Buccaneers and Buses

For once when I’ve sat down to write this blog I’m having to wrack my brains for something to write about – not much has happened in the past week or so, bar a trip out to visit the former pirate hang-out of Port Royal, and the continuing and frustrating saga of getting my visa extended, which has delayed me heading up north to Albert Town. I’m starting to wish I hadn’t bothered.

Kashawn, the latest Bryan dynasty carver

It could have been a different story this week – had things gone to plan, I would have made a trip up to visit Bob Marley’s mausoleum in his birth town of Nine Mile, St Anne, and then last Sunday gone to a free concert to mark the anniversary of the birth of Jamaican national hero Marcus Garvey, whose teachings, writings and activism in the cause of black empowerment have had a huge influence on everything from Rastafari to the American Civil Rights movement. Unfortunately, both trips fell through for the same reason, my prospective companions being flat broke.

Home has been on my mind quite a lot, partly because of a mixture of good news and bad news, but also I guess partly because of boredom. For a couple of days at the end of last week, I felt as homesick as I’ve been so far, I really, really wanted to be home seeing family and friends and just getting back to my old life again. But then there have been reminders of the things I won’t enjoy one bit when I do return, and I remember how lucky I am to be here with a little bit of distance between me and the hassles of normality, taking a pit stop before I have to return to the rat race. I hope the next three months drag like crazy.

Meeting a salty seadog

Port Royal was the first town built by the British after they invaded and took over control of parts of Jamaica from the Spanish in 1654 (Jamaica was not formally ceded to Britain until 1670). Then an island at the mouth of Kingston Harbour opposite the present capital, Port Royal was seen as strategically important for protecting the recently won prize of the world’s seventh-largest natural harbour, and the British built five separate forts there. To man this growing fort town, the British administration hit on an ingenious idea – instead of shipping over soldiers and civilians from home, they began to encourage the Caribbean’s growing armies of pirates and buccaneers to use Port Royal as a base for launching their attacks on Spanish gold ships heading back from South America to Europe. Within a few short years, legendary privateers such as Henry Morgan (who was later made lieutenant general of Jamaica with a mandate to eradicate piracy from the colony) and Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach had helped turn Port Royal into a city renowned as ‘the richest and wickedest on earth’, awash with plunder, rum and prostitution. As if divine judgment had ruled it such, the booming port was destroyed by an earthquake in 1692, plunging huge chunks of the island into the sea.

Marcus Garvey statue, Liberty House

I loved pirate stories as a kid. I even have a soft spot for the Pirates of the Caribbean films, so the chance to see the original pirate town was quite exciting. It took a while to get to, what with Sunday bus services not being so regular, but the hour wait in downtown Kingston at least gave me a chance to see more of the Parade and walk up King Street, past the Ward Theatre and Liberty Hall, headquarters of Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. The wait finally over, the bus headed east out onto the coast road I’d last been on my first night in Jamaica when I was picked up from the airport, past the huge Caribbean Cement factory where the green hills come tumbling down within spitting distance of the shoreline. As we headed out along the causeway past Norman Manley Airport, it occurred to me that I’d be making this same journey in another three months, only then I’ll be heading home.

The Ward Theatre

Port Royal itself was a bit of a disappointment for the simple reason that there’s nothing much there – it’s more sleepy fishing village than historical pirate fort these days, with only a scattering of large, mostly disused buildings suggesting its maritime and military past. I didn’t bother paying in to the museum at Fort Charles as from what I’ve read it’s main attraction is a collection of old canons, and you can see some of them outside the gate anyway. Instead I settled for a relaxing walk in the late afternoon sunshine, while a vicious-looking thunderstorm raged over the water over Kingston and the hills behind, the inky clouds making the sun-soaked island seem all the brighter. Lunch was the Jamaican equivalent of fish and chips (not that I had the fish) – fried fish (fried whole, head and all, without batter), festival and bammy, or cassava cakes, topped with amazing chilli pickled cabbage and washed down with an ice cold Guinness. As we sat by the shoreline next to some fishing boats, we watched some tourists heading off by boat to one of the nearby cays. We got talking to one of the fishermen and he quoted us a price of $5000 – about 40 pounds – for a two-hour boat trip to one of the little sand spits, the largest and nearest of which I could have swam to. Needless to say, I didn’t take up his kind offer.

In the sea, finally!

Besides, if you wanted to go swimming, there’s a perfectly good beach at Port Royal itself, although I guess for your average tourist it isn’t pristine enough to fulfill their fantasies of tropical beach luxury – annoying details like flotsam that doesn’t look like it has been cleaned up in years probably spoil the dream. But that wasn’t going to put me off taking a much-anticipated dip in the Caribbean, although typically, as soon as I stripped off the storm clouds reached Port Royal from inland accompanied by a surprisingly chilly wind. Not that that mattered much once I was in the sea – it was a temperature I’d be quite happy to have a bath in (I was later told warm sea is usually a forewarning of hurricanes). I could have stayed there all day, except I had to get the bus home.

