Made it back in one piece

Two posts in one month! holiday has been good to me. I spent the last few days in Portland giving my daughter her a proper introduction to my true love, the beach. She saw so many beaches in such a few days it was crazy, Frenchman's Cove, San San bay, Boston Bay, Long Bay and finally she stamped her name in the Visitors book of the Morant Point Lighthouse at the east most point of our little island.

I have always wanted to go to this remote lighthouse but I had neither the knowledge nor equipment(capable car,maps) to get there. This trip was quickly placed back on the table once I got the Jimny and my GPS unit sorted out. It takes about half an hour of driving through farm tracks that are surrounded by cane fields as fars as the eye can see. When you think things are bad you then leave the cane fields and drive for approximately another half an hour on a dirt track through the bush, with no cell reception and mud holes to potentially get stuck in. My car is pretty slim and it still barely fit on the path, there were bushes on both sides of the track that ensured the doors couldn't open. As a budding cartographer I have documented this journey here for others to follow as getting the coordinates to chart my way through this unmapped land was my other major hurdle.

This beach makes the trip through the bush totally worth it, the only people around were a one or two fisher folk doing some spear fishing. The water was clear and the sand powdery, the only thing you would need is a rake to clean up the sea weed and the random drift garbage. Blogspot does not do my photo any justice so if you want to see a much higher resolution version check out my panoramio page.

The photo on the left shows part of the smoother nicer path through low bush leading up to the light house. Don't be fooled though this is a like a freshly paved highway compared to other places you will have to drive through. My recommendations for those who would also like to make this trip?
1. A vehicle with 4x4 low gears.. I suspect the newer suv's with "full time 4wd" may have skipped out on these gears in their transfer box.
2. A GPS programmed with the coordinates I have provided through openstreetmap above or a friend who knows the way.

The second point is probably the most important one, you wouldn't want to get lost in a cane field, all the paths look the same. If you choose to ignore and want to rough it you could follow the single sign at the end of the cane field and hope for the best.

When the stars align

This is not my garden, I am somewhere in middle Jamaica approximately 2100 feet above sea level in a cool and windy Manchester. For some reason I have no courses scheduled(and more importantly no projects outstanding) for the next couple of weeks so I made the best of this odd occasion and took two weeks off work.

I plan to make the most of these few days off and plan to tour this little isle a bit and if weather permits take the jimny for a dip in Atlantic ocean at the east most point of the island :p

Photos to follow.

Winter solstice

So today was the shortest day in the year for those of us up here in the northern hemisphere, did anyone notice? The winter storms seem to be pretty bad in the states but the weather here is a nice cool 80 degrees here in Jamaica, I love this weather.

So what have y'all been up to? I went Christmas shopping yesterday and bought exactly one gift. I guess lots of family and friends this year will be disappointed as usual. I have a problem with buying gifts, if I don't know what someone wants or will appreciate they will end up getting nothing. That is much safer than buying them something that never gets used or thrown out.

Anyway is it just me or did Christmas skip Jamaica this year? Not many people have up the usual decorations and the traffic is not there. There isn't much Christmas music on the radio either, if it wasn't for my stash of Christmas mp3s it would just be like any other time of the year. One noticeable difference is the amount of people shopping at pricesmart though, that store is cleaning up this year.

This is a bit off subject but re the love life conversation started out in the comments. I am currently at a crossroads and the outcome may have long lasting effects, all I can say is stay tuned lol

The real parade

This float here was titled the Olympic dream and it was probably the most appropriate float in the parade given Jamaica's performance in the 100m sprints thus far, 2 golds, 2 silvers and lots of records broken/created. I don't need to get much further into this matter as I see pretty much every other Jamaican in the blog sphere has covered it already. We have nothing on China or Phelps winnings but as a small nation we have done pretty well for our self.

Enough olympics chit chat, it was now 2pm on Independence day and I was heading down to Halfway tree to see if I could catch the parade with real people in there.

This was quite the opposite of what I saw earlier in the morning, I thought the promoters where fluffing the numbers when they said 2000+ people would participate in the parade and they did not fail to deliver. It was baking out in the midday heat and yet still there were thousands of people lining the side of the road watching the parade.

They also mentioned a classic and sport car section of the parade. I am not quite sure what this has to do with Jamaica's independence but the people love them some classic cars. Can someone please explain how so many VW bugs made it to the parade? They may be classic but not classy enough to be parade worthy. There was also an unmodified 3000GT in the line up, really now.. maybe I could have entered my civic Vi-RS into the parade as well since they taking every Tom Dick and Harry. At the end of the parade there was also around 30+ bikers on sports bikes just revving their engines. I was at a lost as to their significance in this parade. I guess the promoters where trying to ensure they captured every ones attention. Bikers always seem like a trip to the ER waiting to happen to me.

I think the people in costume depicting various aspects of Jamaican history was the best part of the parade. Those man/donkey people took the cake. Do you see the guy with the Hasselblad camera roaming the streets? maybe not, the picture is too small, but he is the camera guy right behind the red gold and green flag man, if you took a peep over at their website their low budget camera starts at $18,000.. lets just leave it at that.

Then there was the passa passa float that you might have seen from my last post and in true passa passa road side pool party style they had the blow up pool and girls in it. Passa passa seems to have really taken off internationally, to di werl' in true Jamaican style, so I guess it does have some place in the parade. Thanks TG.

The parade had passed, I was sweaty, my memory card was full so I was just following the crowd trying to make my way back to where I parked when I saw a bunch of people looking up and taking pictures. It was Bruce(PM) and his team perched up in a building across from the clock tower. Nice parade Bruce and Olivia, I would have toned it down a bit and spent the countries money on infrastructure improvement though. *clicks tongue*

Independence day '08

This was a few weeks ago on August 6th, so yah I know I'm a bit late but as usual I have been bogged down with other things. Tropical storm Fay passed by Jamaica this weekend leaving me in my house with lots of time to edit photos so you can thank her for this post.

Anyway for Independence day I heard there was supposed to be a few street parades. The first one started at 10am just down the road from me so I saddled up and went down to TGIF to see a handful of people also waiting for the "parade" to start. First of all, as expected, they started in Jamaican time which means for us punctual people we had to wait an hour before the first float started to move, we all sat there wondering if we came late and missed the parade. The next issue was the missing music and the missing people. When the floats started to move they were empty and there was no music. I'll let the photos show how lame the first parade was.

After I had seen enough and was about to leave a guy stopped me and gave me his story. He just came back to Jamaica, was waiting on the barber to open, didn't know anything of a parade hence left his camera at home and would like me to email him the pictures. I found it odd for him to give me such a detailed story but as you can tell from my previous posts I think it's pretty much a given for people to stop me about some photography issue whenever I venture out into public with my camera these days. So guy, I apologize for the delay but here is the first set of the photos.

One thing to note. If you look carefully at the make a joyful noise float you can clearly see that it is church themed. What blows my mind is the back section with the ghost looking wacky waiving inflatable arm flailing tube man that is surrounded by white rum bottles pouring into the float. Bad sponsorship.. float faux paux.

Stay tuned I already have the pictures ready from the real parade later on that day for my next post that should be ready shortly.