CIAO CARRY BEIN’- ‘DYER MAKER, QUEUE BA, BAR BAIT-O’S & GUY ANNA

continued from previous So I’ve ‘done’ over half of the Caribbean countries now, seven down and only six (depending on current political events) to go. ‘Big deal’ you say, except that that’s a lot of flights and connections, not to mention expense. You don’t see many backpackers here, unless they’re sailboat-savvy. I hear you can get on boats in Antigua (drop the ‘u’ to match local pronunciation). That’s a greater number of countries than in all of South America. With your indulgence I hope to check some more Caribbean countries off the list by doing some simple airline stopovers. These are tiny countries with tiny less-than-Alaska-size populations and it’s not like they’ve all got distinct cultures. I figure if I get to Antigua I can go RT to Grenada on a LIAT milk run stopping off at several different countries on the way down and back. Then I’d just do a side trip to St. Kitts where I might even buy citizenship if I think it’ll get me into those countries that might not like a US passport. I’m serious. Current rate is $300K investment and $35K for paperwork. Who knows? Maybe they’ll let me run for president. With another little side trip from Miami to the Bahamas, I’d then have the Caribbean zipped up, all thirteen countries.

So I’m already planning two or three trips ahead while sitting in Montego Bay, probably not the typical activity here. They’ve seen it all. MoBay is yesterday’s travel news, like Acapulco or Hong Kong or Rio. I was shocked at how small the tourist strip is here. I haven’t been to Negril but I’ve been to Kuta in Bali, the road that never ends. If it weren’t for the airport and the cruise ships, this wouldn’t seem any more of a tourist destination than Hollywood or Chiang Rai or Flagstaff or Berkeley or Portland or Boulder, all places I’ve called home, however temporarily, chronologically inverse. I’ve seen cruise ships before in Ensenada, but not like these. These cruise ships are amazing, huge floating hotels that bring you only one step closer to ‘the real thing’ than watching the world on Nat Geo. The passengers go crazy when they land of course, ready to drink and shop. Would they even know the difference if you merely toured them around an island theme park, each stop a different country theme? It’d save on diesel fuel.

The next day dawns gray and blustery again, but I feel better, so I work out. I usually feel worse when I don’t. Now I got a big idea while watching the planes coming in low over the ocean to land at MBJ. Ever since watching the movie ‘Pushing Tin’ I’ve wanted to try that little air turbulence trick like Billy Bob Thornton where the plane flies right above you and lifts you off the ground. Of course it also throws you around so you need some heavy duty safety equipment which I don’t always carry in my pack. Also there’s usually the problem of gaining access to a runway, especially difficult in these days of flight terrorism. But if the flight comes in over water… and I’m content to stay in the water instead of actually flying around… what’s to stop me from a little bit of experimentation in turbulence? Of course there is the possibility of problems with the Jamaican equivalent of the FAA; that’d be a spot of bother, or… it could draw some kind of attention from the other people on the beach; but…

…the Thing, the bug, the virus, whatever- it’s still inside me. Sores aren’t healing and new ones are opening up. Tender tissues are swelling up in sensitive places. What’s in that water any way? Is it even safe to swim in a third world country so close to a city with its trash and sewage and God knows what? You don’t swim in Pattaya, Thailand. It’s not healthy; everyone knows that. Can you safely swim in MoBay? They got two tourist police for each tourist here. Why can’t they hire some people to pick up some trash, too? But there’s no time for abstract speculation. I need an exterminator… fast, before the Thing decides to franchise and found new colonies. I need a weapon. I need antibiotics.

It’s hard to appreciate the fact that bacteria used to rule the world. Think dinosaurs were the most successful species with their 200 million year run of the earth, or maybe (chuckle) humans? Think again. The explosion of multi-cell life as we know it occurred only some seven hundred million years ago. Bacteria have been around at least three billion, ever since Earth cooled down below the boiling point. The amazing thing is not that life occurred; it’s that complex life occurred. And I’m still trying to figure out my wife. Any responsible scientist who claims that certainly more life exists out there somewhere given the law of large numbers, is surely talking about bacteria. Any scientist who swears there are PEOPLE out there is taking corporate money from somewhere for something. The dreamers are just killing time scanning the skies for radio signals, until they actually find one… Back on Earth bacteria, good Muslims that they are, will never give up, always trying to regain turf that they’ve been forced to cede over to modern antiseptic societies. They probably will. It’s just a paradigm shift. In their world view we work for them, giving them shelter and transportation in return for some time on Earth. At least we can understand bacteria; they’re like us. Viruses are another story. They’re like another dimension, DNA in a condom and nothing else, always ready to infect, any time any place any vector. Wear protection.

