As part of my narrative catch up, today I venture to Jamaica, the first stop of our Carnival Conquest cruise ship.
When a cruise ship docks for its nine or so hours of island fun, most people on the ship use the ship's own excursion desk to find interesting zipliningsnorkelbeach trips, but experience has taught us that if you can find a great local tour guide and book it yourself, you'll have a more interesting trip. So I did some digging and calling and e-mailing and ended up booking a family trip to Dunn's River Falls, a 600 foot waterfall that you can climb.
The trick with this tour was that we were docking in Montego Bay and the falls were in Ocho Rios, a good hour forty-five away, but I noticed that the cruise itself was offering an excursion to the falls so I figured we could do it too.
I hunted around for awhile and talked to quite a few friends who've been to Jamaica many, many times, and they all told me we had to climb the falls. So I ended up talking to Richie at Moby Dick Tours about their tour package. Unfortunately, the tour they give started in Ocho Rios, but Richie was very helpful, waved his hands magically, and conjured a bus and driver named Vivian who would meet us at the dock in Montego Bay, take us to the falls, take us to lunch, and then bring us back to the ship.
The day we docked in Jamaica, we met Vivian as quickly as we could (this was at the cruise terminal; he was holding up a blue Moby Dick Tours sign) and began the long bus ride. Along the way we learned a few helpful Jamaican phrases (in particular: 'Yah mahn," and "It's irie," which means everything's good or okay), learned some about the Jamaican landscape and the road to Ocho Rios, and discovered that Columbus landed in a Jamaican cove that is right next to a giant Bauxite mining operation.
Vivian parked our bus in a narrow spot (well, all spots were narrow) in the official parking lot for the falls and then gave us the rundown of how things worked there. Then he walked us up to the ticket counter, got tickets for the group (this was all part of our tour fee), and told us he'd be waiting for us in the bus when we were done. And he made sure to tell us to take the path back to the parking lot at the top of the falls and to avoid the other path through the small shop area where, according to everyone, you get berated and abused by some high pressure sales people.
We followed a large paved path to the bottom of the beach, which is where you begin your hike up the falls (the falls themselves are not Niagra-like; they're gentle and shallow, perfectly climbable), and once there we were accosted by the tremendous number of people following our very same plan. There were people everywhere, and most were holding hands, forming long chains of slow-moving - creeping actually - lines of bathing suit-clad humans inching up the rocks.
I wasn't quite sure how to begin, so we all made our own family chain and I marched forward, squeezing in between a man with a bathing suit two sizes too small and a woman who has financed quite a few plastic surgeons' Mercedes.
Clamoring over rocks while holding hands wasn't that tricky. The tricky part was the 10,000 other people doing the same thing. And the double-tricky part was dealing with the 'guides.'
You could hire your own guide to take you up the falls, and these guys were aggressive and unforgiving. They'd grab your hand when you didn't need help. They'd yell and scream and whistle quite loudly. They'd shout for their group to stick together and then guide them right through the center of our own line of people. So we had to push back, just to make it 10 feet up the falls. The guides (well, the ones who didn't think we were part of their own group - some thought we belonged to them) would get frantically angry and shout and scream and use all sorts of non-relaxing, non-irie language.
But we preserved, scraping our legs and knees and toes. Toward the middle of the climb I noticed my swim shoes had tears at the top of the big toes from all my slight whacks with rock bottoms. Suzanne got caught in a collision with three other people and got her foot lodged under a large rock. Later, under x-ray, we learned that she broke her foot on the rocks and is now, as of August, confined to a massive Herman Munster-style ski boot that is, ideally, supposed to ward off any threat of a cast. I'll have more on this later.
Most of the huge crowd on the falls dissipated after the first third of the climb, and by the end most had given up so the last part of the climb was pain and shout-free. At the top we avoided the aggressive shopkeepers (although we did run into one woman who kept insisting she could weave the greatest hair beads in the entire universe).
Vivian, as promised, was waiting patiently for us to finish our hike, and once we were aboard the bus, he took us a slight distance toward Ocho Rios for lunch. This was a semi-relaxing lunch - well, semi for me because I was a little stressed about getting back before the boat left. The boat waits for no one (except people on official cruise line expeditions). If we missed it, we'd be sunk.
Lunch was very nice. We sat indoors, close by a waterfall, and had our choice of an extensive buffet including (and I was quite excited about this) sugar Coca Cola - no high fructose corn syrup here!
The ride back was quite nice. Vivian was a very safe and careful driver. He told us a few riddles and then played some reggae while most of us snoozed.
He got us back to the dock in plenty of time, and as we boarded we were serenaded by a Jamaican military band marching by the boat. Clearing customs was simple, although one of the customs officials goosed me as he was patting me down.
My response: "Dat no irie, mahn!" Even the dour government workers who were shiny with sweat laughed at that.