I’m starting to feel like I’m becoming more closely acquainted with the bus service between Old Harbour and Kingston, via Spanish Town, than I ever needed to be, and sure enough I was back on it again the next day to go and finally try to sort my visa out, at the third attempt. For whatever reason, the buses were unusually crowded, and that seemed to make everything take twice as long as normal. In Spanish Town, the big yellow JUTC bus to Half Way Tree must have started to leave the depot and stopped again to pick up more passengers about six times, until you couldn’t have found standing room for a sardine. This cramming process took a full 20 minutes, and although I’d left Old Harbour in what seemed plenty of time, I started to doubt that the Immigration Office only closed half days on Fridays.

Monique on the beach

It didn’t, and getting my visa approved was relatively straight forward, even though they did question why the organization that had sent me over had not applied for a work permit exemption for me, which strictly speaking was required even to carry out work on a voluntary basis. However, it was obviously not that a big deal and they duly granted me the three month extension, before delivering the coup de grace – for some unfathomable quirk of the bureaucratic process, they wouldn’t stamp my passport there and then and I would have to return to collect it on Thursday afternoon, which would be journey number four. As you can imagine, I was overjoyed at this news.

View Kingston Harbour from Port Royal

The buses hadn’t got any quieter by the time I returned to the Half Way Tree depot at about 3pm, and the line for the Spanish Town bus was horrific. After waiting for the first bus to fill up and depart, Monique insisted I forgo 30 years of indoctrination in British etiquette and follow her out of the queue to the front, ready to pounce once the next bus arrived. What I witnessed next was all the vindication I’ll ever need to know that queuing is good, proper and right. In the maelstrom that erupted as soon as the next bus pulled up, I saw children and old women rudely shoved aside in the free-for-all to get on and get a seat. But the best of it was, no sooner had this scrum started, than another empty bus bound for Spanish Town pulled up right behind the first – there was no need for anyone to push and wrestle, there was room for everyone. Now if everyone had just stayed queued nicely… Once on the bus, however, I saw a much better side of the Jamaican character summed up in the use of public transport. A young mum with a rather tubby little girl of about five had got on too late to get a seat – to save her daughter’s legs, she simply asked Monique if she minded if the girl sat on her knee, who said yes, no problem. Somehow I couldn’t imagine the same kind of spirit of helpfulness existing between strangers on a bus back home, where people seem most intent on staring straight ahead and avoiding any kind of interaction with human beings. Moved by this spirit of camaraderie (and realizing that the plump girl was sending Monique’s legs numb before we’d even left the bus terminal), I gave up my seat to the mother so she could have the pleasure of letting her own baby block off the circulation to her lower limbs.

However hectic that journey was, I’d picked the right day to go to sort my visa out – the next day, bus and taxi operators in St Catherine and St Andrew, the parishes where Spanish Town and Kingston are, went on strike calling for the minister of transport to resign, over what dispute I don’t know. The action apparently brought both major cities to a standstill and left hundreds of people stranded. It also caused some tension – Shawn, Kadaye’s boyfriend and baby Kashawn’s dad, works on the buses and came home that night saying one of his work mates had been shot in the foot after a car driver lost patience with the strikers blocking the road in Linstead with their picket and decided to open fire.

A final note on the use of buses in Jamaica – if you ever do get to use one of the large yellow JUTC buses in and around Kingston and Spanish Town, don’t be surprised to be treated to an impromptu sermon from some wannabe preacher. On the way back from finally collecting by newly stamped visa yesterday, I was treated to a middle-aged man in glasses belting out a series of hymns in one of the worst singing voices I’ve ever heard – if there was a God, surely he’d have done something to this guys larynx to prevent him torturing the unsuspecting public so. Monday’s highway testament was much better, however – I actually agreed with a lot of what the earnest-looking young man had to say, bar all the bible quotations. His theme was people ‘wanting things there own way’, and he went on to explain how this was at the root of most of Jamaican society’s ills with a careful dissection of politics, popular culture, domestic arrangements and much more besides, all delivered in the typically Jamaican blunt, no-bullshit style.

By and large, I have found Jamaican people generally much more switched on to the political and social circumstances surrounding them than back home – there’s none of the burying your head in the sand, it doesn’t affect me, I find all that stuff boring attitude that you get in so many Brits. And I have to admit religion plays a key part in that, both Rastafari, which ensures that a radical, anti-state, pro-revolution ideology is pretty mainstream here, and Christianity, which serves as a kind of collective moral conscience people aren’t afraid to talk about in public. As with the guy on the bus, I found myself agreeing with an article written by some prominent Christian or other in Wednesday’s paper about a Jamaican guy who’s just been jailed in 30 years in America for running a Ponzi scam worth millions of dollars. Minus all the biblical references, his arguments about greed and selfishness were spot on.

The flipside of the tight grip Christianity has on the moral consciousness of many Jamaicans remains all too apparent, however. Pro-life anti-abortion posters are dotted all along the main highway into Kingston, and most obvious of all is the deep-rooted homophobia whish seems nearly universal. The same paper on Wednesday ran a front page story about how a gay rights group had had an advert refused by Jamaica’s main TV company. The story quoted company officials citing prominent Christian pastors who in recent weeks had spoken out about the evils of homosexuality as evidence that a pro-gay advert would cause too much public offence. Whether they remain a practicing Christian or not, these attitudes are engrained in most Jamaicans from birth, and while the Church keeps its influence, I can’t see that changing. It’s one example of where the influence of a reactionary and conservative religion is holding this country back.