A sailboat on the beach in San San Bay, Jamaica. Photograph © James Cerruti

High on Jamaica
By Paul Martin

The Caribbean's largest English-speaking island, Jamaica is a feast of many flavors, and the familiar fare of rum, reggae, surf, and sand are merely the appetizers.

Monica Zijdemans laughed as she drove her vintage Volvo through the rolling Trelawny hills, the wind whipping her dark hair. Deftly dodging potholes in the narrow road, the free-spirited Jamaican launched into her rendition of the sound that the leaves of banana trees make when the breeze blows through them just so. It resembled the eerie call of the humpback whale. "It's a real siren song," she said.

I'd met Monica only minutes earlier, while having lunch at the Hotel Villa Bella, the gracious old country inn that she runs outside the nearby town of Christiana. When she'd learned I was unfamiliar with this part of Manchester Parish, where she'd grown up—in the mountainous heart of Jamaica—she'd suggested a quick tour. Eventually we stopped at the 160-year-old Bethany Moravian Church, a simple gray stone building perched on a ridgetop. Shafts of sunlight pierced the gathering clouds as we looked across the surrounding hills. Monica smiled serenely. "This is my chapel in the sky."

Monica's offer to show off her homeland wasn't an unusual gesture. Everywhere I went during the three weeks I spent traveling around this Connecticut-size island, I met Jamaicans eager to point out sights that I shouldn't miss. And if I was directed to more than one "prettiest spot in the country," well, that was understandable. Any number of places might qualify. In its 146-mile length, Jamaica manages to pack in a continent's worth of wonders: a spine of genuine mountains, world-class beaches, river-cut valleys and broad grassy plains, areas of swampland and semidesert, even a bizarrely eroded plateau region.

I found Jamaica—and Jamaicans—a continual fascination. Originally peopled by peace-loving Arawak Indians, "discovered" by Columbus in 1494, ruled by the Spanish for a century and a half and then by the British for the next 300 years, Jamaica is a land where history lies deep. Besides, how could you not be intrigued by a place where you can pet a crocodile, coax a hummingbird to sit on your finger, glide down a river on a bamboo raft, and walk up a waterfall?

So where to begin this lively banquet? I started out in Kingston and circled the island counterclockwise, with stays in the resort towns of Port Antonio, Ocho Rios, Montego Bay, Negril, and Mandeville, places as different as peas from pearls, yet every one of them claiming a portion of the island's colorful past, and each a great jumping-off point for explorations.

"STAY HERE OR DON'T COME BACK"

(Sign outside a small Kingston lodging)

"Kingston is wonderful. I love it."

"I wouldn't live in Kingston for love or money."

Those polar opinions were uttered by two Jamaicans that I met. That's how Kingston affects people. Some love it. Some hate it-or perhaps, more accurately, they fear it. Memories linger about the 1976 and '80 elections, when Kingston's heart-of-darkness ghettos erupted into war zones. Today Jamaica's political parties seldom settle their differences Wild West fashion, and, while Kingston has more than its share of big city woes, travelers who bypass the capital miss out on a lot.

Kingston's superlative setting for one thing. The city spreads along the dry coastal plain of southeastern Jamaica, suspended like a mirage between the calm blue sweep of the world's seventh largest natural harbor and the green wall of the Blue Mountain range, which culminates in 7,402-foot Blue Mountain Peak.

Home to a third of the island's 2.4 million population, Kingston jumps with creative energy. Music, dance, theater, art—the island's best of each are here. So is some of the island's richest lore. In the fishing village of Port Royal, at the end of the sandy spit that encloses Kingston harbor, you can step into the 17th-century lair of buccaneer Henry Morgan, while in nearby Spanish Town—Jamaica's first capital—you can sit in the cool stillness of St. James Cathedral, which traces its lineage to the 1520s.

But perhaps the best reason to visit Kingston is Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park. Established in 1993 as Jamaica's first land national park (Montego Bay Marine Park opened the year before), these 193,260 acres preserve a green, quiet world just an hour northeast of the capital.

I gained my introduction to the Blue Mountains from Maya Lodge, a collection of cabins and campsites near the edge of the park run by Peter Bentley, a soft-spoken Jamaican dedicated to safeguarding his country's natural heritage. Peter underscored the new park's importance. "These mountains are the main watershed for the island, yet we've been losing over 5 percent of the forests yearly to logging and farming."

Peter and I were sitting on the lodge's thatch-roofed dining platform, enclosed by jungly vegetation. Birds screeched and chattered as I ate my breakfast of warm homemade breads served with sugary grapefruit and butter-soft papaya. Children were laughing and shouting in the village across the valley. I was fueling up for a hike that would afford me a glimpse of some of Jamaica's 3,000 species of flowering plants, 250 species of birds, and 129 varieties of butterflies.