Looking for a doctor in a Third World country is always fun. The only consolation is that it’ll probably be cheaper than the US, but it’ll probably be more than Thailand. It is, but health is more important, health and happiness. Considering that I’ll see my wife tomorrow for the first time in two months, I need to be fit, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. I wouldn’t mind a little icing on the cake, too, after pretty boring food for two months. The boredom diet works, and the travel diet too. I’m down to 173 pounds from probably 183 a half year ago. That’s fighting weight, lean and mean and polished to a high sheen... Blood pressure’s good, too. So it costs me $70-80 for the office visit and a week’s worth of penicillin from a clinic called, I shit you not, ‘Doctor’s Office’. What the Hell; this trip is way over budget anyway. I only spent $17-1800 for 50 days in the four southernmost South American countries a few months ago. These 60 days will end up at almost three times that, and I’m a frugal muthuh’ fuh’ yuh’, rice cooker and all. Who said that foreign travel is cheap? The initial flight for both these trips was a frequent flyer freebie, as is my next one to Rome; use ‘em or lose ‘em.

But the antibiotics work and this trip draws to a close. Even the defecation aggravation and resulting hemorrhoids seemed to respond. I knew it! They sneaked in the back door! Almost symbolically I caught a Seinfeld episode that I’d somehow missed, lost in the crowd, like the one illusory last peanut in a bag holding mostly empty shells, ‘Serenity Now’ (“Newman!”), the end of an era. It’s time to move on. I’ll spend a week in California before heading out to Rome. See you there. If you like this travel blog then it’ll definitely continue on TravelPod at http://www.travelpod.com/members/hardiek where I’ll eventually tell the stories of all my travel both past present and future, at least until I reach the official UN total of 192 countries. The Thailand-to-Timbuktu blog may revert to its earlier trial role as a world music mouthpiece for promotion and criticism. World music is a worthwhile cause that needs all the help it can get. Stay tuned.

‘DYER MAKER JAH MAKE A JAMAICA ME HAPPY, ‘CEP…

The change comes over me all of a sudden, almost imperceptibly and without warning. One minute everything’s fine; then the next minute I’m losing it, my health, that is. First it’s just a funny feeling of myself being divided and separated with an ensuing lag time between the two halves, and then a little chill and involuntary shudder as my body tries to create some artificial warmth for itself through motion. Or maybe my body is simply trying to shake it off, deny the existence of the other now inside me. But it’s too little too late. I have no choice but to ride it out now, let it run its course. But what is it? It’s not some drug I voluntarily ingested and now I’ve changed my mind while waiting for it to ‘kick in’. It’s another being, another life form that’s found its home in me, whether by accident or design, sitting in the driver’s seat and taking over the wheel. They say the worst virus the world has ever seen, Ebola, still lives in some cave in Africa, just biding its time… in expectation. What’s found its home in me? Whatever it is, it’s wicked, splitting me apart, twisting my view of the world to its own diseased perspective “as all seems yellow to the jaundiced eye.” But I’ve already had HepA, so I should be knock-ulated for life. No matter, the important thing now is to stay warm, drink lots of liquids… and take a vitamin pill.

Some cold weather in Cuba is one thing; that’s not even the Caribbean proper. That’s only a stone’s throw from Miami and subject to major cold fronts coming down over the plains from Canada, one after the other, like planes taking their turns on the runway. Most don’t make it to Jamaica of course, nor Cuba either, running out of steam at around Orlando, maybe leaving a little patina of frost on the fruit crop at worst. But when you stay in your room in Jamaica to stay warm, not cool, and the AC takes a full day off, then you know you’ve got some bad weather. The East Coast has been getting battered all season, so I hear, while California has been getting fried, basking in record winter highs, so I tell my wife. This is good to remember, because I got chills to the point of going to bed early and getting under the covers. That’s not normal; I generally like cool weather. But it makes no difference when something’s got you in its grips, a bug or virus or something. I hate that feeling, that out-of-body experience that puts you beside yourself with fear and anxiety, not to mention unease and disease. The weather actually serves as something of a consolation, not just that I’m not missing anything, but that the chill is not only internal. It’s almost like the front came to Jamaica through me.

