The lull before the container storm

We spent yesterday at the docks in Kingston again, this time trying to clear our container for delivery. Again, we got up early (3am) and drove through the early morning to arrive in time for a breakfast at the container depot (calaloo and yam with sweet coffee). Hours passed as the process of bringing the container into the customs shed dragged on. Then our inspector appeared. She was new, someone our man Dave from the Jamaican shipping agents had not encountered before. She was clearly determined to make her mark and ordered that the entire contents be removed and each of the 131 packages opened for her perusal. Lunch, taken promptly at 1pm, interrupted the process and it was not until 3.45 that Merrise emerged from the ordeal with a bill of JA$20,000 (£1= JA$145) to pay for the ineligible items (which included her brother Oliver’s hydraulic slab-making machine). Merrise has asked me to make it quite clear that my role was to stay outside in case sight of my white (and therefore rich) face pushed up the amount of duty we would be asked to pay. It was she who did all the work. By the time the officious new customs officer (who, incidentally specialised in the Kingston ‘look’, a super sized version of the one commonly available in Jamaican circles elsewhere) had satisfied her desire to peer into every corner of our life, our hopes of getting the container delivered that day had gone. So I’m writing this as I wait for it to arrive today. It seems incredible that when we calculated the time it would take for the container to get to us, we took the shipping company’s estimate, added a further three weeks, than added another week, and that was supposed to coincide with our arrival on the island nearly three weeks ago. I was supposed to be returning to the UK tomorrow, but that’s impossible now so I’ve had to re-book for a flight on Saturday.
While I was dozing in the unforgiving heat at the docks as Merrise and Dave supervised the removal of the packages, our phone rang. It was UPS. “Hello Mr Bish-TON” (Jamaicans always accentuate the last part of my surname). “I can confirm that your consignment (from Uncle Eneil) is now in Miami.” Even by the convoluted standards that this shipment has already involved, this seems faintly unreal. “But last week it was in Kingston,” I stammered. “Yes, I know Mr Bish-TON, but I’m assured by Miami that it will be sent to Montego Bay late on Friday.” I’m speechless. I thank her for calling.
As I write, I’m interrupted by the sound of a huge American truck pulling into the drive, and swiping a bit off the gate column. Can this really be the container?

Still waiting on the container

Wednesday we got up (by mistake) at 1.25am – I thought it was 5am – and drove to Kingston. After about an hour, when the sunrise stubbornly refused to appear, I looked at my watch again, and realised my mistake. We arrived in Kingston in good time, needless to say, for our 8.30 appointment with destiny. In terms of distance, the journey is about the same as the one I regularly make from London to Birmingham, but in every other respect it’s like driving on a different planet. There’s a great highway from Mo Bay along the north coast going east, but the moment the road takes to the mountains – Kingston lies on the south coast bounded by some seriously high mountains – things start to change. The incessant rain that fell for the best part of three months during this year’s hurricane season has turned some of the twisting bends on the mountainsides into something more akin to a battle scene. Huge chunks of road, turned upside down by the sheer force of the water. At one point, the tarmac had huge channels gorged into it by the water, so that it looked like a monstrous withered tree root. At these points, progress is slow. In retrospect I was glad it was so early because at least there were no trucks struggling along.
We got lost in Kingston, drove through Denham Town along a road that separates it from Tivoli Gardens – which, in spite of its gentile name, is a war zone. Finally made it to the freight office. The rest of the day for me passed dozing in the car with the engine running and air con on, as Merrise went through the endless procedures designed to establish her entitlements for duty free import. Now they have to find the container so that customs can inspect it. This was supposed to be Friday. But we knew as we drove back on Wednesday that it was unlikely.
Meanwhile UPS continue to fail to deliver the pedal boat sent by Uncle Eneil. The online tracking system says that it has arrived in Mo Bay but it lies: we know it is sitting on some lonely piece of tarmac at Kingston airport. This may finally have made it to Mo Bay last night but as there’s no one picking up the phone at UPS, who knows?
On the plus side, History caught about 7lb of lobster this morning, so we’re going to grill them tonight.

