Places that I want to visit #7

Port Antonio, Jamaica

Port Antonio can be found on the north-eastern coast, about 100 km from the capital, Kingston. The town is surrounded by some of the most rugged and beautiful scenery in all of Jamaica. It is the island's third largest port, and famous as a shipping point for bananas and coconuts. You have just got to love the idea of a tropical island featuring bananas and coconuts, don’t you?

Apparently, Port Antonio was a sleepy coastal town up until the 1880s, when the banana trade took off in Jamaica and Port Antonio began to be promoted as a destination for wealthy American travellers. It is claimed that the banana trade, coupled with the tourists who came in the banana boats, was once so large that weekly sailing from Port Antonio was greater than weekly sailing from the port of Liverpool. Of that, I am somewhat sceptical, but it’s still a nice story.

In the wettest, greenest parish in Jamaica, known for its many rivers and waterfalls, Port Antonio was the model of paradise for Hollywood for some time, and it became the playground for royals, movie stars, musicians, and eminent politicians. The arrival of film star (and fellow Tasmanian), Errol Flynn only added to the lustre. He actually went out and purchased ‘Navy Island’, the eighteenth century base of the British Navy in Port Antonio. Yet although it was once at the centre of Jamaican tourism, the region has since been eclipsed by Montego Bay, Ocho Rios, and Negril.

In the middle of town, it is said that you can still see the Jamaica of old. This small, bustling town is like many in Jamaica: clean though ramshackle, its sidewalks surrounding a market filled with vendors, tin-roofed shacks compete with old Georgian and modern brick and concrete buildings. One of the more popular sites in this area is the Blue Lagoon, which owes its colour to its depth of 200 feet, whether or not two shipwrecked young people are there, exploring their own burgeoning sexuality, remains unknown.

Another point of interest for me is in the “Windward Maroons”, who fled into the hills around Port Antonio to escape slavery. In the remote high-altitude hinterlands of Jamaica, the Maroons waged a successful guerrilla campaign for a full eighty years before the British found and destroyed their settlements. It wasn't until 1739 that Quao, the Blue Mountain Maroon leader signed a peace treaty with the British, granting the Maroons some form of autonomy and independence, which they still enjoy today. The most legendary of the Maroons was Queen Nanny, although not much is known about her. She was said to possess magical powers. According to tall tales, she kept a cauldron bubbling day and night without benefit of fire, to boil alive any British soldier who tracked her down.

I want to go, baby or no baby.

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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