Blue Mountains
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 25/Jul/2010 12:45, 34 days ago
This morning's adventure to head up to Mavis Bank in the Blue Mountains in hopes of finding Jamaican Tody birds at Cinchona Botanical Gardens was aborted. We seem to be doing a lot of that lately. George says the best way for us to get there is to buy a blindfold for me and he'll have a glass of rum to steady his nerves.We left the house about 6:30 am but didn't get much past Gordon Town before the road became too rough for the rented Yaris so we parked and just started to walk, meeting two rasta men, a bamboo collecter, an ackee picker and a woman walking to church. We enjoyed our morning walk in the mountains where all you could hear was the sound of the water flowing down the hills. Very peaceful.Even though there is a whole lane collapsed at this point in the road, it's not the worst we've seen in the Blue Mountains. At least the remaining road is still clear. Many times the entire surface has been washed away or covered in rubble like the road surface below.This is as far as we went. We talked to a rasta man who assured us the road to Mavis Bank was a bit of a lion tread. We asked him what he meant by that, wondering if we should venture onwards, but that was the only way he could think of to describe it. Eventually he said it was a bit rough, a lion tread.Streams flow through the Blue Mountains everywhere, especially after heavy rains as we've had the last couple of days.We saw this giant tree growing out of the river bed below with large white flowers around the trunk which looked like air plants so I took some photos. With my zoom we could see they were cactus although they looked like giant water lillies close up.We were in an area just north of Gordon Town, only about 3 kms from Papine. That's as far as we got. We were aiming for Cinchona Botanical Gardens north of Mavis Bank, another 9 or 10 kms along the mountain road. We'll have to see if there's another way in...maybe someone more experienced on the mountain roads can take us there some other time. There's always the blindfold and rum solution.Just out of curiosity, we then went up another mountain road off Constant Spring because we had a couple of hours to kill before returning the rental car. Constant Spring is closer to the centre of town. This time the roads were in far better condition and we passsed a Mercedes and two BMWs coming down the hill (I don't notice these things but George does) so we knew there was going to be fancier houses up ahead. In fact, the houses were all very much bigger and showed signs of greater wealth - three story houses the norm. The downside of this area was there were two angry street people with big sticks harrassing the cars stopped at the traffic lights at the bottom of this road - a far cry from the soft rastas and bamboo cutters in Gordon Town.As always in Jamaica, if you don't like what you see, just put on a blindfold or have a glass of rum. Just joking, if you don't like what you see, just turn around and you'll find the opposite extreme somewhere else. Personally we found walking in Gordon Town with the rastas friendlier and more peaceful because there were far fewer cars on the road and lots of interesting people walking up and down the hills to talk to.