Blue Mountains 1 Admas 0

Me and Liz had decided that we were going to go the Blue Mountains; the picturesque mountain range that greets me every morning as I stroll to the bus stop. Remember those?

Being a man, I naturally wanted to go to the peak, which was the highest point in Jamaica. Some cursory research revealed the following facts:
- the view is best at sunrise
- the peak takes three to six hours if you leave from a very remote place near the mountains
- said remote place was a good 3-4 hours from where I lived

Adding these new bits of information together, it quickly became clear that the itinerary was not going to involve a lie-in. The plan was to head up for Sunday. Today was Saturday. Saturday evening.

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I don’t tend to miss appointments that I have to wake up for. I think this is because I am both a worrier and a very light sleeper. So when I have something important to do the next morning, it usually weighs so heavily on my mind that I wake up repeatedly in the middle of the night, terrified of oversleeping.

So, come Sunday, I woke up and the time on my mobile phone read 00:35.

I had woken up early. Fifteen minutes early.

As I stumbled out of bed in the pitch black and turned on the light, my body and my brain were trying to talk to each other. My brain was on surprisingly good form, given the hour; it was ticking off the list of items I needed to take in my rucksack (bananas, jerk chicken from previous night, cereal bars, snickers bars, juice, bottle of Pepsi) and telling my hands to do various things (make bed, put on clothes). My body was definitely trying to communicate something, mostly, I suspected, sheer confusion at what exactly was going on. But I ploughed through. The taxi was due to arrive at 1am.

The plan was as follows. Our housekeeper had sourced us a taxi through a friend that would take us to Mavis Bank, our drop off point. My predictably last-minute efforts at organising the trip (start time for making plans: 4.25pm the day before) had resulted in a somewhat stripped down approach to the adventure. So, ideally, one should be taking a ride to a remote drop-off point near the bottom of the biggest mountain. This is still some distance from Mavis Bank and the roads there are seriously dodgy, so ideally (there’s that word again), you’d need to source a 4 x 4  for the second leg of the trip. Really smart people with guide books and planning skills do things like get there at a reasonable hour, spent a few hours kipping in a little hotels and then jump out of bed in the middle of the night to make the trek in time for the glorious sunrise.

Hmm. My planning had started a bit later and those pesky guides who would escort me from Mavis Bank to the interesting part of the Blue Mountains proved really very tricky to get hold of. I should have anticipated that. In fact, none of the numbers listed in my guidebook seemed to get me anywhere. One of the numbers took me to a gruff man who, while having impeccable taste in Jamaican music (he was listening to some wondrous, heart-stopping rocksteady when I called), really didn’t know what I was talking about and was positively incensed when I called back to double-check whether I had dialled the right number. I almost gave up at this point. My next thought was that I should just do the trek without a guide. My knee-jerk ‘How hard can it be?’ instinct began to take over and I started to imagine myself in a fine tradition of impromptu explorers of beautiful yet challenging natural landscapes. Rose, our housekeeper (a rock of common sense), was not having any of this. ‘Ye mad?” she inquired. When she said this (not the first time I have heard her say this to one of my plans), I knew that I was suggesting something stupid. Crap.

In the end, I used some local knowledge to find something of a compromise – my co-worker at the Council, Jason, told me that if I just popped along to the Mavis Bank police station, they could put me in contact with a local guide. Ah, Jamaica. I yearned to trust the flippancy of such a typically Jamaican set-up, but deep-down, I obviously didn’t believe it – I had to at least check that the police station existed. It did. As to be expected, the police officer on the other end of the line was bemused at my clearly socially unacceptable insistence on details. Just turn up, ok?

As I hadn’t been able to get hold of any of these hotels and given that my plan had only taken form at around 9.30pm on Saturday, it seemed sensible to adjust the timetable accordingly. So, a 1.00am departure it was.

The taxi ride to Mavis Bank was really wonderful. I was so tired I felt like I was in a trance throughout. The town we passed through was eerily quiet; garish neon signs illuminated an occasional group hanging out or a meandering night-walker. Slightly unusually, we were being driven by two people: Rose’s friend, whose extreme friendliness would have been a bit more palatable had I not been trying to get by on two hours’ sleep and his cousin, a quiet but very nice young Rasta.

And the music was sublime, classic roots – the fiery heart of Jamaican music. Creaking out of a barely functioning car tape-player (the way all good old music should be heard) Peter Tosh was coolly incensed, Bob Marley sang his heart out before his voice broke and Jacob Miller pleaded with the police.
- Please, Mr Officer
- don’t lose your temper

I was amazed that someone was actually at the police station when I turned up. The young officer had (not unreasonably) been napping but dealt with it all, getting hold of the guide and telling him to get his ass down to the station. While the young officer went back to bed, me and Liz entertained ourselves by eating bananas and hoping that when the guide did turn up, it would be in a 4 x 4.

He didn’t. And it took him a couple of hours. Also, for good measure, my dreams of reaching the peak were laughed off by the guide. We’d be walking for 24 hours! he said. I settled for a smaller peak. Our guide was fine, if a bit aloof. He certainly didn’t start off well – once he’d got me down off my mission to climb the peak, he proceeded to just point at the nearest peak (more of a hill) and ask if that was ok. I had to keep prodding him until he pointed at something halfway decent which would take, you know, at least six hours and give me something to talk about. Also, he didn’t exactly win my confidence when, upon us coming across a river right at the beginning of the walk (still dark) he uttered a loud, surprised ‘Oh!’. Not what you want to hear.

Anyway, in the end, it rained heavily. I don’t think I’ve ever been as tired and hungry as I was on the way back down. Lesson: something about planning things.

When we got back, I did some wide-eyed enthusing about the music in the car-ride to Rose, who responded in her wonderfully unruffled, typically Jamaican manner.
- Rastaman ‘ave good music.