After breakfast, I set out with organic farmer and guide Willy Graham, a lanky, bearded man of upright bearing. Willy's gentle voice led me up the trail for four hours, advising me to "take it easy" as we billy-goated up steep slopes through plantings of the area's famous Blue Mountain coffee. On dirt roads we passed women in Sunday finery and idling farmers imbibing morning tots of rum.

Fluted ridges rippled away in every direction, Kingston and the sea always in the distance. All manner of trees pressed in on us—jackfruit and breadfruit, mango and guava, pod-covered "woman's tongue" trees. Banks of wild ginger perfumed the air. A pair of slow-flapping white egrets hung like impressionist brushstrokes against the green hills.

We'd started from the lodge at 1,700 feet elevation. At 3,000 feet we entered the park and its montane rain forest. Another thousand-foot climb took us up near Hardwar Gap, where Willy led the way along the Vinegar Hill Trail into a primordial thicket so dense with trees and ferns and mosses it reminded me of the profusion of life around a coral head.

Willy lightly ran a callused hand over the delicate green mosses enveloping a log. "Look, mon-how nice dey are. I love dem."

You could tell that he meant it.

"DANGEROUS CURVE. SPONSORED BY THE KIWANIS CLUB OF ST. THOMAS"

(Sign on the highway to Port Antonio)

Mountains and sea. In Jamaica, you're never far from one, or both. For Port Antonio, a two-and-a-half-hour drive around the eastern end of the island from Kingston, mountains and sea are the defining features. Here on Jamaica's rainy northeast coast, where the Blue Mountains' lush windward slopes trail down to the sea, Port Antonio—with its Victorian gingerbread and air of genteel decline—clings to the steep foothills like a Hollywood stage set, on twin harbors worthy of a Winslow Homer painting.

You soon learn that the quiet, amiable capital of Portland Parish derives more than good looks from its setting. The mountains that enfold this town of 10,400 also isolate—make that preserve—it from Jamaica's tourism hustle. Just ensconce yourself over a rum punch some evening up on the hilltop veranda of the Bonnie View Hotel and you can take part in one of the most active pursuits in town—watching the lights twinkle on below and the stars slowly delineate the sky from the sea.

Port Antonio hasn't always been out of the tourism mainstream. In the 1920s and '30s, it was a major port in the banana trade; banana freighters hauled vacationing North Americans here until a blight and hurricanes nearly wiped out the banana business.

Port Antonio was a favored hideaway for luminaries such as J.P. Morgan, William Randolph Hearst, and Clara Bow. In the 1940s, Errol Flynn sailed in on his yacht, fell in love with the place, and proceeded to buy 60-acre Navy Island, off the end of the peninsula that divides the town's twin harbors. You can stay on Flynn's fantasy island, now a private resort. I took in the harbor view from there, looking back at the little white town painted on the hillsides. I understood why Flynn chose to spend much of his later life here.

Port Antonio's low-key entertainments include fine dining at the bric-a-brac-filled DeMontevin Hotel or the swank, white-on-white Trident Villas & Hotel east of town; lolling on the cliff-sheltered vest-pocket beach at Frenchman's Cove; and exploring the faux-Parthenon ruin known as the Folly, an abandoned turn-of-the-century mansion that was once home to a Tiffany heiress. But the pinnacle of a Port Antonio stay is a raft trip on the Rio Grande, which rises in the mountains behind the town.

I set off one morning on a two-hour float down to the coast with Capt. Nathaniel Bell, a gray-haired river veteran. We drifted out onto the broad, shallow water aboard his skinny bamboo raft, between hills thick with spiky stalks of wild sugarcane, towering banyans dripping aerial shoots, and flamboyant poinciana trees, their blossoms reverberating deep orange against the greenery.

The pace we set was something just a bit slower than leisurely. Captain Bell nudged us along with his bamboo pole, expertly guiding the raft through occasional riffles. Floating vendors tempted me with cold Red Stripes, the Jamaican brew, and a bankside calypso band sounded a happy note. Lounging in my seat like some archduke of the waves, I came to the conclusion that if you can't relax on a Rio Grande raft trip then you're simply not cut out for relaxation.

At one point we came to a narrow channel formed by a cliff and a freestanding rock outcrop-Lovers Lane. "Errol Flynn, he name this place," said Captain Bell. "Supposed to kiss and make a wish." Since I was by myself, I had to settle for a wish.

