Jamaican Treasure

By Mike Gerrard

‘All we need now to make this perfect,’ said Lawrence, ‘is a spliff.’ Four of us were lounging in the back of a pick-up truck, on a couple of mattresses thrown in to make it more comfy. The Jamaican night sky was clear, the air was warm, the rum punches had punched in, there was reggae in the tape deck and we were taking a lift to Alligator Pond for a fish supper, Jamaican-style.

‘No problem, man,’ said the driver, running into his house and coming out again to hand us a cedar-wood box.

‘I was only joking,’ said Lawrence.

‘Take it, man,’ said the driver, and we raced off into the night, zig-zagging up hills, below the stars, past the bars and the ads for Red Stripe, past huts lit by a flickering TV screen and through sound blasts of reggae so loud you felt they ought to have stopped the truck in its tracks. The wind was strong and we lurched round bends, and it took about thirty minutes to roll the joint, another ten to light it. We were climbing up and over the southern end of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and down into the valley, down to where the road runs out in the fishing village of Alligator Pond. To the east is Old Woman’s Point and Gut River, to the west Port Kaiser and Cutlass Point. Ten miles west was where we’d set out from, Treasure Beach, and it had taken us over an hour to get here. Welcome to southern Jamaica.

We tumbled out of the back of the truck and into Little Ochie, which calls itself a pub, is scarcely more than a rough shack, but which locals say serves the best fish for miles. We ordered Red Stripes and vodkas and fizzy Tings, and peered into the cold cabinet where the morning’s catch looked back up at us, roughly a rowing-boat full at a guess. We weighed a few random specimens, which were taken out back where the flames from the grill were leaping high, sparks floating up to join the stars. We climbed the steps to one of the outdoor seating areas, clustered around like thatched boats marooned in a harbour of sand. We talked, we drank, and then we ate the tastiest tenderest fish you could dream of, before hauling ourselves back into the truck with a bottle of Red Stripe for the night ride home.

Places like Alligator Pond and Treasure Beach are the other side of Jamaica, literally, from the all-inclusive resorts that cluster along the north and west coasts and are all many people think the island has to offer. But inclusive means exclusive, with most of the locals fenced out of these Caribbean Butlin’s, and the rich tourists fenced in. Inside, everything’s free – drink, food, watersports, gym, tennis – and outside you pay: hasslers, hustlers, carving-sellers, t-shirt vendors and the old dope peddler and all. They just want a slice of the action… and unfortunately you’re the action.

In Treasure Beach, I go all out for inaction. I sit on the patio in the shade and watch a swallowtail butterfly bob its way by. Silhouetted against the dense blue sky a frigate bird glides past, the angle-poise lamp of the bird world. The yellow/black bananaquit sucks up nectar from a plant on the edge of the patio. Time for me to suck up some goodness too, and Kevin’s banana porridge hits the spot, and a fruit platter of watermelon, papaya and pineapple. A few cups of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee later and it’s back to the patio.

I’m at Jake’s Place, a collection of cottages, basic but bohemian, each individually styled by artist Sally Henzell: Mexican, Moorish, Jamaican. She’s about to start work on a Haitian one. Mirror frames are made from twisted branches. Paintings hang on the walls. There’s a ceiling fan to cool you, a CD player to chill out to, and an old bed on which to do whatever you wish to do in the long hot afternoons. By the small pool there’s a tiny green hut of a bar, from which Dougie dispenses the best rum punch you can imagine. ‘My grandmother’s recipe,’ Sally Henzel tells me. Sally is married to Perry Henzell, the writer and film-maker best known in Britain for directing the greatest reggae film ever made, The Harder They Come.

I’m revelling in another writer, Guy Kennaway, whose novel One People is set in a Jamaican fishing village named Cousin’s Cove and which makes me laugh out loud with its description of a certain type of Jamaican man: ‘In an average life of sixty-five years,’ it reads, ‘a Cousins Cove man spent twenty-one years dozing, a decade working on his appearance, eight years flirting, a month having sex, five years boasting about it, six years generally showing off, four years laughing and the balance in idle chat.’

I walk from Jake’s to the village’s other main hanging-out place and source of idle chat, the Trans-Love Bakery and Restaurant, where a calaloo omelette provides me with lunch and Ralph the co-owner provides me with the idle chat. ‘We’ve got a bank in Treasure Beach now. A few months ago some German visitors were walking by one Saturday night, when they noticed the key was still in the front door. They let themselves in, took some photos of themselves lying on the counter drinking Red Stripe, and handed me the key to give back to the manager on Monday morning.

‘Another time I was waiting for them to open when the staff all screeched up in a car, the manager got out, the assistant got out, the guard got out and waved his gun around like in a Western, then the guy with the money got out. You’d think we were in Kingston, not some sleepy village. So the manager unlocks the door and goes in, the assistant runs in after him, the guy with the gun takes another look round and follows them in. And they lock the door leaving the guy with the money stuck outside on his own. He had to knock on the door to remind them they’d forgotten him.’

The Trans-Love is one of the stops for the Cherry B, the van of a bus that rattles back and forth between Treasure Beach and Black River, the nearest town about 40 minutes away. Next day’s market day so I ask the driver if he’s likely to be full. ‘We’ll squeeze you in, man, we always squeeze people in.’ Next day I finish my ackee and salt fish breakfast and wait for the bus with a few of the villagers. Despite its charms, and the fact that the Lonely Planet guide rates it as one of the ten best things about Jamaica, Treasure Beach is not exactly awash with tourists. Before the bus arrives a battered taxi pulls up and we all pile in. There are two people in the passenger seat, three adults and a young girl in the rear, and an unhappy-looking little boy relegated to the luggage space in the back. The driver makes Mike Tyson look like a kitten. I’m nervous because I didn’t check the price. In Black River as we open the doors and all fall out, I check what the locals are paying him. Forty Jamaican dollars. I prepare to be ripped off but it’s forty Jay for me too. I can hardly believe it. The first honest foreign taxi driver I’ve come across in the last ten years and it’s in mean, moody, high-crime, high-risk Jamaica.

I pick my way through the yams and breadfruit, past the piles of Irish potatoes, the papaya, the coconuts and curious little round chilies. ‘Coming through,’ an elderly man booms to get two chatting women out of his way, ‘coming through.’

Back in Treasure Beach that night I walk along the sand at sunset, past another elderly man sitting with his wife on upturned boxes watching the children splashing around. Crabs as fine as filigree scuttle into their holes as I approach. Further on, in a quieter spot and about fifty yards out from the ‘No Swimming at this point’ sign, a Jamaican couple are holding each other and treading water in the dusky light. I hear a moan from the woman, a husky groan that tells me what’s going on below the water line. I make my way back towards Jake’s, and it all seems so natural: the couple, the children, the sunset, the old folk sitting on their boxes, fishing boats bobbing in the sea, the skittering of the crabs and from somewhere in the distance the vague sounds of… not reggae but Jamaica’s other love, country music, Hank Williams: Today I passed you on the street, and my heart fell at your feet, I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you. And all I needed to make it perfect was one of Dougie’s special rum punches. And then another.