Adventure Part Four: Jamaica
In case people are getting bored: I expect there to be six of these posts. So two more. Except - I haven't finished writing this thing yet, so there is a small chance that there'll be three more. In any case, Jamaica was the last place I went to before coming home.
Jamaica
I forget what my first impression of Jamaica was. I know that when we were in JFK waiting for the flight, Konrad and I were struck by the fact that we were the only white people on the plane. I guess my first impression was how poor the insides of airports are at creating memorable first impressions. On leaving the airport, though, there was a much more memorable impression: the heat. It’s not quite the heat that struck me, nor the humidity, both of which are high but not too high, generally; what really struck me was is its age. I don’t think Jamaica has ever been cold. The heat has been there for hundreds of years, and I feel like it’s made its way into every nook and cranny, and deep into the soil and concrete. It’s utterly ubiquitous. It gives the air a completely different quality to what you get in the British Isles, or even in the Mediterranean.
After that, we (my mum, who’d collected us from the airport, Konrad and I) stopped by a roadside fruit-seller, and bought some coconuts from him. He deftly tossed them into the most comfortable position, then sliced some of the husk off so that there was a little straw-sized hole into the nut’s innards. He then gave us some straw, and we had the freshest coconut milk there is. When we’d finished, we gave our coconuts back to the bloke, who cut them in half with some more machete strikes, and cut a sliver off the edge of the husk. We used this sliver like a spoon to scrape the gorgeous stuff off the lining of the inner cavity (it’s called the meat?). And that – drinking and then eating from coconuts on the side of a wide, quiet road, in the intense and humid heat, looking around at the sundrenched landscape, shooting the breeze with a dirt-poor smiling and filthy black man, leaning against our SUV – was the first proper impression of Jamaica.
That evening, we had dinner with my mum and her boyfriend, Bruce, who I was pleased to discover is a great guy. The following day, as he clearly knew how to ingratiate himself with his girlfriend’s son, he took us out jet-skiing. This was extraordinary: I didn’t know you could travel at 60mph across water! The acceleration on these things is also phenomenal. We used waves as ramps and got airborne for about a second a few times. And at the speeds we were going, and with the water coming up towards you and the water intake changing its sound as it started trying to take in air, a second seems like a very long time. We finished in the early afternoon, and went for some lunch at the marina.
That evening, we went to see a Molière play, Tartouffe. This was fascinating: the actors were good, one or two especially so, and the translation they were working with was great, and almost certainly amended by a Jamaican, as some of the colloquialisms were Jamaican ones. But what was really fantastic was the audience reaction: if there was a great joke, people laughed; if there was a great innuendo, they howled and slapped their knees. At one point, a man almost jumped out of his chair from laughing at an especially dirty pun. The actors played with the audience, too – slowing down the delivery of a great punchline everyone could see coming immensely, for example. The performance was immense fun. Probably deeply inauthentic, we decided; and without a doubt much the better for it.
We all agreed that this was a good way to spend our first day in Jamaica.
The reason I went to Jamaica (and by extension America) was that my biological mum, Fiona, is an artist, and she had won a competition to paint a gigantic 72’ wide by 8’ high mural in the international arrivals area of Montego Bay airport, which is a tourist airport in the North-West of the country. The grand opening of this mural took place on the 21st of October, so I had arranged to be there for it. (It’d been two years since I’d been to Jamaica, so I was looking for an excuse to go there anyway.) The reason Konrad came was because I figured he and my mum would get on extremely well, as they are very, very similar in their souls. (Happily, this was the case, and they each told me in private that they were deeply impressed by each other.)
We went to the opening as planned, despite fears that we wouldn’t make it because of worries that a nearby hurricane (an actual hurricane!) would create torrential rain. Jamaica’s roads are pretty appalling: heavy rain would have made them impassable, and at least would have made the traffic, which is far too heavy for the roads to take anyway, unbearable. To everyone’s pleasure, the threat of these impassable roads kept away a lot of the politicians who were supposed to speak at the ceremony, and so their shoes were filled by, said the natives, less jaded, less aloof figures who gave less interminable, more heartfelt speeches. I was less impressed by the speeches than other people seemed to be. Not one of the speakers had an eye for art, and I don’t think any of them really understood the mural. They kept talking about how it would bring lots of tourism-money to the country, without ever really saying anything about how it’s, y’know, a really nice piece of work that captures the spirit of Jamaica remarkably well.
The after-party was largely your typical after-party, with cocktails, finger food, evening dresses and a live band, except that it was in a fully-functioning airport. After a while, the airport staff overcame their professionalism and started nibbling at the food and sipping at the wine. No-one really minded, because Jamaican airports are not exactly terrorist targets, but it was a little disconcerting, amusingly so, to see a machine gun-wielding security guard wandering around smiling with a vodka sunset in his hand.
