MONTEGO BAY: FRIENDLY NATIVES, SOUL FOOD, AND THE QUEST FOR (WI) FI

The Caribbean ain’t cheap, but you probably already knew that. Why should a picture-postcard-perfect swimming-pool-to-the-gods only a half day from approximately one-billion North Americans and Europeans sell itself cheaply? If you’re okay with $50 ‘budget’ hotels, then you’re in. That’s the problem with Lonely Planet- ‘budget’ means different things in different countries. Of course if you want cheaper islands you can go to Indonesia. Everybody knows that. But you’d spend it all on the flight to get there, and that would mean missing some qualities peculiarly Jamaican- like reggae, Rastafarians, and rum, the ‘3R’s of Jamaican experience, to which another should probably now be added, i.e. running, as in Usain Bolt, who almost stole the Olympics from Michael Phelps and even broke records while mocking the losers, including his own teammates, a luxury not even Michael Phelps could afford. Given the success and lingering nostalgia for the ‘Cool Runnings’ of Jamaican bobsled and John Candy movie fame, I suspect there are already efforts underway to somehow connect all these runnings and capitalize on Jamaica’s other non-dreadlocked success.

For all its cache’ within my wildest imagination, the reality on the ground in Montego Bay is a bit different. By my standards I’d say that MoBay is a veritable cold bed of activity… which is good. Though it’s long been superseded by Negril as the hipper alternative and Ocho Rios as the slick uptown cousin, MoBay still manages to rock on weekends and cruise-ship days, and certainly functions as an airport terminus far more user-friendly than funky Trenchtown… I mean Kingston. Yet for me it’s still a bit lacking in services… like maybe supermarkets? Anybody here ever heard of those? If you don’t have traditional ‘green’ markets, then you’re supposed to have supermarkets; that’s the deal. Anything else is substandard. Thank God for the Chinese or there wouldn’t be anything in the stores to eat, as the take’s probably too low for a self-respecting Brit. They run the banks.

Put a dozen of the same thing in a box and offer a discount and voila!, wholesale was invented. Take them back out and stack them on a shelf and you’ve got a grocery store. Take that away and you’re back in Africa, people selling along the roadside and out of their trunks. It looks like a Dead show, or maybe Dimanche en Bamako. Chinese scour the world looking for places that need some basic mom-and-pop groceries, and seem to be doing quite well, thank you. This is not ‘yellow peril’ conspiracy mind you, just Xiao Jie Blou and her husband Zhou trying to take care of her family and put food on the table, everybody’s table. They even open on Sunday. They even learn patois. Their stores here look just like the old market districts of Thailand, a mangled tangle of shelves and boxes, whose owners now scream ‘foreign takeover’ as the big fancy European supermarkets move on to their prized turf. NIC citizens now hop in their cars and drive to the outskirts of town, in a world paradigm shift that probably still outranks E-commerce. Half the world didn’t even have telephones until cells took over recently, al-Qaeda and all the rest. My wife’s never written a check in her life, much less received one. No one in Thailand writes checks, because no one will take them, because they’ll bounce until the rubber wears out, because that imaginary stasis of a balanced budget is an abstract concept, something which eludes many people.

But the best thing about Montego Bay is that there’s a real town there, though a comfy mile from the Hip Strip here where all the hotels, bars and Margaritaville are. That’s enough to keep most of the riff-raff out and keep the restaurant prices up. A mile the other way and you’re at the airport. That’ll teach them to overcharge on airport taxis; I’ll just walk. A five minute taxi ride here costs the same as a thirty minute ride at BKK. So MoBay’s not Kingston, but once again, that’s good. At least it’s more of a city than Negril, which I haven’t been to, but I doubt I’ll like it. You can sense those things. If there’s one thing I hate worse than the choking air of dirty degenerate cities it’s the rarefied air of pristine pretentious resort areas. There’s got to be a balance. So MoBay ‘proper’ is okay, funky and frenetic, kinda’ like Jackson’s Farish Street up until the eighties (all that’s changed now), kinda’ like Port-au-Prince, or Dakar almost spitting images. How is that possible, since the African diaspora occurred before the age of modern cities and the commerce and consumption that the Industrial Revolution ushered in?

