(Update from January 15, 2011)
Before anything else in this email, I have to say how absolutely awful the news of the terrible flooding in QLD has been – we’ve been following it on the BBC and online. I know that many of you back at home have been affected. It seems to have brought out a real camaraderie between people in the state– I hope the cleanup is progressing as smoothly and quickly as it can. We’ve been thinking of you all even more than usual.
It’s been a good few months since my last update so thought it was about time for another group email to fill you all in on what we’ve been doing with ourselves now that we’re out of Sth America. The answer is the Caribbean! Overall, it was a very different travelling experience to South America, which is very backpacker friendly and filled with dirt-cheap hostels. The Caribbean islands are very much more geared towards super exclusive and expensive all-inclusive resorts – which were obviously way out of our price range. So it forced us to be much more pro-active in our backpacking to find cheap accommodation and transport options. It was much more challenging travelling, but extraordinarily satisfying to be really and truly getting off the beaten track and having experiences (some good, some bad, some exceptionally ugly!) that few other tourists get.
We began in Jamaica – and I can honestly say I’ve never been anywhere like it. The first thing to say is that many of the stereotypes are completely justified – the Jamaicans really do say ‘Yeah Mon’ at the end of practically every sentence and wear dreadlocks wrapped up in brightly coloured bandanas. There are spaced-out Rastafarian dudes floating around everywhere. Also, in many ways it is an extremely threatening place, and its reputation for violence is very well deserved. I’m sure that the way we were travelling meant we saw a much ‘rawer’ version of the country, visiting the cheap, out-of-the-way places where there is much less control than in the major tourist hubs where there are resorts galore.
But I will get to that in due course. To begin at the beginning, we started in Kingston, and I’m excited to announce that we now have a third travelling companion – Marco’s best friend Brett Norvill (known to many of you as Arch) arrived in Kingston 2 days after we did and has been travelling with us for well over 2 months now. It’s been great to have his company and to see a familiar face from home after so long. In any case, after meeting up with Brett we didn’t spend long in Kingston – it is one hell of a city and has one of the highest murder rates of any city in the world. We did make a trip to the house where Bob Marley was born and grew up (his marijuana plant is maintained and to this day!) and also went for a brief visit to the ‘Downtown’. It’s a shame as it was obviously quite a nice city in its heyday (whenever that was), but is now so run down that practically every building is either half collapsed or has been patched with rusted corrugated iron with bullet holes smattered here and there. Incredibly dirty and derelict, there were loads of people sleeping on the streets and ferreting through garbage bins so we didn’t stay long but high-tailed it back to our guesthouse in the much safer uptown area. Our hostel owner gave us strict instructions that we had to be home before dark or we would almost certainly be robbed (at the very least) or shot (at the very worst). Eeek!
From Kingston, we headed to Port Antonio on the Northern coast, and it was on the drive there that we really got our first glimpse of the natural beauty of Jamaica. We drove through a mountain range covered in lovely lush, tropical jungle – vivid green, dangling creepers, and small shacks built on the hillsides here and there painted in bright colours. Port Antonio itself was a much nicer place than Kingston – quite a small little town, and very easy to walk from one side to the other. We saw a couple of interesting tourist-y things here – we went to see the Blue Lagoon from the film of the same name with Brooke Shields. It had been raining the day before and the waters of the lagoon were a little churned up so apparently not as blue as it usually is, but none the less it was brilliant to look at! Such vividly aqua water right up against the lush green of the jungle that rises all around it - beautiful.
Another interesting thing about Port Antonio was that there were a LOT of Rastafarians living there, several of whom we made friends with and spent quite a lot of time with. I find the Rastafarian culture quite fascinating and tried on many occasions to get them to explain their beliefs to me, but I was never able to get a straight answer – quite possibly because I never managed to find one that wasn’t stoned! All I got from them was various disjointed rambling about pathways to love and freedom, inner lights and the Power of the Self. To be totally honest, I don’t know how many of them truly subscribe to the Rasta beliefs (or even understand them!), and how many of them just use it as an excuse for a lifestyle of continual pot-smoking and sitting on the beach. But who am I to say – perhaps I just never met the right one to explain it to me!
