Albert Town

If there was such a thing as Paradise, I would hope it looked something like Cockpit Country, an exotically stunning and largely pristine region of steep, sheer-sided limestone hills, deep valleys, rivers, caves and sinkholes situated mainly in the northern Jamaican. Famous for its yams, as the home of the fastest man in history, Usain Bolt, and as the land where bands of escaped slaves, the Maroons, built and maintained independent communities in defiance of the British Empire for nearly two centuries, most of Cockpit Country is so rugged and overgrown that there are still barely any human settlements across its 500 acre expanse – most visitors venture here either to hike or hunt the feral pigs that still run wild.

Cockpit Country

Around the region’s perimeter, the landscape softens just enough to allow small-scale farming to thrive, creating a pastoral idyll where man and nature co-exist in apparent harmony – the wild, untamed bush mingles almost without discrimination on the steep slopes with groves of yam, banana, plantain, beans, sugar cane, coffee, cocoa, avocado and citrus fruits, making it a place of plenty as well as beauty. The largest settlements are scattered in a ring, connected by twisting one-track roads embedded high up the valley walls. These small agricultural communities tend to have with strange names like Wait-a-bit, Quick Step, Barbecue Bottom, Me No Sen You No Come and The District of Look Behind, the latter two reminders of the bloody guerilla wars fought between the Maroons and the British redcoats.

One of the largest of these communities is Albert Town, which sits on a high escarpment looking down into an elongated U-shaped valley where the River Quashie runs for just a few short miles before disappearing underground into the pock-riddled limestone. Albert Town is the home of Charlton Francis, aka Paperfoot and often known simply as ‘Paper’, my volunteer mentor while I’m in Jamaica and my host for what I’m treating as my fortnight’s holiday for the summer.

Paperfoot digging me a yam

I’d been looking forward to coming here for a couple of weeks by the time Paperfoot finally arrived to fetch me last Friday afternoon, and bar all the messing about with my visa I would have come a week earlier. With little to do, the summer holidays had started to drag in Old Harbour, and I was feeling well ready for a change of scene, wandering round the countryside a bit and enjoying some peace and quiet. So I was feeling pretty contented as we headed up the winding, narrow mountain road north of Mandeville, soaking up the scenery as we passed through the big(ish) market town of Christiana and delved into the Trelawney hills soaked in late afternoon sunshine.

I was feeling even more pleased as we arrived in Albert Town and I was shown my home for the next two weeks – a very comfortable and neat apartment on the ground floor of a two-storey, split-level house built into the hillside within spitting distance of the main town square. After three months in more sparse accommodation, having a choice of two double beds, with proper pillows, a laptop and collection of DVDs, and a kitchen complete with kettle and toaster felt like luxury. And that was before Paperfoot started to bring me food – by the end of the weekend, I had my own bushel of green banana, a 10-pound hunk of yam, a dozen ripe bananas, plantains, pumpkin and papaya, plus fresh mint and lemongrass for making tea, brought fresh from ‘bush’ for me to feast on. Let’s just say I’ve been eating pretty well the past week, and if it is possible to poison yourself from eating too much banana and plantain, I’m about to find out.

View from the Aurturo Pub

The weekend was spent exploring the town and the surrounding area. The town itself has little more than a library, post office, petrol station, community centre and maybe a dozen or so shops and bars, including a bakery that sells delicious, slightly sweet fresh harddough bread (although when I asked for ‘fresh bread’, the guy behind the counter gave me a friendly lecture about how his bread, containing salt and sugar, was anything but ‘fresh’, which for Jamaicans means unseasoned and therefore tasteless or bad tasting. ‘Aks me for hot or warm bread and we a-speak the same language, my friend!’). There is also a pretty good pub, the Aurturo, which has a veranda at the back with great views over the valley below.

My guides around town on the first morning were Paperfoot’s 10-year old daughter Tanish and Yashima, granddaughter of Tanish’s step-mum, Sister, whose services came pretty cheap all considering, costing a large bag of jelly snakes and some instant corn porridge. For this they also took me down the road leading past where I’m staying and down into the valley below, past Paperfoot’s home and some of his yam fields and banana groves, and into the scattered community of Freedom Hall, named after a large Baptist Church, where most of Tanish’s extended family live, including her 104-year-old great-grandmother.

Hair-do courtesy of Tanish

The main attraction down in the valley is the Quashie River, a shallow, rocky and very pretty waterway which pours into a huge sinkhole and cave complex a couple of miles down stream from Albert Town. As there isn’t a great deal to do in the immediate area without taking a convoluted series of taxi rides, exploring this sinkhole and cave became my main ambition for the week. Unfortunately, my best laid plans were to be thwarted – twice – by one of the hazards you have to roll with if you decide to take a holiday in the Jamaican hill country smack bang in the middle of rainy season – a tendency for frequent and torrential thunderstorms to spring out of nowhere.