Waiting on the container

The container should be here; the shipment from Uncle Eneil in New Orleans (which includes a peddle boat) should be here; the internet access via Skyweb should be here: but, of course, none of them are. This is Jamaica. No problem. We have Mark Lobban from MPS shipping in London working on trying to find where our container has got to, and we have Fred Mundy in the UPS office in New Orleans trying to work out why our peddle boat is sitting in a warehouse in Kingston, instead of on the sea shore here. The good news is that as I started to write this blog, the guys from Skyweb arrived. They’re fixing a satellite dish facing towards the hills behind Montego Bay where a mast will connect us to the rest of the world. In just a few minutes I may be able to sit here on the patio, facing the open sea and wirelessly publish this blog. This has been such a long-cherished dream of mine that, along with the almost full moon rising, it almost makes up for the fact that 131 boxes inside a container haven’t turned up.
To be honest, part of me is relieved. The thought of heaving those 131 boxes off the container and into their designated spots would have been a daunting prospect straight off the plane – even with the help of Shelley and Hamish who came out specifically to help us negotiate the container, and have now returned to London without lifting a box in anger.
Instead we did a lot of cleaning, painting and general repairing. And eating. We’ve done a lot of eating. On my birthday we went to the Houseboat, which is moored directly across the lagoon from us (conch fritters followed by grilled prawns with wild rice, topped off nicely with a chocolate soufflé). I might have gone for the lobster, but the previous evening History, the Rasta fisherman who looks after the place for us when we’re not here, barbequed about 10lb of lobster using only butter and garlic. Believe me, this is to die for.
Yesterday, Hamish’s last night, we went to the Plantation Inn, a beautiful restaurant about a mile out of town run by Paul Hurlock and his wife Jennifer. Paul was a professional musician during the hey-day of the north coast music scene in the 60s and 70s, before starting his restaurant project 30 years ago. He’s a charming man with a wide range of passions: he spent all evening at our table and we talked about everything from gazebo design using old 70s-style (ie huge) upturned satellite dishes for the roof, to the Rastafarian settlement in Ethiopia. Fabulous smoked marlin starter followed by jerked grey snapper.
We also managed the obligatory pit stop at the Pelican (a wonderful Mo Bay diner that hasn't changed in all the 26 plus years I've been coming to Jamaica)) where I consumed a chocolate milk shake followed by curried shrimp, Yard-style. In between, Hamish and Shelley made lots of raw vegetable salads supplemented by fried kingfish and patties from Miss Mell’s roadside bar. History followed up his first lobster dish with stewed lobster – the tails cooked in the shell in a soy-inspired sauce. Waiting for a container is a tough business.
Mr Campbell and his assistant from Skyweb were here for five hours installing the dish and wireless router. It was past 10 when they finally left. hey did a fantastic job, were extremely professional and really helpful. So we're finally online on the ocean.
PS The weather is unbelievably beautiful. My brother-in-law phoned today to say it was minus five in Birmingham. Hah!

Of horses and dogs

Note: this post was written on November 18 but only posted today due to internet connectivity issues which should happily be resolved later today.
Friday was my birthday and as a special treat I got the day off. We went horse riding at Chukka Blue in the morning. This was my first time on a horse, and I really felt very comfortable: all those hours as a kid watching the Lone Ranger and Rawhide now paying dividends as I sat straight-backed in the saddle, reigns nonchalantly but firmly held in the left hand, leaving my right free to draw the Colt45. Chukka Blue offers a range of ‘adventure’ experiences in Jamaica – from horse riding, quad biking, tree canopy swinging, and so on. Our trip was well organised, plenty of guides on horseback to cajole and organise the group, with a good line in patter that took in history, culture, wildlife and ecology. Riders are taken on a 90-minute stroll through part of the old Maggoty sugar estate and then for a gallop through the sea. The route goes via small hamlet where kids with bare feet gaze up, but without a great deal of interest because they see this twice a day. The place is grindingly poor, but very clean and tidy. Chukka Blue have helpfully provided some branded trash cans. Further on we take a detour through the grounds of Kennilworth great house, where the ruins of what must have been a stupendous 18th century stone house are now part of Kennilworth training college - where youngsters from places like the hamlet we’ve just ridden through are training to be waiters, barmen and cocktail waitresses. The ruins we’re looking at were destroyed during the Sam Sharpe Christmas rebellion of 1831, when tens of thousands of slaves working on sugar plantations (which then covered virtually the whole of the western end of the island) rose up demanding emancipation. Now, the descendants of those rebels are studying in the grounds of said great house to be waiters. What with the heat and everything, it’s quite easy to be overwhelmed by the irony of it all. But it’s a good half-day out – they pick you up from the front door and drop you back afterwards.
Later on we went to look for a dog. The Dog Saga has been going on for a long time. We need a nice dog for the Beach House, we keep saying to one another. It’s complicated by the fact that we’ve never kept dogs, and our only experience is that Merrise was bitten by one when she was a young girl in Jamaica, and I had one when I was boy (called Rex) but he was taken way pretty sharpish when identified as a potential source of my asthma attacks.
Briefly: we went to see our friend Gloria who runs a guest house just outside Lucea (pronounced ‘Lucy’), saw three dogs, didn’t take any, went back next day and brought home one - a sweet mongrel bitch, with a lot of labradour in her, so now we have a dog called Lucea (pronounced ‘Lucy’). OK. So don’t mess with us. We ride horses. We have a dog.

