13 April 2006 20:14
Long Bay Part IVSomehow we decided that it was an absolute must to see the Sunday morning sunrise from the beach. I don't really recall being involved in the decision making process, but still I found myself setting my alarm for 0530 in the morning. [pause a moment to consider the evils of peer pressure...]
Dawn, Sunrise, and Reflections
The sunrise was alright. Not to be callous but I've seen 'em afore. Okay, okay, so it was actually fun to chill (literally) on the beech watching the sun rise with a bunch of friends. This was a rather protracted affair that lasted over an hour (we might have slightly misjudge when the sun was actually going to rise). After it was good and up we took a walk to the north end to admire the power of water en masse.
Not your favorite swimming hole and "Long Bay in the Morning Haze"
and the crew: Diana, Leah, Ben, Ryan (taken and posted w/o permission)
We had now been up for two hours and it was high time for some breakfast. We accomplished this at the resturant below our lodgings. I had a cheese omelet which is probably something I won't order in Jamaica again. In retrospect I should have known, but.... The mass-produced super-processed cheese of choice here comes in metal tins and is similar in texture to Velveeta. I grew up eating Velveeta on occasion, but even so I don't have an overwhelming love of it. Having not grown up on the cheese here makes it quite a bit less palatable.
While we were waiting for breakfast to arrive (again cooked from scratch--makes you appreciate the days when Mom used to spend 20 - 30 minutes making breakfast before calling you out of bed) I headed down to the post office to mail a letter I'd written last night. Lo and behold the PO didn't have a drop box! I walked around the dumb thing three times before leaving completely flummoxed. Who ever heard of a post office without a drop box? I wound up mailing it ten miles further down the road at Manchoneal a couple hours later.
Not surprisingly, Long Beach at nine o'clock on a Sunday morning is practically a ghost town. Still a little bit of walking and we managed to rustle up a ride, though it took another five minutes of haggling before we agreed on a price. Our destination was Reach Falls, a set of waterfalls nestled back against the ridgeline that parallels the eastern coast of Jamaica.
This was actually my third attempt to reach the falls. The first time I'd been alone and just thought I'd give it a shot. Don't think I even had swimming gear along. A bunch of guys flagged me down at the turn off to tell me the falls were closed. Oh? This was news. This was soon after Hurricane Ivan, so I inquired if that was the reason? No, they'd been closed for over a year now, while the facilities were undergoing renovation. Oh? That's too bad, well, I guess I'll head home. No, wait, you haven't given me a chance to finish telling you everything. See, I was a tour guide while it was still open, so I know the place and for a likkle fee I can take you down there and show you around a little.
un-hunh. sure.
Problem was, I believed him. To my credit I'd only been on the island a couple months then, but I still should have known better. Wayne, one of our Jamaican dispersers set me straight a while later.
So when Paul and Sib showed up and we were messing around on that part of the island so I decided to give it another shot. I was still determined not to pay anything, so we sailed past the guys at the turn off with ease. They were too busy lounging in the shade of a ramshackle lean-to beside the intersection to react quickly enough. Unfortunately for my scheme they had the road blocked off another mile further along...a rather permanent pile of concrete chunks and rocks that looked like they'd been there a while (they were still there when I went this third time).
If I'd known then what I know now we probably could have paid the two guys sitting there $200 to $300 to "watch our car" and walked on down to the falls. But for all I knew it was another two miles down the road. On that day instead we turned around and headed on up the coast.
But this time I was determined that the third time was to be the charm. I'd also determined that it was probably inevitable that I was going to have to pay to actually see the falls. Resigned to this we hired on a guide by the name of Campbell. His asking price was something ridiculous, but we managed to talk him down to $250 a head before he lead us down to the falls. He then proceeded to sit around looking very bored for the three hours we loafed there.
Upon reaching the falls, I was very very impressed. They were absolutely gorgeous. YS Falls in St. Elizabeth had held the number one spot for public attractions on my personal list of favourites, but Reach Falls booted YS to number two within minutes.
With water of gorgeous blue hues that my mediocre photography skills are unable to conquer in all their splendor, the falls themselves are about 20 feet high. But then there are smaller falls and rapids both upstream and downstream as well as some very deep pools. We wound up spending the better part of three hours there ranging up and down the river too see what there was to be had.
Four random pictures of Reach Falls, including one with Ben in a position that his mother probably wouldn't appreciate seeing.
When we first arived, there was a local kid diving off the top of the main fall. He managed this with an easy seeming grace and flair, yet for some odd reason I wasn't very inclined to try and out-do him. Ben was wanting to jump but had second and third (and fourth) thoughts when he got to the top. The local kid dived a few more times to show him how easy it was done, but Ben didn't take the bait.
Then Diana climbed up to the top, said "I'm going", and proceeded over the edge. {sigh}. We can't have that now, can we? Ben and myself followed in short order, though I later admitted quite readily to Diana that the only reason I'd gone was because she went first.
The afternoon was beginning to proceed along and we still had a ways to go yet. We changed clothes and started out on foot. We were around a mile down the road before a taxi happened by and we hitched a ride down to the main coastal road. Upon reaching we sat in the middle of the intersection and haggled over a price to get us all the way to Morant Bay. Being Sunday the coasters were out in reduced numbers. We'd be able to catch one from Morant Bay for Kingston, but there were none running between Morant Bay and Port Antonio (the stretch we were on). Our driver argued (quite correctly) that it could be a while before we caught an empty route taxi to Morant Bay. Chances were they'd have two to three people in them already and no room for all five of us.