I made my first assault on reaching the sinkhole, which I knew from my guidebook involved a short hike through farm-cum-bush land followed by a difficult scramble down a steep collapse, on Sunday, setting out at around 1pm accompanied by Paperfoot. This, I realize with hindsight, was my first mistake – the rains here always come in the afternoon. Nonetheless, after following the road down into the valley for a couple of miles, I left Paperfoot in glorious sunshine at the house of a friend he needed to call on, with instructions to follow the road for about another half mile or so round a sharp bend where I would see a sign for the trail down to the sinkhole.

All of this was straightforward enough, and I found the sign without any problems. However, on rounding the bend I also found something else – a huge bank of black cloud towering above the hills at the head of the valley ahead, and the unmistakable misty veil of torrential rain cloaking the view. Although where I was stood was still bathed in hot sunshine, I could see the thunderstorm was headed straight for me, and was probably moving quite quickly. Not fancying getting caught half way down a steep slope on my own in torrential rain with nothing but the shirt on my back, I turned on my heels and headed back. My instincts about how quick the storm was approaching proved correct – by the time I reached the house where I’d left Paperfoot less than half an hour before in blazing heat, the sky was black and the rain was bouncing it down. I’d actually timed it pretty well – it only really started to properly rain about a minute before I arrived in the sanctuary of Paperfoot’s friend’s veranda, but that was enough to soak me to the skin.



Sheltering from the storm with Paperfoot



We waited there for about an hour for a break in the rain, knowing we had a fair walk back up the steep hill to go. Eventually, seeing the torrent slacken to a light drizzle, Paperfoot decided that the downpour had exhausted itself and we would be safe to hit the road again. It wasn’t a good guess – within ten minutes it was absolutely tipping it down again, and I was soon so wet I might as well have just gone and sat fully clothed in the river. We took a short cut up a rocky bank which now resembled a small stream, and took refuge a while in an abandoned shop, before deciding the only decent thing to do in the circumstances was to head over the road to a small wooden bar and take refuge under the tarpaulin at the back while having a beer. By the time we’d finished, the rain had slackened off and the sun was even trying to breakthrough again.

Yashima, Monique and Tanish

I made my next attempt to reach the cussed cave on Thursday, this time accompanied by Tanish, Yashima and Monique, and equipped with a bag full of food, a towel and a waterproof jacket. Learning my lesson from the last trip, I made sure we set off earlier, stopping along the way to top up our lunch provisions by picking Ethiopian apples and guava. However, lulled into a false sense of security by the hot sunshine, cloudless sky and the fact we had time in abundance, I made my second mistake. The plan was to visit the sinkhole but also spend some time lazing around next to (and in) the river itself. As we were already pretty hot by the time we reached the river a mile or so upstream from the sinkhole, we decided to stop and take a dip in the river for a while.

Despite not being very wide or deep, Quashie River is a beautiful place to bathe. High banks overgrown with tall bamboo and guava trees hanging out over the water make it a sun trap where little wind reaches, but also provide plenty of cool shade, while the water from countless mountain streams gushes over the rocks in mini-waterfalls, collecting in places in waist-deep pools just big enough to stretch out in. It’s also where local families come to do their laundry and wash – the first couple of places we tried down the bank, we came across naked and women and children in the midst of having a bath, prompting me to make hurried apologies, although no one else seemed to bat an eyelid. When we eventually did find a long stretch of relatively deep water to ourselves, our paddling soon drew complaints from a woman just downstream who was washing her clothes, as we were disturbing the sandy bottom of the river and making the water muddy.

The Quashie River

The combination of hot sun, cool water and attractive scenery was pretty hard to resist, and we probably spent longer sitting under small waterfalls and trying to catch small fish with our hands than we should have done. But by the time I decided we should head for the cave, the sun was still hot and the sky blue, with just a few white clouds starting to gather over the hills upstream. I should have learnt my lesson from the previous Sunday about how quickly weather closes in up here – by the time we reached the signs to the cave, it had clouded over and a few drops of rain were in the air. I couldn’t believe my luck – same place, same result. This time, though, sheer stubbornness meant I wasn’t going to give in so easily – I was going to see that sinkhole even if I got a proper soaking in the process. So we set off on the track from the road, prompting a warning from a bemused and slightly concerned-looking woman at the nearest house not to even try going in the sinkhole in the rain as the river flooded extremely quickly as soon as heavy rains started sending water cascading down the surrounding hills. I didn’t care anymore, I knew the weather had screwed up my chances of reaching the cave for a second time, and I just wanted to see where it was.

