challenge [him] and [he] wants to bite the inside of his mouth when he tries to say their names.” He tugged me off to show me this plant, and that plant, and ushered me over to a hibiscus bush that he said was his favourite. There were several different coloured bushes, but this one was particularly beautiful to him as it had “the best red of any flower at the resort” and then he reached out and picked the largest and gave it to me.

I’d made another friend!

He told me that they can graft several colours onto one bush (I did not know this!), and then pointed to an interesting flower that looked (to me) like a cross between a hydrangea and an impatien, but the blossoms sat atop the most evil looking spiked inch round trunk you have ever seen. I said that I thought these would make good plants for around homes and under windows and he said “Yes, particularly under the kitchen window so that we can pour the dish water out the window to water them.” It reminded me of my Grandma sending me outside with the dish rinse water to water the rose bushes. He picked a little clump of those flowers for me too, but first dipped the stem into the sand to stem the white sticky sap oozing from where the flowers had been snapped from the bush. He told me hi didn’t want me to get any stain on my top from the flower. And then he tugged me down the path to show me more of his favourite flowers.

I asked Freeman if he’d gone to school to learn about landscaping and he said no, he’d been here for a year, and before that he was a handyman at another resort where he fixed things. Before that he’d done odd jobs, and before that he’d graduated from high school, in 2011. In the final two years of school he’d taken vocational training and learned welding. He told me that he wanted to be able to do as many things as possible because he wanted to be able to always keep working, that he had a 14 month old baby at home and he wanted to make sure that that baby’s father was always there and could provide for him legally, he said he wanted to see his child grow up and do well in life. Freeman is 21 years old, and he has a better work and life ethic than most people his age in North America. He was an amazing young man and I learned so much from him in those 20-30 minutes I spent alone with him, wandering “his flowers” and chatting about his life growing up in Jamaica.

This is the Jamaica I wanted to find.

I wandered back to our beach chairs and we had lunch and a couple of Red Stripe beers before Kirk decided that we both needed to go have a massage at the cabana on the beach. $1 a minute, 25 minutes for $20, they gave us 30 minutes each for $50. And she worked knots out of my shoulders that I’ve had for weeks but hadn’t managed to get around to going to the chiropractor for. When they were done with us we were positively greasy with coconut butter and we slithered back to the bus for the next leg of our trip this day.

I left my flowers on Rasheena’s chair and when she boarded and saw them she called out through the bus “Who brought me flowers!?” She pinned the hibiscus into her hair and her smile lasted for a very long time, occasionally sniffing at the little clump of pinkish flowers that Freeman couldn’t name for me.

The bus took us to a gift shop filled with the standard t-shirts (4 for $20), blended coffee, Jamaican rum, $1 shot glasses, hats, bags, flip flops, and various other things emblazoned with JAMAICA on them. The only thing I was interested in was a hat with a sticker of $40 that the shopkeeper told me I could have for $20…but I could see no way that it would survive the plane ride home, so I left it behind.

Freeman wound his way though the frighteningly narrow streets of the cliffs of Negril and deposited us into an empty parking lot across the street from Rick’s Cafe. The place wasn’t busy yet, and we watched a few cliff divers jump to the clear blue waters below. As time passed, people flooded through the gate, catamaran cruise boats filled to capacity arrived and anchored, some disgorging their passengers to ferry boats to take them to steps that they could climb to the cafe at the top for a drink, some dinner, and the view across the water and along the rocky cliffs. Kirk and I found a shaded table and enjoyed a beer before he told me I should go take some photos of the cliff jumpers, so I made my way over to the edge and down a set of steps to the bottom.

When I came back, Kirk noted that I’d been gone some time to which I replied “I was having a conversation with my new friend, Lloyd, the taxi driver, he can take us anywhere we want to go on the Island.”

Kirk said “Explain?”

I explained that when I got to the steps down, all the people were near the top and the steps down to near the water were clear, except for a man in a blue shirt sitting on a little outcrop at the bottom. I figured if I wasn’t allowed down there, if it was an off limits space and the man in blue was there to keep people away, I’d be yelled at as I descended, but I wasn’t yelled at, and a few moments later I found myself next to the man in blue. I smiled at him when I reached the bottom and told him he had the best seat in the house. He asked me where I was from, and said he wanted to visit British Columbia some day. When I asked him if he worked there, he thrust out his hand and said “No, I’m Lloyd, I drive a taxi cab and if there is anywhere you want to go, you can call me and I’ll take you there!” We chatted for a few minutes before he looked over my shoulder and up the stairs and stood up saying “My fare is ready to go, I have to leave now, it was very nice to meet you and I hope you come back to Jamaica again, please, take my seat mon.” And he was off.

I had made another friend.

I took a few photos and by then the steps all the way to the bottom were full and navigating my way back up without being knocked into the sea below was a bit tricky, there are no safety rails…..

We watched the sun go down and disappear behind the clouds as it slipped below the horizon, and everyone in the cafe seemed to pause and catch their breath, before flooding out to their buses to be trundled back to their hotels all over the island.

Finney clearly wanted to get home for the evening and the ride was definitely not as mellow as it had been int he morning. We barrelled along the narrow and twisting corridor that winds its way through the cliff region of Negril, and when he reached straight highway stretches, he was definitely driving at or above his capabilities, as Pearson would have said.

As darkness took over the island Kirk pointed to a large tree overhanging a river, it was decorated with splotches of white – cranes gone to roost in the branches for the night.

As we passed back through the towns, everything seemed prettier. Night time has a way of making everything softer, gentler. The chipped paint, the cracked walls, the dusty paths, they all disappear and all that is left are twinkling lights and dark silhouettes.

We got back to the hotel at 8:45pm, that was a full 12 hour day out on the road. We made sure to provide a healthy tip for the effort and time the driver and guide had put into us. We rushed to make the dinner buffet before it closed, and then went for a walk at the waters edge on the beach. The moonlight was lighting up the white sand and throwing gently glowing shadows under the trees. A wedding party was dancing the night away to a live band, guests dancing barefoot in the soft sand.

The other night when we’d stood at the edge of the balcony at the pool, looking out into the dark, during the brief blackout, a man had stepped from the shadows, silhouetted against the sand and water below. He had rattled a maraca at us and called to us to come down to him.

Nuh uh!

He was nowhere to be seen tonight, perhaps he was sitting on his own stretch of beach enjoying the softness of the moonlit night.

Jamaica has many faces, I saw a different one today.