Five was actually too many to fit legally into a car anyway. On our way from Long Bay to Reach Falls that morning we'd passed a police checkpoint just before leaving the main road. We were talking and enjoying ourselves when suddenly the driver slowed down and pulled off to the edge amongst two or three other cars parked along the edge. He jumped out and walked around back to talk with the other men along the edge of the road. Another 400 feet up the road there was a police car with two cops standing, one on each side of the road, to flag down passing motorists.
One of the men behind us was holding a roll of cash in one hand, I wasn't able to watch to whole time but I'd assume money changed hands from our driver to him. Our driver then jumped back in the car and we drove on through the checkpoint without the police batting an eye--despite having one too many tourists packed in the back. It was interesting because he (our driver) expressed more concern over being overloaded than he did over not having a taxi license (official "vehicles for hire" in Jamaica have red license plates, normal private not-for-hire vehicles have white plates as did this driver). Either way it was a common example of police corruption in Jamaica because we were clearly overloaded and clearly paying passengers (as in, we can't help screaming "white tourists!" by our very presence).
Now what all this says about us for having illegally overloaded an illegal taxi in the first place, I'd rather not think about too hard. The god of Convenience is easy to please with a sacrifice of ethics. (Given we were traveling on a weekend, our "more ethical" options would have involved the expenditures of more time and money).
Meanwhile the Mennonite traits in our group were showing themselves plainly in our haggling for a ride to Morant Bay as our driver refused to budge from $1300 total and various persons of our group refused to budge from $1250. It was getting to the point of ridiculous before we railroaded a 3-2 vote through our group in favor of shelling out the measly $50 extra (US 80ยข). With that, we shut the car doors we'd so threateningly opened and cruised off down the road for Morant Bay.
(don't you wish you could haggle with the Walmart clerks over the price of a pair of jeans or the cost of a dozen eggs?)
An hour and a half later or so we finally pulled in. My shoulder was in agony and I couldn't feel my feet, but despite not having moved in an hour and a half the ride was relatively eventless. He dropped us off near the coaster station and we popped across the street to get a late lunch at Mothers (a Jamaican fast food chain). After downing a collection of patties and coco bread (and relishing the air conditioning while we had it), we headed for the next stop.
First there was the standard shouting match between the two conductors there over who was lying hardest. In reality the choice this time was easy: we took the coaster that was fullest--it'd be leaving soonest. This particular coaster had issues. Rather, the transmission had issues. Apparently it wouldn't go into first with the engine running. This meant coasting by a number of bus stops at a slow enough speed to let people egress and ingress, but still maintaining enough momentum to avoid stalling as we started off again in second. If he did have to come to a complete stop the driver'd leave the engine running with the clutch disengaged (this was a rare coaster in that it had air conditioning and no music...usually those variables are reversed). When we were ready to go again he'd kill the engine, shift to first, engage the clutch, and restart the engine. This produced a lovely jerking start as the starter turned not only the engine but the drivetrain as well before the engine caught and the rpm's came up.
Somewhere along the line this would have required a disabling of the safety switch in the ignition/starter circuit, but vehicle safety inspections here are a joke.
We stayed on the coaster all the way to the end of the line, in this case Parade in downtown Kingston. There the buses and coasters actually have a decent parking area laid out for them with a semblance of order. Leah works in that part of town so she knew which bus to catch to get back up to Halfway Tree. Bus fare was $50 per to ride as far as you liked. Things got a little interesting passing through the Cross Roads area when a somewhat unstable woman got on board. She spent the first while yelling threats to a man outside the bus before finally settling down into a seat across from the bulk of our group.
She then spent the rest of our ride voicing death threats against a good number of people, including us as she pointed to each of us in turn saying, "I'm gwanna keel you and you and you and you and you..." etc. The stakes raised themselves a bit when she reached into her purse and pulled out a kitchen knife to wave around. It wasn't the sharpest looking, but sharp enough to make us a little uncomfortable as she casually pointed at people with it. She spent a lot of time muttering across the isle at Diana and Leah in very thick patois and sheer nonsense. Leah recognized her since she'd come into the human rights center where she works often enough to get banned.
Eventually we reached Halfway Tree and filed off the bus without further incident. Ben and I were headed in a different direction than the girls and Ryan, so we parted ways and spent our fifteen minute walk having a good but semi-inconclusive conversation on how to relate and react to people who are irrational or otherwise "not of sound mind".
===
Well, complete with the grand finale of an "interesting" coaster ride, our trip to Long Beach was for all practical purposes over. After a visit to Ron and Gus's to collect some of my stuff I wound up over at the girls' house again waiting for Paul to come pick me up on his way home from work. In reality though, I never did have a "typical" coaster ride (if the quintessential concept of a "normal" coaster ride can be said to exist). Never was the music loud to the point of deafness, never was the music foul to the point of oppression, never was the driving unsafe to the point of fear, never was the capacity laden to the point of overflow, and never were we blessed with a sermon. (Though I've had the sermon experience before in Nicaragua where one of the passengers stood up front with a megaphone and preached for 20 or 30 minutes before passing out some tracts and a collection hat--actually a rather positive experience despite my ignorance of the sermon content. The passengers responded on the favourable side of neutral (though not by much I'll grant), and the tracts were actually produced by Beachy Amish in Costa Rica).
A good time was had by all, and I spent well under US $50 during the course of a two day vacation spree.
And although I had a good public transportation experience, think I could get around with some degree of proficiency and economy on my own, and remain willing to use public transportation in the future...it's still really nice to have a car.
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