"CAUTION: SLEEPING POLICEMEN AHEAD"

(Sign at Dunn's River Falls near Ocho Rios)

Looking at all the lime green and hot pink and shocking blue houses in Jamaica, you might think you've landed in a carnival. Well, I can tell you where its midway lies: on the perpetually car-and-pedestrian-choked main drag in Ocho Rios—Ochi to locals—a two-and-a-half-hour drive west of Port Antonio along the north coast.

I made my way down this gauntlet of craft shops, food stands, juke joints, and genial hustlers one balmy Saturday night. (You can walk it end to end in under an hour.) From sidewalk vendors' stalls, head-high banks of speakers poured out reggae at a volume fit to loosen the fillings in your teeth. Near the town clock tower I watched the crowd part for a pretty young Jamaican in a full-length evening dress of gold lamé, with matching hat and shoes.

That streetscape was pure Jamaica, a scene so exuberant as to border on the surreal—though after a time here, you wouldn't find yourself surprised if a snowy white unicorn suddenly stuck its head in at your window. Not in Ocho Rios anyway, Jamaica's prime cruise ship destination and eastern anchor of the north coast's industrial-strength-tourism duo (Ochi-Montego Bay). Things get wild when the almost daily Love Boats disgorge their quota of the 436,000 passengers that annually descend on this former fishing village of 5,800 souls.

At the sprawling, eclectic craft market behind Turtle Beach—the high-rise-rimmed semicircle of white sand next to the cruise ship pier—I plunged into the frenzied world of commerce along with an invading army of cash-wielding boat people. As I browsed among stalls offering pastel carved fish, bright oil paintings, and a surfeit of T-shirts, eager vendors solicited my business with assorted honorifics: "Over here, teacher," "Doctor, come look," "Hey, Kenny Rogers." Out west of town I joined the clamorous horde in a group assault on Dunn's River Falls, a slip-sloshing 600-foot climb up a stairstepping waterfall.

Despite its habitual buzz, Ocho Rios does offer quiet interludes. A half-hour east of town, I fell in love with Firefly, the mountaintop aerie of British playwright and composer Noël Coward. The music room of the modest white house contains two pianos, on which Coward and his showbiz guests played duets. In the bedroom is the antique four-poster where Coward died of a heart attack in 1973, at age 73. Standing in his private "room with a view," the open-air office where he wrote much of his later work, I looked out on an unsullied sweep of scalloped bays and forested headlands a thousand feet below. I was almost inspired to write a song myself.

In the hills directly above Ocho Rios I dawdled at Coyaba River Garden and Museum, three manicured acres that seem intended to prove the serenity of plants and moving water. The small museum here presents a capsule history of the island's occupation, from the Arawak Indians through the Spanish and British eras, with their ugly legacies of slavery. I was fascinated by the Arawaks, who seemed to have spent a good deal of time at leisure. I felt an immediate affinity for those vanished islanders when I learned that they'd coined the words "hammock" and "barbecue."

Oh yes, I also learned that in Jamaica "sleeping policeman" is the name for a speed bump.

"GRACE'S ONE-STOP BEER JOINT"

(Makeshift tavern sign near Montego Bay)

When Columbus anchored off a particularly lovely crescent of sand on the north coast of Jamaica in 1494, he found only a scattering of Arawak villages. Five hundred years later, high-rise hotels and restaurants encrust the hills at Montego Bay, and some 43,500 Jamaicans scramble to make a living off the million-plus visitors who pass through the island's tourism capital every year.

When I arrived in MoBay, as locals call it—an hour and a half west of Ocho Rios—I set out to find the Montego Bay Marine Park. At popular Doctor's Cave Beach, surrounded by legions of prostrate sun-worshipers and Jamaican gigolos promenading their wares, I discovered I was in it. The entire bay—3,780 acres, extending along six miles of coast and out to a depth of 300 feet—is encompassed by the park, which was formed to preserve the too-perfect blue water (surely they dye it) and golden sands that have been attracting tourists since the turn of the century.

And there's more here to do than sauté yourself on the beach. If you have a day to spare, consider a trek inland into the wilds of Cockpit Country, southeast of MoBay. This eroded limestone plateau, with its cave-pocked valleys and hoodoo peaks, is home to the Maroons, descendants of slaves in the Spanish period.

Southwest of MoBay you can do something you've likely never done before: feed a hummingbird by hand. Each afternoon, a menagerie of wild birds flocks to Lisa Salmon's rock garden. I sat mesmerized as a doctor bird, a blur of iridescent green plumage with long tail streamers, lit on my finger and sipped nectar with its needle-like tongue from a tiny bottle of sugar water. All I could feel were the bird's delicate claws; its weight was as insubstantial as a dandelion puff.