Monique enjoys nature's bubble bath

Following the path down and round the edge of a large yam field, we probably got 200 yards before the heavens opened. I started to feel guilty about subjecting two ten-year-old girls to the downpour, especially knowing how most Jamaicans avoid rain at all costs, but the consensus was we were miles from home, we had nowhere to shelter, and everyone was still in their swimwear anyway, we might as well keep going. About 15 minutes later, after battling through some thick overgrowth in unrelenting rain, we reached the top of the descent into the sink and I realized I wasn’t going any further – the sides are sheer and in that rain, far too slippery to risk taking the two girls down. So back we headed, but, to my surprise, not dispirited – everyone was enjoying the stupidity of hiking half-naked through the bush in the kind of rain that takes just seconds to soak you to the skin.

Typically, no sooner had we got back to the main road than the rain started to ease and the sun came out again. I knew there was no point going back – the slopes down to sink would be too wet to climb down for hours – and everyone wanted lunch. Seeing as we were all wet through anyway, why not head back to the river to eat by/in the water. So it was that we managed to squeeze in a picnic of banana, banana fritters, bread, guava and Ethiopian apple, washed down with home-made grapefruit juice, before the rain returned with a vengeance. The downpour that engulfed the valley for the next half hour or so is probably the heaviest rain I’ve ever seen, and certainly walked in. We rigged up towels, t-shirts and the one waterproof jacket I had with me the best we could to keep the rain out of our eyes, me and Monique opting to make pretty ridiculous-looking hats out of black plastic bags, and trudged back up the hill, laughing and enjoying the exhilarating feeling of no longer caring how hard it rained because we couldn’t possibly get any wetter. God knows what people in the houses we passed thought of our motley crew.

Kitted out for the rain

Eventually, the heavens relented and the sun came out to dry us out on the final stretch of our journey, which was probably a good job as it was starting to feel a tad cold. On the way back, I got accosted by the kind of gentleman of senior years who back home could be assumed to sleep on park benches and stink of piss – a toothless, sun-dried old man who came lurching out of a rum shack towards me, carrying a huge joint and so drunk he could barely walk. I couldn’t understand most of what he was saying, but at first I gathered it was pretty friendly, peppered with the usual ‘Respect, whitey!’ and elbow touches. But then he gestured towards Monique and said something about white men and black women and suddenly had this wild, infuriated look in his eye. I tried to walk away, but he kept grabbing my arm and facing me, suddenly asking me ‘You hate black people, huh?!!’ Then I knew it was time to get away, and fast – despite being old and half-cut, the guy had had a machete tucked under his arm the whole time, which made me feel kind of nervous. Monique and the two girls weren’t much help – they’d sped up to get away from the madman and had got a fair way up the road while I conversed with my new friend. There was nothing for it – I picked up my pace to a near-trot I calculated the old get wouldn’t be able to keep up with in his state of inebriation, and left him cursing in my wake. I guess every town has one.

On Monday I braved the mountain roads to head to Christiana to meet Monique, who had decided to come visit me. The journey there was yet another education in the game of sardines that is typical of Jamaican public transport – the driver of the route taxi managed to squeeze SIX people into his Toyota Corolla, a new record for me, by making two people share the front seat. I’m not sure exactly how he managed to change gear, but the woman sat in the middle didn’t seem to be complaining.

The Blue Hole

I managed to survive the journey with just an aching kidney (thanks to a stray elbow from a fellow passenger) and stiff hips to show for being bounced around in a human crushing machine for the past 40 minutes, and had time to kill. I’d arrived in Christiana early to go on a walk I’d seen in my guidebook down into the valley below to a swimming pool known as the Blue Hole. I set off with only the vaguest directions, and was very grateful for a couple of young boys who asked me where I was going, telling me I’d passed the track into the bush I needed to take. They kindly offered to take me, leading me down a red dirt path through some yam fields, and then down a tall flight of natural stone steps in the steep valley wall.

Christiana boys, erm, 'posing'

Despite the stream which feeds it being little more than a trickle, the Blue Hole is a sizeable pool, and deep enough in parts to allow for some good diving off the 10-foot rocks surrounding it. This I gathered straight away from the large group of teenage boys swimming there and taking it in turns to show off their best twist, pike and bombing routines from the high ledges. As I’m becoming used to, the scenery around the pool was like something out of a fairy tale, all glistening rocks draped in lush, hanging vegetation, and I spent a very pleasant couple of hours there swimming in the icy water and chatting to the boys, who were particularly keen to discuss the comings and goings in the English Premier League transfer window ahead of the new season.

Right now I’m sat writing this while a particularly loud thunderstorm rages outside, full of plantain porridge and avocado, feeling extremely relaxed. Not 20 miles away, the bars, discos and go-go clubs of Montego Bay will be gearing up for another weekend of all-night parties and unbridled hedonism. You can keep them – to be able to walk and pick what you want to eat from laden trees and rest in the shade with your feet cooling in the current of a cool stream is happiness enough for me right now.