It was also in Port Antonio that we really got our first real glimpse the drug culture of Jamaica. Everyone knows it has a reputation for weed – what we didn’t know is that there is also a real problem there with much, much harder drugs. Literally EVERY TIME we stepped onto the street we were constantly approached by locals who would come up and offer us not only weed but cocaine, speed, ice, crack and heroin. No joke. They are persistent, too. When we refused their offers they wouldn’t leave us alone but would get very, very aggressive and threatening and demand an explanation as to why we were insulting them by refusing to buy their drugs. A classic phrase from the Jamaicans was “why you disrespectin’ me, white guy?” It is a phenomenally drug-soaked culture, and as a result there is really a continual sense that violence could break out at any time. Kids that looked no older than 12 were smoking big fat joints on the streets, and it’s a disturbing moment when you realise that the guy you saw leaning against your bus smoking a joint the size of a cigar is actually your bus driver.
We also spent a fair bit of time at Long Beach, where (thanks to Marco’s totally awesome, absolutely fearless bargaining skills) we managed to get a villa literally ON the beach (at high tide, the water lapped at the stairs of the balcony) at a ridiculously cheap price, and spent about 10 days doing nothing but sitting on our balcony drinking beers and exploring the various picture-postcard perfect beaches that surrounded the area. The highlight would definitely have been Winifred beach – it was small, but quite literally breathtaking. Pure white sand, and the sea was thousands of different shades of blue and green.
When we finally managed to drag ourselves away from Long Beach, we briefly visited the more touristy cities of Ocho Rios and Montego Bay but didn’t stay long as enormous cruise ships were constantly disgorging countless tourists who swarmed everywhere. We made an unfortunate mistake in Montego Bay as well: booked ourselves accommodation online in a mysteriously cheap ‘guesthouse’, only to discover upon arriving that it was actually a brothel – right down to red lightbulbs in the rooms and girls soliciting Marco and Brett in the hallways. It’s funny in hindsight, but at the time made my skin absolutely crawl!
Our final stop in Jamaica was Negril, where you can rest assured we spent many, many hours snoozing and swimming on the world famous 7-mile beach – again, pristine sand, stunning colours in the water, and great bars and restaurants scattered along the waterfront. Each evening we enjoyed stupendous views of the sun setting over the Caribbean sea, and if it wasn’t for having to constantly fight off the locals trying to sell you drugs or rides on their jetskiis, it would have been heaven! It managed to come pretty close even so :-).
From Jamaica, we headed to the Dominican Republic. The capital, Santo Domingo, was really beautiful. In the historical centre of town, there was lots of the traditional Spanish architecture with the low buildings and delicate terraces, and lots of lovely lights strung up in the trees everywhere which made the place very pretty. We visited Fortaleza Ozama, which is basically a castle with lots of turrets, and the boys had great fun playing with all the military canons and guns on display. Also, just down the road from where we were staying was the oldest cathedral anywhere in the New World – and believe it or not, it was air-conditioned!
Once again we avoided the major resort cities in the Dom
inican, and stuck to the cheaper hinterland areas as much as we could. We spent a week staying in a ranch in a tiny town called Los Camados where we heartily enjoyed ourselves walking and riding motorbikes through the coffee plantations in the mountains and exploring the tiny towns and villages. A very rustic place with intermittent power and no hot water, but calm and very peaceful.
We also visited MontiCristi, which just happened to be a very close to the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and as we were so close Marco and I decided to go for a day trip to the border town and see what we could of Haiti. It was a very sharp divide between the two countries, and no doubt as to which was poorer. They were divided by a river, and the Haitian side was literally COVERED in rubbish, and there were UN vans making their way around here and there. On the ride back to the DR our bus was boarded by the Dominican military 3 times to have our passports checked – obviously they have a huge problem with Haitian refugees illegally sneaking across the border. And considering the problems Haiti has faced, I suppose you can’t blame them for trying.