It’s no big deal I think, probably just a 24-hour bug, but it’s probably enough to keep me close to home for the remainder of my stay in Jamaica. So that means I spent three weeks in Jamaica total and never got out of Montego Bay. Oh, well. I did the same in Port-of-Spain for a week when I also had wi-fi and a cheap (by Caribbean standards) room. At least here I don’t have to piss in the sink. Actually that’s one of my favorite things while traveling, to actually put down roots in a place for a while. For me traveling is not merely an end in itself; it’s the background against which my life happens. It would’ve been nice to tour the island, but taxis in Jamaica are not cheap, with prices that would make a New York cabbie blush. How about $10 for the five-minute ride from the airport into town? Or $100 for the one hour ride to Negril? Prices might be negotiable as long as you’re not at the airport already, and depending on how well you speak patois. Hating pretentiousness I try to remember black Southern US dialect, complete without conjugations nor declensions and frequent use of the word pickaninny. Given the similarities, it just may be possible that this was the marshalling yard for African diaspora culture, given that slaves were typically ‘seasoned’ in the Caribbean before moving on to the big time in the US. When transcribed to Roman alphabet, Creole is easily understandable, so hardly qualifies as its own language as far as I’m concerned. Dem belly no full wit bacon fi dey only be talkin Jamaican. You neva git dat trip to Rio talking dat Krio. Dem mullah dey no issue no fatwa talkin dat patwa.

There’s local mini-van transport here, but they look pretty cramped and crowded, and seem to only do about thirty minute runs, so for Negril you’d have to transfer at Lucea. That’s a lot of hassle just to go look at another geek-ass tourist resort. What am I going to do with seven miles of beach? If I could run naked down it that’d be different, but I doubt that’s the case. That’s the first thing I did the very first out-of-country trip I took over thirty years ago to Yucatan. I ran down a deserted beach naked. The rest is history; now I look for simpler pleasures. That’s the nice thing about Montego Bay; it’s been surpassed by upstart cousins Negril and Ocho Rios and their $500/nt resorts. So I got lucky here, less than $50/nt and wi-fi coming in my window from next door. But now I have other health issues also, which I won’t go into at any depth. Suffice it to say don’t despair if you get an attack of hemorrhoids at the beach. Jump right in; the salt water works wonders. Who needs Epsom salts?

So I spend my last ten days of this trip getting as domestic as an old mother hen, even buying a rice cooker, so I can cook brown rice and pumpkin squash and callaloo and ‘ground provisions’ like yams and sweet potatoes, supposedly the secret to Jamaican runners’ success. Aahh… real food. Supermarkets here aren’t great, but I bet they’re better than Negril or Ocho Rios. Of course anything that boils water can also make coffee, and Jamaica’s got some of that too. It’s almost like home. I can make a drip coffee maker out of anything, but Styrofoam cups are the preferred raw material. So life takes on a certain regularity, taking a walk on the beach or a swim, walking into town for provisions, but mostly sitting right here in my room with my Internet and Cable TV and MySpace and Sype, doing business and talking to my wife and writing and reading and… just living, almost like the real thing. The big excitement was when I thought there was a Seinfeld episode that I hadn’t seen yet, but it was a false alarm.

Jamaica of course is old news in travel and music circles, reggae music pretty much single-handedly spawning the world music industry after Bob Marley’s death. Jamaica is now so dependent on tourism that I doubt they could do without it. This spawns a certain dependency, both economic and psychological. Though famous for its ‘friendly natives’, which is true, that’s not to be confused with the scads of hustlers pretending to be your instant friend. Aside from the simple offering of goods for sale, including ganja, they have a couple of interesting come-on lines I haven’t encountered elsewhere. One starts “I can see you’re not a racist” and the other “Hey! Remember me?” at which point the hustler claims to be the cook at a restaurant he assumes you’ve frequented or security at your hotel, i.e. everyone’s hotel. What, do they go to scam school? They’re still groveling, trying to get in the back door when the front door’s wide open, at least to any legitimate product of reasonably good quality that I actually need.

Michael Phelps would probably love it here. He could toke up all he wants and there’d be almost no place to upload a video to YouTube. It’s funny though. I smell ganja here all the time, literally ALL the time, but I’ve only rarely actually seen someone smoking it. The Phelps hubbub is ridiculous, though. If somebody wants to rag on him, why not blast him for doing a Rosetta Stone ad and never speaking a word of Chinese in the process, not a ni hao nor a wo ai ni nor even a simple chi fan ma? It’s a joke, but maybe appropriate for Rosetta Stone, which I consider to be almost a consumer fraud in addition to bogus linguistics. We all wish there were some magic way to simply Chomsky-like absorb a language, and Rosetta Stone plays and preys on that philosophy, but I don’t believe it. If you want to learn a language, crack the book. I didn’t notice Chomsky speaking perfect Spanish on Havana TV. He spoke English. Actually you don’t need a book now, much less a dozen. You just need a laptop and internet, ditto for guide books. You can shift my paradigm anytime, baby. To be continued…

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.