I finally even found something resembling a real supermarket, so I’m excited. Before that the most exciting thing so far was seeing a buck (butt?) naked woman walking down the street in the early morning as if that were the most normal thing in the world. Maybe for her it is. I wanted to stop her and get her story, but didn’t want to offend her sensibilities or violate any religious taboos. I wouldn’t want to change any of the local customs, no. You’ve got to be sensitive. The Interzone bozos almost got to me the first day with all their little dog-and-pony shows and psychological manips to get me into their shops and their houses and their pants to spend all my money before it’s all gone, stash for cash. They can sense fresh meat like a vulture at five thousand feet. Funny thing is that by day two or three that’s all over and I’m now like part of the landscape, twilight man, homo erectus Montegus, the guy who walks for miles looking for something nous ne savons pas, but never at midday nor midnight. That’s me. Roasting buns in the midday sun was never my vice, nor late late nights.

Most of the beaches are private, so long walks on the beach are not an option. It’s beyond me why anyone would do anything else there besides swim or have intercourse… I’m talking about SOCIAL intercourse, you dirty minds out there, talking and laughing and mutual masterminding, that sort of thing. I wouldn’t mind some myself, swimming that is, but it hardly seems worth all the extra protection for that one sublime moment when you surrender all to the warm wet wildness of nature’s vast womb. Where does the passport and money go? Such considerations are the bane of the independent traveler who long ago forewent the pleasures of tour guides and glossy brochures and pleasure palaces in favor of actually seeing some places, unedited and in the raw, if not le boeuf.

So I quickly get a daily routine together, going to the city in the morning while it’s cool to explore and eat Jamaican lunch for cheap, then head back to the ‘hip strip’ to beat the heat and send out these messages in bottles in the hopes that someone will rescue me. If I want sit-down supper, then I’ll go to the Chinese joint down the street close by. Given the lack of groceries, there’s not much need to bemoan the lack of a kitchen. Half the Chinese eateries in the world operate on that principle- ‘we can do it cheaper and better than you can do it yourself.’ The other half try to capitalize on their exotica Asiatica where the Homies ain’t never seen no slant-eyed stuff (“I wonder what else is slanted, yuk yuk?”) nor pineapples and peppers in the same dish. You get used to it.

The Jamaicans are genuinely friendly people, despite the hustlers, though like all such people they run the risk of running it into the ground and making genuine pests of themselves as has long been the case in Morocco and is arguably in process in Thailand. That friendliness usually carries a price; they’ve all got their hands out. Sometimes it’s nice just to blend in to the point of being ignored. Anything else is a subtle form of racism, however benign. But it CAN be fun, all the extra attention, especially if you’re a novice traveler looking for thrills. Me, I’m past all that; yeah, right. No, me, I’m just looking for a wi-fi signal. What was optional a year ago is no longer so. I’ll pay extra for a wi-fi signal and even go without cable TV. I just opted out of a place a few bucks cheaper WITH KITCHEN because there’s probably no wi-fi; MAYBE a rogue signal, but no guarantee. I’m borrowing it where I am now, and then I’ve only got it on the balcony, drifting in and out of consciousness. Step inside and it’s gone. Such is love. The Information Age is no longer a societal paradigm, but a personal way of life, to have info constantly at one’s fingertips, constantly up-dated and inter-active. I wonder if it’s not the same urge, interpolated and extrapolated, as the primordial quest to control fire, create language, and conquer continents. Outer space and inner space transect right here and right now.

Jamaica’s so-called ‘jerk cuisine’ is not bad, something of a cross between soul food and Indian cuisine, though I’m hardly an expert after only a week’s time and something of a weak stomach, cautious after decades of self-abuse with chiles and derivative products. That seems a little odd with only a handful of native Indians here, they one of the traditional merchant groups who, along with the Chinese and the original peripatetic Semitic Lebanese, keep Jamaica out of the jungle. As Chinese cooks increasingly take over cooking chores, Jamaican food itself may be taking on some Chinese qualities. Curries there are cooked from scratch and piping hot, not perpetual stews simply ladled over and out. The bakeries aren’t bad either, combining the chores of meaty British patties and sweet European pastries, with biscuits both British and American to boot. Too bad there are none of these on the ‘hip strip’. They’d probably do well, since street food is hard to find. Fancy restaurants aren’t. Neither are skunks, the smell of which pervades the atmosphere. I suppose you could eat them too, maybe mixed into brownies. But I’m past all that.