Our final stop in the DR was the fun little town of Puerto Playa, where we visited another fortress and did day trips to the various beaches around the area. Once again, it had the lovely Spanish-style layout of terraced buildings fanning out from a central plaza, and as it was coming up to Christmas there were lots of beautiful Christmas decorations in the streets. We spent 3 weeks all up in the DR, and it was really a lovely place. Very calming after Jamaica, too!
Our final stop in the Caribbean was Puerto Rico, where we are now. For those of you who don’t know, Marco is actually half Puerto Rican so he has plenty of relatives here, and we have been staying with his Grandmother in the capital: San Juan. It’s been lovely to have a place to call home for the past month, and to escape from the constant packing and unpacking!
The historical area of San Juan is beautifully distinctive; with very bright buildings and narrow cobblestoned streets. For some reason I have yet to discover, the cobblestones are blue instead of the usual gray, which makes it very distinctive. We’ve spent a good few days just wandering around the area and exploring the 2 fortresses that stand over the city; one of which (Fortaleza San Filipe del Morro) is by far the most impressive fortress we’ve seen on our travels to date.
We did have the excitement of a small earthquake on Christmas Eve – we were sitting in the flat in the evening when there was a very loud noise and everything shuddered and vibrated, making the plates and cups on the shelves rattle like mad. It didn’t last long but was thrilling none the less.
As Marco’s Grandma owns a car and was kind enough to lend it to us, we did lots of day trips to various places around the island. Most notably, we went to visit the town of Hatillo on the day of their annual Masquerade Festival. This basically consists of the Puerto Ricans starting to drink at the crack of dawn, and dressing up in flamboyant costumes and driving around town on their floats. The floats are really just jeeps that they have covered in crepe and decorations to make it as bright and colourful as possible. There is also a prize for the noisiest float, and as a result of this they are all fitted out with enormous speakers and fog horns, and they BLARED!!! We had come prepared with earplugs, but even through them the noise was absolutely deafening, and to top it off the people on the floats were carrying bottles of shaving foam, silly string, chocolate sauce and super-soakers filled with beer that they squirted all over the crowd so by the end of it we were covered in a sticky mess. It was absolutely frantic, crazy and insane – I’ve never seen a festival like it but it was brilliant fun.
Also near Hatillo we went to visit the Arecebo Radio Telescope – the biggest satellite telescope in the world. It was the one used in the movies ‘Contact’ and ‘The Dish’ – so lots of pop-culture references as well. It was a beautiful drive to get there (somewhat longer than it needed to be thanks to our dubious navigating!) but also very impressive to look at once you got close up. It was absolutely mammoth, and steel cables as thick as a person went from the edges of the dish to the tops of the mountains to help keep it suspended. A miracle of engineering as well as technology!!
Another huge highlight of our time in Puerto Rico was our trip to a small island of the coast called Viequez. We caught a ferry over there, and while Viequez itself as an island was pretty enough, the real highlight is the Bioluminescent Bay. The bioluminescent bay is a sheltered area of water where bioluminescent microbes thrive. Basically, the water looks normal as long as it is still, but whenever something disturbs the water the microbes are irritated... and SPARKLE!!! Literally, sparkle and glow so much it really does look like magic. We were lucky enough to get a bit of a cloudy night so the moon and stars were covered and it was extra dark. We kayaked out to the middle of the bay and the wakes of our kayaks and the splashes from our paddles spread our behind us gleaming and glimmering in the dark. Once we were in the middle of the bay we went swimming... and I really cannot describe it. The best I can do is to say it was like my whole body was a lit sparkler underwater – the bright silver sparks shooting out from all over our skin and hair. I’d never seen anything like it in the world – it was ethereal and magical.
