Jamaica - Oracabessa/Ocho Rios (4/4)

Our final location was at Papa Curvin's in Oracabessa. The address was simply on the A3, the major road running on the coast, and the directions simply advised to stop to ask for Papa Curvin as everyone knew where he lived. At the time of reading the directions, this was a little odd but by this stage of the vacation, we came to realise that stopping and talking to people was how things worked. 

But we didn't need to- photos of the gates were all we needed to find his place. He was in the front of his house talking to someone who was apparently off to Kingston the next day and Papa wanted a part to fix his hot water system. It really felt to Amy and me that there were huge logistics issues to living in Jamaica. The roads were pretty empty of traffic, especially on the east end past Port Antonio, and it seemed like a lot of Jamaicans didn't have their own vehicles. Route taxis seemed to be the way the locals got around. The taxi drivers would be the most aggressive drivers who would often come right up behind your rear bumper and if they were nice, they would toot their horn before overtaking you as a warning. Amy and I got very used to identifying them and moving over to get them past safely. But then they would stop to load or offload a passenger forcing you to then pass them. Anyway, with no Amazon Prime vans and few travel options, it wasn't clear how people got things. The shacks at the sides of the road would do fruit and veg and the odd minimart could cover tinned staples but anything else seemed impossible to buy throughout most of the island. It appeared that waiting for a buddy to be making the journey to Kingston and providing a shopping list was the method Papa Curvin at least adopted as a solution and he must have been one of the richer people in the country.

I had read his bio on airbnb before coming so knew that he had been a musician for Boney M (now you'd have thought that Boney M was a Caribbean disco troop but actually he's a German producer called Frank Farian who died last month). According to Papa, Frank was an arsehole and the musicians/dancers in the group were exploited and their songs (which were based on traditional songs anyway) were stolen by him and they saw very little of the money from the hits.

His land was a narrow but deep stretch from the A3 to the coast and we were in the cabin right at the end, closest to the sea. It was simple but good for us and being behind his gate and with an actual lock on the door and with all four walls intact, it felt very safe and private. There were some other cabins on the property and we met Steven who was a regular visitor and stayed for long periods helping with the grounds and also a kindergarten teacher who was working with the local kids but she was from Denmark originally. Also we met Chris who worked on the property and he brought us fresh coconuts and spring water. It felt like there was a family here should we need it but our stay here was short.

The end of Papa Curvin's property was a cliff looking north. The sunsets weren't terrible. The waves crashed quite high and Papa Curvin and Steven told us that in some recent storms, the waves were getting to be 6-7 m tall and actually making it onto the property and damaged trees with the salt water.

Oracabessa was a small town not too far from Ocho Rios which hosted the cruise ships. The cruise ships tended to come in around 8 in the morning and leave around 4 in the afternoon. On our first day there, a cruise boat was in the harbour so we decided to try one of the B-tier tourist traps in the hope it would be less swamped. 

So we went to Konoko Falls which were small falls but also had a botanical garden, a zoo and a museum. I think we managed to see a lot more spiders than people- not that there were all that few people, there were just a lot of golden silk orb weaver spiders. The zoo was a little sad especially the aviaries that were too small for the birds to fly in (plus they had goats there... goats were everywhere on the island, sometimes resting on the bit of road you wanted to drive on even) but I saw a beautiful iguana. The museum was the best bit in the end for me as I hadn't seen much about the history of Jamaica and found the small amount of badly spelled information here fascinating. It mentioned the Taino, the native people, killed through contact with the Spanish who enslaved them and passed on disease (sigh). Then the Spanish brought across slaves from Africa and some Jamaican people can claim some Taino ancestry from the marriage of the Taino and African slaves (most Jamaicans are descended from the African slaves of course).

I liked the falls here for being pretty tame- there wasn't much water and I felt pretty comfortable climbing a portion of them. But I spent more time photographing the spiders than doing anything else here. They were magnificent and their webs were everywhere. 

We stopped off in Ocho Rios town on our way back from Konoko Falls and weren't too enamoured with the place except for the presence of an up-scale supermarket. Main Street was full of tourist shops with cheap tat and there seemed to be no way to get to the seafront to see the cruise ship. The beach was behind a tall fence obscuring the view and there was a charge to go through. We turned away from the crass and soulless tourism of the town.

But on our second day in the area, we again went to a tourist trap destination. This was easily the most developed and eager to fleece tourists of any location we went to but I still liked it. This was Dunn's River Falls. After paying the entrance fee, we were in a place that offered only waterfalls with no other attraction but these were my favourite falls. These falls are 180 m long and shallowly terraced climbing 55 m in total. It was popular for people to climb from the bottom of the falls (a spectacularly golden beach) to the top. We weren't up for the full length but we went out there and paddled where it seemed safe to. 

Despite coming on a non-cruise ship day, it was packed with people. They mainly went up as large tour groups being led by staff who also took photos of the tourists and led them in chants. I don't think I have been as enthusiastic about anything in my life as the tourists shouting "oggie oggie oggie" were. 

I mused over our order of destinations. Ochi was the most touristy by far and had the most amenities (specifically, it had the best supermarket) and the roads were really good in the area. Out in Oracabessa, we still got the roadside fruit vendors and taste of Jamaican life. This could have been a better starting point for our trip than Treasure Beach which was really going in at the deep end. 

We bought a pineapple and some watermelon from the roadside in Oracabessa and suspect that we were grossly overcharged but we never wanted to haggle (well, I haggled once in Ocho Rios for a t-shirt but the vendor was at Dunn's River and so saw a lot of tourists come through each day unlike all the other locations we bought things at which rarely saw tourists). As compensation, the vendor gave us some things we assumed were potatoes until he named them "Jamaican kiwi". Google tells me they were naseberries which sounds like something out of the BFG and tasted of brown sugar.

But then again, maybe the shock of Treasure Beach was best and having a softer transition back to civilisation was good to ready us to go home. Hard to say. Our stay in Treasure Beach was a tad too brief for us to feel much towards it. I don't think I really got into Jamaica until the mountains which is where I learnt to relax and talk to everyone I met. Generosity of time seemed to be something they truly valued. And I don't think I will move on from the views and the solitude we had in the mountains. The terrifying road gave me literal nightmares but I think I was happiest here with the simple food, foraged fruits and easily made friends.

Our rental car at the end of the trip. Those potholes were really bad.