Touchdown

Yesterday was my first full day at the house, having arrived the previous afternoon. The flight had a goodly number of elderly Jamaicans, wisely deciding against ‘being shut up in the North’ for the winter and, like me, taking the first ‘cheap’ Virgin flight of the winter season. That’s £400, if you want to know. At Montego Bay, a stack of wheelchairs awaited them. I wondered briefly if any of them were planning a trip to the healing waters of Bath. Sangster airport has been undergoing massive expansion recently, fuelled by excitement over hosting some of the games in last year’s cricket World Cup, and the pressure exerted by airlines such as Virgin who required much bigger facilities to cope with the numbers pouring out their Boeing jumbo jets which had taken over slots vacated by Air Jamaica. Anyway, the new facilities are pretty much completed now, with a new departure lounge and massively enlarged baggage reclaim hall have opened since I was here in April. Even the passport control point was properly staffed, with helpful staff smiling and directing passengers quickly and efficiently. Whatever happened to the ‘look’?
Outside, it was chaos as usual. The pick-up area has been enlarged but when, as happened on Wednesday, a thunderstorm rolls over the hills and disgorged its contents in sheets of monsoon rain for about 40 minutes, just as the passengers from Virgin flight V065 are exiting, well, it’s just chaos and it’s difficult to think of it being any other way. Merrise was circling the pick up point with Hamish riding shotgun on the look-out for me.
Anyway, yesterday was picture perfect. We swam in the pool around nine, after Hamish had come back from a 5km run down towards Hopewell. Shelley did some vague stretching and curling up on the bed exercises. Then did 40 lengths. I managed an heroic 25.
Our mission for the day was to clear out one remaining store room on the side of the apartment building which we had never, in three years, got round to doing. It’s a small, L-shaped room, created out of what might once have been a reception point. It’s full of dress-making materials: row upon row of paper pattern hanging from the ceiling, bales of material, boxes of buttons, jar after jar of bits and pieces. There’s three old, damaged Singer sewing machines. And, in amongst it all is a portfolio of designs, address books with measurements. They all belong to Trevor Owen, the previous owner who died five or six years ago, I think. There are three boxes of labels bearing his name in elegant black lettering. Trevor Owen : Montego Bay : Jamaica WI. I keep the portfolio and all the paperwork, thinking maybe I’ll frame up one of his sketches. They are so evocative of a different time and place – where rich ladies sent postcards from England saying ‘Trevor, I shall be out in November. Can you run me up three of those cocktail dresses?’
Trevor bequeathed us many other little bits and pieces around the place, all of which we have tried to preserve. We want his ghost to be at peace. Because looking after ghosts out here in Jamaica is a very serious business.

Smooth runnings 3

OK, back to the trek around Jamaica. After the exertions at Doctor's Cave Beach, we didn't actually get going until after lunch the following day. Originally I had intended to stop off at the YS Falls, a superb set of waterfalls about 50 miles south of Mo Bay on the south coast, near Black River. However, the late start meant we had to give these a miss. After passing miles of rich farmland on the road over the island, the final stretch along a lonely, winding shoreline to Milk River was quite eerie. The pitted limestone rocks and desolate cacti at the side of the road began to assume strange, exotic shapes in the fading afternoon light. It began to feel as if we were travelling back in time and the first sighting of Milk River Mineral Bath confirmed this feeling. It's a fine 19th-century colonial structure, with the dining room and bedrooms on the first floor, surrounded by a wide veranda. The baths are on the ground floor: nine blue doors open into narrow cavern-like rooms, with steps down to a private, mini pool, into which flows the mineral spring. Inevitably, the first thing we did after a hot day in the car was dump our bags in the rooms (en-suite with a big bed, a big old air con unit and an even bigger old telly) and jump into a bath.
The water is crystal clear, pleasantly warm and has a strong saline taste. Dr Phillippo reports that Savory and Moore of London had analysed the water, revealing the following constituents: "Chloride of sodium, sulphate of soda, chloride of magnesium, chloride of potassium, and chloride of calcium, besides traces of lithia, iodine, bromine and silica. These constituents with its temperature of 92 deg place this spring among the thermal calcic waters of Hamburg, Weisbaden, Kassingen, Bourbonne, Schlangenbad, Gastein and Kranznach. It has the soapy unctuous feel that characterises the Schlangenbad and the warm springs of Virginia, imparting to the skin a velvet smoothness to the touch which continues after leaving the bath."
After what seemed like only a few minutes of floating blissfully in the water, a rude knocking at the door reminded us that guests are only allowed to bathe for 20 minutes at a time ("de watah so powerful, y'see," explained the attendant). We withdrew to the dining room to examine the effect of the first dip. No question: we felt a distinct smoothness. Velvety smooth, in fact.
We spent most of the mealtime involuntarily caressing our bare arms and shoulders to reconfirm the 'velvety feel'. Meals, it has to be said, are not Milk River's strongest point. The menu has a determinedly Jamaican solidness - cornmeal porridge at breakfast, yam, banana and rice with the evening meal. I found myself, in Phillippo-esque mode complaining to Merris(e): "If only they had a really creative, more health conscious, Jamaican chef here - imagine, fresh fruit juices, lobster with green pawpaw and chillies . . ."