Well, that is about it for now. Tonight is our last night in Puerto Rico before we fly back to Colombia for a brief second visit to catch up with friends and give Brett a small taste of Sth America. From there we head into the US where, among other adventures, we will be attending the ‘Ultra Music Festival’ in Miami – I suggest you google it and check out the line up!
Before anything else in this email, I have to say how absolutely awful the news of the terrible flooding in QLD has been – we’ve been following it on the BBC and online. I know that many of you back at home have been affected. It seems to have brought out a real camaraderie between people in the state– I hope the cleanup is progressing as smoothly and quickly as it can. We’ve been thinking of you all even more than usual.
It’s been a good few months since my last update so thought it was about time for another group email to fill you all in on what we’ve been doing with ourselves now that we’re out of Sth America. The answer is the Caribbean! Overall, it was a very different travelling experience to South America, which is very backpacker friendly and filled with dirt-cheap hostels. The Caribbean islands are very much more geared towards super exclusive and expensive all-inclusive resorts – which were obviously way out of our price range. So it forced us to be much more pro-active in our backpacking to find cheap accommodation and transport options. It was much more challenging travelling, but extraordinarily satisfying to be really and truly getting off the beaten track and having experiences (some good, some bad, some exceptionally ugly!) that few other tourists get.
We began in Jamaica – and I can honestly say I’ve never been anywhere like it. The first thing to say is that many of the stereotypes are completely justified – the Jamaicans really do say ‘Yeah Mon’ at the end of practically every sentence and wear dreadlocks wrapped up in brightly coloured bandanas. There are spaced-out Rastafarian dudes floating around everywhere. Also, in many ways it is an extremely threatening place, and its reputation for violence is very well deserved. I’m sure that the way we were travelling meant we saw a much ‘rawer’ version of the country, visiting the cheap, out-of-the-way places where there is much less control than in the major tourist hubs where there are resorts galore.
But I will get to that in due course. To begin at the beginning, we started in Kingston, and I’m excited to announce that we now have a third travelling companion – Marco’s best friend Brett Norvill (known to many of you as Arch) arrived in Kingston 2 days after we did and has been travelling with us for well over 2 months now. It’s been great to have his company and to see a familiar face from home after so long. In any case, after meeting up with Brett we didn’t spend long in Kingston – it is one hell of a city and has one of the highest murder rates of any city in the world. We did make a trip to the house where Bob Marley was born and grew up (his marijuana plant is maintained and to this day!) and also went for a brief visit to the ‘Downtown’. It’s a shame as it was obviously quite a nice city in its heyday (whenever that was), but is now so run down that practically every building is either half collapsed or has been patched with rusted corrugated iron with bullet holes smattered here and there. Incredibly dirty and derelict, there were loads of people sleeping on the streets and ferreting through garbage bins so we didn’t stay long but high-tailed it back to our guesthouse in the much safer uptown area. Our hostel owner gave us strict instructions that we had to be home before dark or we would almost certainly be robbed (at the very least) or shot (at the very worst). Eeek!
 |
| Marco, Brett & Me at Bob Marley's house in Kingston |
From Kingston, we headed to Port Antonio on the Northern coast, and it was on the drive there that we really got our first glimpse of the natural beauty of Jamaica. We drove through a mountain range covered in lovely lush, tropical jungle – vivid green, dangling creepers, and small shacks built on the hillsides here and there painted in bright colours. Port Antonio itself was a much nicer place than Kingston – quite a small little town, and very easy to walk from one side to the other. We saw a couple of interesting tourist-y things here – we went to see the Blue Lagoon from the film of the same name with Brooke Shields. It had been raining the day before and the waters of the lagoon were a little churned up so apparently not as blue as it usually is, but none the less it was brilliant to look at! Such vividly aqua water right up against the lush green of the jungle that rises all around it - beautiful.