After the after-party we found a bar and had some rum and some soup. Konrad and I played some pool, and I got talking to a bus driver who had never left Jamaica, and had hardly even left Mo Bay. He was wholly unrepenting of this. And this seems reasonable enough.
After this, and after some driving back and forth looking for places to stay because our original plan fell through because the gate-man was asleep and no amount of honking was shifting him, Konrad and I found our bed for the night in the beautiful house of Nikki, a friend of Fiona’s. The house was dark, but not so much so that we couldn’t see that there was clearly a great creativity and love behind its decoration, and that it was surrounded by thick tropical forest. Nikki offered us a joint before leaving us for her bed. We smoked it on a couch on the veranda while talking about love and the painful bit that comes afterwards. The effect of the joint on me was that I kept forgetting sentence-clauses that I’d just spoken, and so had to try really hard to remember what I’d just said before I could speak the next clause. As a result, I spoke with great sloth, or rather, at a normal pace, but with long pauses between my speakings.
After saying as much as was necessary, we each lay down on a couch and dozed for a while. I listened intensely carefully to the sounds of the rainforest: there were a myriad different noises: crickets, rain on the leaves, rain on the wood of the house, treefrogs, birds, lizards, water dripping from leaves to other leaves… I couldn’t recognise much of it, but it struck me as immensely musical. I would like to make some concert-music out of it: a giant orchestra mimicking the sounds of that night; the piece framed by massive fortissimos of thunder; in which some of the more rhythmic sounds (the treefrogs have a very clear cry) came together for fleeting dance sections before separating again so that all you hear is the rainforest as a whole. But I’d have to go back there to notate the sounds properly if I were to write such a piece; so it’ll have to wait.
Fiona, Konrad and I drove back to Kingston the next day. We stopped by a beach for a bit of a swim. Because we didn’t quite trust the area, two of us swam while one of stayed back to watch the car keys, etc. While I was on guard duty, a bloke came up to me with a knife in his hand and started talking to me in a nigh-on incomprehensible accent about nothing in particular, before asking if I wanted to buy anything – fish, ganja, rope… I don’t think he meant anything by the knife, but he seemed to be high on cocaine or something, and it was pretty uncomfortable. After a few minutes of this, the increasingly heavy rain and close lightning (due to the distant hurricane) brought Fiona and Konrad back from the sea, and we scarpered.
The rain and lightning became extraordinary (although the lightning was distant). As we neared Kingston, well after nightfall, the weather cleared up, and we saw ahead of us a bright yellow moon rise above the Blue Mountains, the mountains that created Jamaica. I don’t know what caused its extraordinary colour.
Jamaica
I forget what my first impression of Jamaica was. I know that when we were in JFK waiting for the flight, Konrad and I were struck by the fact that we were the only white people on the plane. I guess my first impression was how poor the insides of airports are at creating memorable first impressions. On leaving the airport, though, there was a much more memorable impression: the heat. It’s not quite the heat that struck me, nor the humidity, both of which are high but not too high, generally; what really struck me was is its age. I don’t think Jamaica has ever been cold. The heat has been there for hundreds of years, and I feel like it’s made its way into every nook and cranny, and deep into the soil and concrete. It’s utterly ubiquitous. It gives the air a completely different quality to what you get in the British Isles, or even in the Mediterranean.
After that, we (my mum, who’d collected us from the airport, Konrad and I) stopped by a roadside fruit-seller, and bought some coconuts from him. He deftly tossed them into the most comfortable position, then sliced some of the husk off so that there was a little straw-sized hole into the nut’s innards. He then gave us some straw, and we had the freshest coconut milk there is. When we’d finished, we gave our coconuts back to the bloke, who cut them in half with some more machete strikes, and cut a sliver off the edge of the husk. We used this sliver like a spoon to scrape the gorgeous stuff off the lining of the inner cavity (it’s called the meat?). And that – drinking and then eating from coconuts on the side of a wide, quiet road, in the intense and humid heat, looking around at the sundrenched landscape, shooting the breeze with a dirt-poor smiling and filthy black man, leaning against our SUV – was the first proper impression of Jamaica.
That evening, we had dinner with my mum and her boyfriend, Bruce, who I was pleased to discover is a great guy. The following day, as he clearly knew how to ingratiate himself with his girlfriend’s son, he took us out jet-skiing. This was extraordinary: I didn’t know you could travel at 60mph across water! The acceleration on these things is also phenomenal. We used waves as ramps and got airborne for about a second a few times. And at the speeds we were going, and with the water coming up towards you and the water intake changing its sound as it started trying to take in air, a second seems like a very long time. We finished in the early afternoon, and went for some lunch at the marina.
