“Life is one big road with lots of signs, so when you riding through the ruts, don’t you complicate your mind.” — Bob Marley, Wake Up and Live
The thumping reggae beat fills the van. Everyone has stopped chattering and the raw music is the only thing. Outside the windows of our 14-passenger 1999 Toyota Hiace van, the night and Jamaica slide by.
The nervousness that our motley group all felt the first day is mostly gone. In the darkness, I look over at the silhouette of our driver, Roosevelt, and am glad for his calm driving demeanour. Things can get a bit hairy on the twisty, tight, crowded roads in the mountains.
Roosevelt, driver and now friend, provided smooth, skilled driving around Jamaica and was a wealth of information for Lisa and her fellow travellers.
Garry Sowerby,
The first night, when we left the confines of the resort and headed up Long Hill, leaving Montego Bay behind, traffic was dense. It gets dark early in the Caribbean, but people don’t stop moving. They stroll down the centre of the skinny roads, barely visible, selling everything from grilled shrimp to sticks of sugarcane. There’s an implicit understanding that you don’t hit them and they hopefully get out of the way.
The busy town of Anchovy in the mountains was our destination. Train Station Bar, on the main square of the town, is on the list of National Heritage Sites of Jamaica. The one-room high-ceilinged bar operated as a train station on the Kingston-Montego Bay Line from 1894 until 1992. History and heat seep from the walls despite the fact that they are virtually covered with posters of naked woman advertising rum.
From there we bounced further into the mountains to a place called Awful Gully. It wasn’t that bad. We stopped at a small roadside bar, ubiquitous in the Caribbean Islands, a shack with more posters lining the walls and more rum bottles lining the bar. An intense game of dominoes was in progress.
The ride back into Montego Bay was twitchy and action-packed with roadside pedestrians suddenly materializing from the darkness, horns bleeping, large, tattered trucks trying to turn at intersections onto impossibly narrow roads, locals yelling directions: “Back up, stop, wait here, go ahead, back up!”
Confusion reigned, at least to my Canadian eyes.
The 1999 Toyota Hiace, a sturdy four-cylinder diesel engine 14-passenger van, dubbed Magic Bus by Lisa and the group of friends with whom she tooled around Jamaica recently.
Garry Sowerby,
Day Two. Tropical rain pours over the island all day. Roosevelt collects us from the front of the hotel and we pile into our “Magic Bus,” the sturdy Toyota Hiace, with a low-maintenance four-cylinder diesel engine that has racked up 400,000 kilometres.
We hug the shoreline for more than an hour, heading west. At Dry Harbour, now called Discovery Bay, we climb out to visit the spot where Christopher Columbus landed and “discovered” Jamaica, claiming the island for Spain.
The Taino and the Arawak, the people that had lived here since 4000 B.C., could have told Columbus that Xaymaca, their name for the island, land of wood and water, already existed.
From Discovery Bay, we veer inland to the heart of the island. In the warm driving rain, through the mountains, with torrents of water rushing down at us from the hilly roads, the hectic towns are alive with merchants and buyers, people going about their business and school kids in plain brown uniforms running to catch buses.
We are on a pilgrimage, it seems, to Nine Miles, Saint Ann Parish, to see the place where Robert Nesta Marley, international reggae star and committed Rastafarian, was born and is now resting, hopefully in peace.
After our tour of the Bob Marley Mausoleum, the group is quiet. We are under the spell of the legacy of Bob Marley, whose prophetic given name Nesta, means ‘wise messenger’.
We pass the brightly-painted school that his mother, Cedella Malcolm Marley Booker, built in 1999 to honour her son and all he had tried to do with his music to help promote social change, to end the poverty of the island, and to move people’s feet.
In the driving rain, as we pass Marley’s school in our Magic Bus heading back to the unreality of our resort, we are subdued by the three scrawny boys that race barefoot alongside our van, hoping for one of our hands to extend some crumpled dollar bills out the window so they can buy lunch at school tomorrow.
After a third day of tooling around, our island driving adventure is almost over.
We’re sad to leave the sun, summer and vacation stupor, but so glad we ventured off the resort for most of our trip here to sample a tiny sliver of the real Jamaica, God’s land of wood and water … and rum, reggae and sugar.
For me, the warmth, friendliness and spirit of the people is the wealth of Jamaica. The almost three million people on the 11,000-square-kilometre island are a rich blend of cultures and languages, going back 6,000 years or more, making Jamaica’s motto “Out of Many, One People” ring true.
Yes, the island has its problems but there are many Jamaicans working to better their home, perhaps doing what Bob Marley advocated in Pass it On: “Live for yourself and you will live in vain. Live for others, and you will live again.”
Follow Lisa on Twitter: @FrontLady