Another interesting thing about Port Antonio was that there were a LOT of Rastafarians living there, several of whom we made friends with and spent quite a lot of time with. I find the Rastafarian culture quite fascinating and tried on many occasions to get them to explain their beliefs to me, but I was never able to get a straight answer – quite possibly because I never managed to find one that wasn’t stoned! All I got from them was various disjointed rambling about pathways to love and freedom, inner lights and the Power of the Self. To be totally honest, I don’t know how many of them truly subscribe to the Rasta beliefs (or even understand them!), and how many of them just use it as an excuse for a lifestyle of continual pot-smoking and sitting on the beach. But who am I to say – perhaps I just never met the right one to explain it to me!
 |
| Our Rasta friend 'Skinny' |
It was also in Port Antonio that we really got our first real glimpse the drug culture of Jamaica. Everyone knows it has a reputation for weed – what we didn’t know is that there is also a real problem there with much, much harder drugs. Literally EVERY TIME we stepped onto the street we were constantly approached by locals who would come up and offer us not only weed but cocaine, speed, ice, crack and heroin. No joke. They are persistent, too. When we refused their offers they wouldn’t leave us alone but would get very, very aggressive and threatening and demand an explanation as to why we were insulting them by refusing to buy their drugs. A classic phrase from the Jamaicans was “why you disrespectin’ me, white guy?” It is a phenomenally drug-soaked culture, and as a result there is really a continual sense that violence could break out at any time. Kids that looked no older than 12 were smoking big fat joints on the streets, and it’s a disturbing moment when you realise that the guy you saw leaning against your bus smoking a joint the size of a cigar is actually your bus driver.
We also spent a fair bit of time at Long Beach, where (thanks to Marco’s totally awesome, absolutely fearless bargaining skills) we managed to get a villa literally ON the beach (at high tide, the water lapped at the stairs of the balcony) at a ridiculously cheap price, and spent about 10 days doing nothing but sitting on our balcony drinking beers and exploring the various picture-postcard perfect beaches that surrounded the area. The highlight would definitely have been Winifred beach – it was small, but quite literally breathtaking. Pure white sand, and the sea was thousands of different shades of blue and green.
 |
| Some Jamaican's enjoying the water at Winifred Beach |
Our final stop in Jamaica was Negril, where you can rest assured we spent many, many hours snoozing and swimming on the world famous 7-mile beach – again, pristine sand, stunning colours in the water, and great bars and restaurants scattered along the waterfront. Each evening we enjoyed stupendous views of the sun setting over the Caribbean sea, and if it wasn’t for having to constantly fight off the locals trying to sell you drugs or rides on their jetskiis, it would have been heaven! It managed to come pretty close even so :-).
From Jamaica, we headed to the Dominican Republic. The capital, Santo Domingo, was really beautiful. In the historical centre of town, there was lots of the traditional Spanish architecture with the low buildings and delicate terraces, and lots of lovely lights strung up in the trees everywhere which made the place very pretty. We visited Fortaleza Ozama, which is basically a castle with lots of turrets, and the boys had great fun playing with all the military canons and guns on display. Also, just down the road from where we were staying was the oldest cathedral anywhere in the New World – and believe it or not, it was air-conditioned!
Once again we avoided the major resort cities in the Dom
inican, and stuck to the cheaper hinterland areas as much as we could. We spent a week staying in a ranch in a tiny town called Los Camados where we heartily enjoyed ourselves walking and riding motorbikes through the coffee plantations in the mountains and exploring the tiny towns and villages. A very rustic place with intermittent power and no hot water, but calm and very peaceful.
We also visited MontiCristi, which just happened to be a very close to the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and as we were so close Marco and I decided to go for a day trip to the border town and see what we could of Haiti. It was a very sharp divide between the two countries, and no doubt as to which was poorer. They were divided by a river, and the Haitian side was literally COVERED in rubbish, and there were UN vans making their way around here and there. On the ride back to the DR our bus was boarded by the Dominican military 3 times to have our passports checked – obviously they have a huge problem with Haitian refugees illegally sneaking across the border. And considering the problems Haiti has faced, I suppose you can’t blame them for trying.