That evening, we went to see a Molière play, Tartouffe. This was fascinating: the actors were good, one or two especially so, and the translation they were working with was great, and almost certainly amended by a Jamaican, as some of the colloquialisms were Jamaican ones. But what was really fantastic was the audience reaction: if there was a great joke, people laughed; if there was a great innuendo, they howled and slapped their knees. At one point, a man almost jumped out of his chair from laughing at an especially dirty pun. The actors played with the audience, too – slowing down the delivery of a great punchline everyone could see coming immensely, for example. The performance was immense fun. Probably deeply inauthentic, we decided; and without a doubt much the better for it.
We all agreed that this was a good way to spend our first day in Jamaica.
The reason I went to Jamaica (and by extension America) was that my biological mum, Fiona, is an artist, and she had won a competition to paint a gigantic 72’ wide by 8’ high mural in the international arrivals area of Montego Bay airport, which is a tourist airport in the North-West of the country. The grand opening of this mural took place on the 21st of October, so I had arranged to be there for it. (It’d been two years since I’d been to Jamaica, so I was looking for an excuse to go there anyway.) The reason Konrad came was because I figured he and my mum would get on extremely well, as they are very, very similar in their souls. (Happily, this was the case, and they each told me in private that they were deeply impressed by each other.)
We went to the opening as planned, despite fears that we wouldn’t make it because of worries that a nearby hurricane (an actual hurricane!) would create torrential rain. Jamaica’s roads are pretty appalling: heavy rain would have made them impassable, and at least would have made the traffic, which is far too heavy for the roads to take anyway, unbearable. To everyone’s pleasure, the threat of these impassable roads kept away a lot of the politicians who were supposed to speak at the ceremony, and so their shoes were filled by, said the natives, less jaded, less aloof figures who gave less interminable, more heartfelt speeches. I was less impressed by the speeches than other people seemed to be. Not one of the speakers had an eye for art, and I don’t think any of them really understood the mural. They kept talking about how it would bring lots of tourism-money to the country, without ever really saying anything about how it’s, y’know, a really nice piece of work that captures the spirit of Jamaica remarkably well.
The after-party was largely your typical after-party, with cocktails, finger food, evening dresses and a live band, except that it was in a fully-functioning airport. After a while, the airport staff overcame their professionalism and started nibbling at the food and sipping at the wine. No-one really minded, because Jamaican airports are not exactly terrorist targets, but it was a little disconcerting, amusingly so, to see a machine gun-wielding security guard wandering around smiling with a vodka sunset in his hand.
After the after-party we found a bar and had some rum and some soup. Konrad and I played some pool, and I got talking to a bus driver who had never left Jamaica, and had hardly even left Mo Bay. He was wholly unrepenting of this. And this seems reasonable enough.
After this, and after some driving back and forth looking for places to stay because our original plan fell through because the gate-man was asleep and no amount of honking was shifting him, Konrad and I found our bed for the night in the beautiful house of Nikki, a friend of Fiona’s. The house was dark, but not so much so that we couldn’t see that there was clearly a great creativity and love behind its decoration, and that it was surrounded by thick tropical forest. Nikki offered us a joint before leaving us for her bed. We smoked it on a couch on the veranda while talking about love and the painful bit that comes afterwards. The effect of the joint on me was that I kept forgetting sentence-clauses that I’d just spoken, and so had to try really hard to remember what I’d just said before I could speak the next clause. As a result, I spoke with great sloth, or rather, at a normal pace, but with long pauses between my speakings.
After saying as much as was necessary, we each lay down on a couch and dozed for a while. I listened intensely carefully to the sounds of the rainforest: there were a myriad different noises: crickets, rain on the leaves, rain on the wood of the house, treefrogs, birds, lizards, water dripping from leaves to other leaves… I couldn’t recognise much of it, but it struck me as immensely musical. I would like to make some concert-music out of it: a giant orchestra mimicking the sounds of that night; the piece framed by massive fortissimos of thunder; in which some of the more rhythmic sounds (the treefrogs have a very clear cry) came together for fleeting dance sections before separating again so that all you hear is the rainforest as a whole. But I’d have to go back there to notate the sounds properly if I were to write such a piece; so it’ll have to wait.
Fiona, Konrad and I drove back to Kingston the next day. We stopped by a beach for a bit of a swim. Because we didn’t quite trust the area, two of us swam while one of stayed back to watch the car keys, etc. While I was on guard duty, a bloke came up to me with a knife in his hand and started talking to me in a nigh-on incomprehensible accent about nothing in particular, before asking if I wanted to buy anything – fish, ganja, rope… I don’t think he meant anything by the knife, but he seemed to be high on cocaine or something, and it was pretty uncomfortable. After a few minutes of this, the increasingly heavy rain and close lightning (due to the distant hurricane) brought Fiona and Konrad back from the sea, and we scarpered.
The rain and lightning became extraordinary (although the lightning was distant). As we neared Kingston, well after nightfall, the weather cleared up, and we saw ahead of us a bright yellow moon rise above the Blue Mountains, the mountains that created Jamaica. I don’t know what caused its extraordinary colour.