Amy’s and my fourth wedding anniversary. Landed in Mobay and traveled by van to Negril. Our driver is the gregarous Jinx Elegant, couldn’t ask for a better info source for first hour trip. Taking in the roadside shacks, hand-painted signs. Many shacks do double service as businesses and homes — people live and sleep in them, but also serve lunch from the front stoop. Passed one labeled “Rastarant.”
Jamaica has third-highest rate of traffic fatalities in the world – roads are pretty bad and drivers are spontaneous, often crazy. Govt. driving safety signs are everywhere, with a variety of messages. Saw one reading “Save a live, drive good.” So much for gubmint grammar. Others reading “Don’t be in a hurry to enter eternity.” Anti-litter signs near rivers: “Don’t teach your garbage to swim.”
First two nights at “Beach House” in Negril — set into lush jungle right on white sand beach. Air sultry and moist. Straight to water with mask and fins. Bathtub-warm, but just sand and kelp close-in. Cicadas and frogs and night creatures so loud we thought we wouldn’t be able to sleep, but of course did. First meal of jerk chicken sears lips and tongue — but we would find much hotter versions as we traveled. Rasta Bobby offers “much respect” but just wants us to buy him a beer. Soon we learned that everyone says “Respeck” to everyone — or is it just said by hustlers to tourists?
Language butchering is so fun to read. I saw a t-shirt in Spain
that said “Your eyes go trough my heart”. Imagined an impassioned toreador serenading his amor, “my bovine princess, your eyes are great trough from which my heart gulps like an exhausted horse….”