Our final stop in the DR was the fun little town of Puerto Playa, where we visited another fortress and did day trips to the various beaches around the area. Once again, it had the lovely Spanish-style layout of terraced buildings fanning out from a central plaza, and as it was coming up to Christmas there were lots of beautiful Christmas decorations in the streets. We spent 3 weeks all up in the DR, and it was really a lovely place. Very calming after Jamaica, too!
Our final stop in the Caribbean was Puerto Rico, where we are now. For those of you who don’t know, Marco is actually half Puerto Rican so he has plenty of relatives here, and we have been staying with his Grandmother in the capital: San Juan. It’s been lovely to have a place to call home for the past month, and to escape from the constant packing and unpacking!
The historical area of San Juan is beautifully distinctive; with very bright buildings and narrow cobblestoned streets. For some reason I have yet to discover, the cobblestones are blue instead of the usual gray, which makes it very distinctive. We’ve spent a good few days just wandering around the area and exploring the 2 fortresses that stand over the city; one of which (Fortaleza San Filipe del Morro) is by far the most impressive fortress we’ve seen on our travels to date.
We did have the excitement of a small earthquake on Christmas Eve – we were sitting in the flat in the evening when there was a very loud noise and everything shuddered and vibrated, making the plates and cups on the shelves rattle like mad. It didn’t last long but was thrilling none the less.
As Marco’s Grandma owns a car and was kind enough to lend it to us, we did lots of day trips to various places around the island. Most notably, we went to visit the town of Hatillo on the day of their annual Masquerade Festival. This basically consists of the Puerto Ricans starting to drink at the crack of dawn, and dressing up in flamboyant costumes and driving around town on their floats. The floats are really just jeeps that they have covered in crepe and decorations to make it as bright and colourful as possible. There is also a prize for the noisiest float, and as a result of this they are all fitted out with enormous speakers and fog horns, and they BLARED!!! We had come prepared with earplugs, but even through them the noise was absolutely deafening, and to top it off the people on the floats were carrying bottles of shaving foam, silly string, chocolate sauce and super-soakers filled with beer that they squirted all over the crowd so by the end of it we were covered in a sticky mess. It was absolutely frantic, crazy and insane – I’ve never seen a festival like it but it was brilliant fun.
Also near Hatillo we went to visit the Arecebo Radio Telescope – the biggest satellite telescope in the world. It was the one used in the movies ‘Contact’ and ‘The Dish’ – so lots of pop-culture references as well. It was a beautiful drive to get there (somewhat longer than it needed to be thanks to our dubious navigating!) but also very impressive to look at once you got close up. It was absolutely mammoth, and steel cables as thick as a person went from the edges of the dish to the tops of the mountains to help keep it suspended. A miracle of engineering as well as technology!!
Another huge highlight of our time in Puerto Rico was our trip to a small island of the coast called Viequez. We caught a ferry over there, and while Viequez itself as an island was pretty enough, the real highlight is the Bioluminescent Bay. The bioluminescent bay is a sheltered area of water where bioluminescent microbes thrive. Basically, the water looks normal as long as it is still, but whenever something disturbs the water the microbes are irritated... and SPARKLE!!! Literally, sparkle and glow so much it really does look like magic. We were lucky enough to get a bit of a cloudy night so the moon and stars were covered and it was extra dark. We kayaked out to the middle of the bay and the wakes of our kayaks and the splashes from our paddles spread our behind us gleaming and glimmering in the dark. Once we were in the middle of the bay we went swimming... and I really cannot describe it. The best I can do is to say it was like my whole body was a lit sparkler underwater – the bright silver sparks shooting out from all over our skin and hair. I’d never seen anything like it in the world – it was ethereal and magical.
Well, that is about it for now. Tonight is our last night in Puerto Rico before we fly back to Colombia for a brief second visit to catch up with friends and give Brett a small taste of Sth America. From there we head into the US where, among other adventures, we will be attending the ‘Ultra Music Festival’ in Miami – I suggest you google it and check out the line up!
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