Picking up the passport

Another real time update: It’s Monday night and Merris(e) left this morning with our daughter Shelley for Jamaica. This followed several days of complete brinkmanship with regard to our final preparations. First, there was the business of M’s Jamaican passport. Because of the missing ‘e’ in her name, and the subsequent delays occasioned by this rogue letter, the passport didn’t make it back into the UK until last Friday. It had to be picked up from the Jamaican High Commission in London, and so I was the obvious courier, especially since M was in Birmingham, dealing with other things.
Now I have to say that, on the whole, M’s dealings with the High Commission have been very cordial: the incredibly helpful Anita who sorted out the business of the missing ‘e’ with the authorities in Jamaica, also thoughtfully telephoned M on Friday morning to say that the passport had now arrived. Off I went, assured that it would be a two-minute job – trying to banish thoughts such as ‘But it’s never a two-minute job in Jamaica’. Sure enough, as I stepped into the passport section (round the back and in through the tradesman’s entrance) my heart sank.
I was immediately transported back to those painful hours I spent queuing in the water and electricity payment offices in Mo Bay when we were trying to sort out the outstanding amounts left unpaid by previous owners of the Beach House. First, the waiting room was full. The doorway was half-blocked by a group of men all exchanging hard luck stories. ‘Maan, me a tell yu, de woman say I don’t have all the documents I suppose to have.’ ‘Yes man, ‘ said the second, ‘She suppose to help I but she just tell the I to “G’way”.’ In the seats, arranged like pews in a church, sit a group of dancehall queen look-alikes, all with amazing hairstyles, most with a small, very bored child wriggling on their lap. I look at them as I enter: they give me the ‘look’ back. In an obscure corner of the room is one, small glass partition, where a mature woman with several decades’ experience of giving the ‘look’ to forlorn passport seekers is holding court. It is her I must attract the attention of in order to pick up M’s passport. Unfortunately, there are five or six people in front of me, all trying (and failing) to attract her attention as well. I look round in desperation. I pluck a ticket from the queuing machine. Number 49. I look up. ‘Now serving number 14’ says the electronic board. My heart sinks.
Suddenly, the woman – or number 14 as we shall call her - who is being attended to at the glass counter walks away. There is a sudden surge forward. We are all talking at once. ‘I’ve just come to pick up my wife’s/brother’s/husband’s, child’s passport’ we babble. The mature woman walks away from the glass partition and is hidden from view. I try to stay clam. I know that the slightest sign of irritation on my part will be taken very badly by the mature woman, and push me further down the pecking order. There is another white bloke in the queue. He turns to me and says forlornly: ‘I’m only here to pick up my wife’s passport. She said it would be a two-minute job.’ I empathise, but not too much.
Finally, in desperation I call M and ask her to try to contact the helpful Anita to let her know I’m there. After about 10 minutes, M calls back and says that Anita says I must push a button on the right hand side, near the door. I see a button. I push. Miraculously, another door next to the tiny glass counter opens, and four of us pile into a space just big enough for one. With difficulty, we close the door to discourage other queue-jumpers. Inside the cubicle is another glass counter and a woman holding four brown envelopes. We grab them and make good our escape. The men are still grumbling by the door. One of the toddlers has broken free from his mother’s lap and is beating out a rhythm on the water cooler, but I am back into the bright sunlight of Kensington.