30 December 2006 16:58
back in november i some how allowed myself to be talked into spending a weekend in negril. it's not something i ever really saw myself doing, but i figured maybe it was time i actually experienced that which i had so long lambasted from the safety of ignorance.i traded off my second and third flights on friday to Rick to give us a head start on the ride to negril. it took us a bit longer to get there, but there were some extenuating circumstances. after doing my flight over the eastern end of the island, i wrapped up some paperwork then headed up to august town to pick up Drew. school was mostly out for the day when i got there a few minutes after one, which in reality means nothing since a bunch of kids with nowhere else to go were running around the school yard screaming. i tend to get weird looks when i show up there...whities aren't exactly common. i showed up one time last year to pick up Ben and he told me later that one of the teachers had came to get him saying that there was a strange white man in the schoolyard--thus it had to be for Ben. even for a friday afternoon, there weren't as many kids as normal. the past week had been fairly disorganized...many students and teachers didn't show up due to local violence that had been ongoing one week prior to that. since the august town constabulary is located right in front of the primary school it acts as a focal point for gun battles between gangs in neighboring communities and the police force. all three of the salters i've known who taught/teach at the school there have heard gunfire that was a little too close for comfort.
Drew and I then retraced my route out of august town over to upper waterloo to pick up Elizabeth. with her on board we turned westward in earnest, finagling our way on to washington boulevard which in turn dumps onto the A1. thus began the portion of our trip that i have traveled over many times in the past two years--Kingston to Mandeville. the toll road with it's (fantastically fast [3]) speed limit of 110kph does greatly aid in making the trip shorter. with it's help Spanish Town and Old Harbour go by painlessly (i've spent my fair share of time crawling through the center of Spanish Town when the bypass happened to be closed in my direction). T1 dumps us out west of Freetown and the ride continues on the A2 (which we would eventually follow all the way to Negril). May Pen goes by on our north and the road is still good two-lane until reaching Toll Gate where we begin winding our way up the valley along the Milk River. here's a 10km stretch of rough asphalt, a chance to spend a lot of time tail-gating the car in front in tense expectation of a four second passing window that's always waiting just waiting around the curve. at least, that's the predominant view of any taxi driver chosen at random.
we actually spent an unexpected amount of time in porous due to an accident right in the middle of town. traffic was backed up all the way to Whitney Turn on the parish line between Clarendon and Manchester. i smile every time i drive across that line...it always reminds me of driving across the Maryland/Delaware state line where there's a sharp increase or decrease in pavement quality depending which way one is driving. in this case, the rough unmarked two-lane road of Clarendon changes to a marked, reflectored! (a rarity here), and very smooth two-lane road of Manchester. not that having a nice road does much to improve safety since there is also a corresponding 'improvement' in best possible forward speed. porous is a nice little town, but two forty-five in the afternoon sees hundreds of school kids trailing along the gutter (there isn't enough room for a sidewalk) with hurried traffic hurtling through town. porous gives every indication of being a laid back village along a small mountain river that suddenly woke up one day to find that the main road between it's parish capitol and the national capitol just happened to run smack dab through the center of town. of course, it's always been that way, but i dare say the traffic volume is a bit higher now that it was back when the first horse drawn carriages carried the elite through town on their way to the great houses of mandeville.
the accident itself wasn't very pretty (when are they?). i've actually seen what i would consider a high number of accident scenes in the past month, including a hit pedestrian who was still lying in the middle of the road waiting for an ambulance when we filed by in the traffic. with all the accidents i've observed lately i hope God's not trying to tell me something i'm not picking up on. once past the scene traffic sped up and we hauled up the long grade to mandeville. somewhere around in here i found myself handling a call on my cell phone and trying to write down a number at the same time while driving. guess the accident didn't make much of an impression...
we picked up Laurel at jbc and set back out. Spur Tree Hill, Goshen, Santa Cruz (we took the bypass around the north side), Lacovia, Middle Quarters, we skipped Black River by cutting across to Crawford and continued until we wound up in Whitehouse. here we stopped at a bakery for some fresh coco bread and hard-do (thanks Philip!). the road here is in so-so shape as it winds along the narrow stretch of coast crammed between the sea and the 2000' hills of southeastern Westmoreland. we made good time though until hitting Savannah-la-Mar at 1730. whilst not the most brilliant time to be driving through a parish capitol on a friday, it wasn't actually too bad. we did take a somewhat scenic tour after i missed the turnoff for the main traffic route. i say 'route' instead of 'road' because it involves several ninety degree corners, some one-way action, and even one acute corner in order to follow it. instead we took the old route through the middle with it's requisite roundabout. this was a nominal one where a random tractor tire or telephone pole is thrown into the middle of the intersection just to make things interesting. often local traffic has its own ideas about how an intersection is to be used, and it's hard for the stranger just passing through to pick up on whatever nuances there are regarding traffic flow. i've chosen...'poorly' before, but this time managed to wing my way through without getting honked at.
i don't think we lost much time with the deviation, but it was probably just enough to put us behind an accident instead of in front of it (or in it). we were only about half a kilometer from the scene, but we sat for about half an hour or forty-five minutes before anybody started moving. the incident really wouldn't have been of much note except for the combination of several factors. A) it was a pretty serious accident and people probably died, so i shouldn't minimalize it too much despite not knowing them (enter rant). B) i've mentioned how many accidents i'd seen already, this just added another to the supposed list of whatever God was trying to tell me. C) the accident involved not only two vehicles, but a power line pole as well. an interesting side effect of this was to disrupt power for the remainder of our journey. not only was it dark while driving through urban areas (the sun went down while we were waiting for the accident scene to clear), but when we got to negril forty-five minutes later it was still dark.
we commented on the fact that the light was out (jamaicans will often say "there is no light", meaning "there is no electricity"), but it didn't really sink in until we hit negril proper and turned up the strip. Elizabeth had made reservations ahead of time, but regardless it was an interesting job trying to find a small hotel/resort that none of us had been to before amidst the cornucopia of unlit resort entrances. due to the diligent watch of my passengers (and some slower than usual driving on my part--a real trial i must confess) we found it on our first pass and didn't even have to turn around. a few candles were lit here and there, but overall darkness reigned. our check-in was painless enough and soon we found ourselves with two cabins and one lit candle per cabin.
welcome to negril.
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