East of town are two impressive plantation homes built in the late 1700s, when Jamaica was on its way to becoming the world's leading sugar producer. Stately Rose Hall Great House—a three-story Georgian edifice agleam with antique furniture and intricate woodwork—comes complete with the ghost of former mistress Annie Palmer, the legendary "White Witch," a voodoo priestess who supposedly killed off three husbands and took a series of slaves as lovers.

Not far away is quaint, antique-crammed Greenwood Great House, built by the family of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The rambling hilltop home, with its long second-floor veranda overlooking the sea, was among several great houses owned by the Barretts, one of Jamaica's richest families. I confess, as I gazed at all the fine furnishings here, I found myself pondering the irony that, in a sense, Elizabeth's poetry was supported by the sweat of the family's 2,000 slaves, a legacy over which Elizabeth herself expressed great shame.

"ROY AND FELIX SERIOUS CHICKEN"

(Negril Restaurant sign)

In Negril—ten miles of oceanfront commerce in search of a town—people do take eating seriously, along with every other fleshly indulgence. After all, this loosely knit hamlet of 9,000, two and a half hours west of MoBay, is the home of the anything-goes resort, Hedonism II (aka the Human Zoo). In the 1960s and '70s, hippies descended on this western end of Jamaica in pursuit of the uninhibited life, drawn by cheap prices and the island's finest stretch of beach, seven faultless miles of white sand. Free spirits still gravitate to this most laid-back of Jamaican resort areas, where even the rules are relaxed.

The pursuits of Negril are uniformly body-oriented. You can stuff yourself with seafood at unembellished eateries like Cosmo's or Sweet Spice Restaurant, where I dined on a first-rate conch steak. You can gyrate toward meltdown to the music of name reggae bands at Kaiser's Café or MXIII. At Rick's Café or LTU Pub, on the rocky cliffs south of the beach, you can embalm yourself with overproof rum while watching some of the gaudiest sunsets in the Caribbean. You can even improve your body at the Swept Away Resort's extravagantly equipped sports complex or at the Negril Yoga Centre.

But mostly in Negril, life's a beach. There's a place to suit every taste at the beachfront bazaar. Strung along the sand are any number of hotels, food stands, bars, dive shops, parasailing outfits, and craft emporiums, each fronting its own little parcel of beach, most public, some private (but no buildings taller than the highest palm tree—by law). I liked Runaways, a welcoming public beach with an open-air restaurant-bar and not overly insistent music.

The morning I kicked off my flip-flops and eased onto a chaise longue, it wasn't too long before I noticed the six topless Italian girls clustered knee-deep in the gentle surf. The young women were gabbling in each others' faces and gesticulating wildly. Nearby, their sleek boyfriends—fiercely tanned and unremittingly handsome—were bounding about with paddles in their hands in pursuit of a small, lively ball.

Up the beach to the north, white hulls and Day-Glo sails tacked in the indigo water off Booby Cay, named for the seabirds that nest there. In that same direction was the tony Grand Lido Resort, where you can sail on a yacht once owned by Aristotle Onassis, and it was somewhere thereabouts that the notorious pirate "Calico Jack" Rackham, a man partial to calico underwear, was captured by the British in 1720. Rackham and his crew were nabbed while partaking in a rum bash. In Negril, some things never change.

A motorboat zoomed past my patch of sand, towing the billowing green and black umbrella of a parasail. A young man dangled beneath it like a cluster of grapes, grinning madly-though whether from an excess of fun or fear I couldn't tell. A dreadlocked, megaphone-toting tout strolled by, exhorting us all to attend the big show that night at De Buss restaurant. "Check it out." Maxine, my friendly waitress, came by at intervals to assess my beverage needs. While I couldn't quite catch the words of the reggae songs that were rolling across the sand, they were beginning to strike me as unerringly true and vitally important.

Yes, events were unfolding nicely. And up there in the blue vault of sky there was a cloud show going on.

"SLOW MEN AT WORK"

(Road repair sign outside Mandeville)

Sometimes in Jamaica you might perceive that there really are slow men at work. At my hotel in the town of Black River on the little-developed south coast, an hour and a half from Negril, I scored a trifecta of delays—a prolonged electrical outage, an omelette 40 minutes in the making, and a shower that emitted not a stream, not a trickle, but a slow, IV-like drip. Jamaicans have an unruffled outlook on such minor setbacks. "No problem, mon," they say, "soon come," meaning, stay calm, it's gonna happen eventually.

I was passing through Black River on the way to Mandeville, my final stop. Before I left Black River I took in one of the island's prime nature attractions, a boat safari into the 7,000-acre Great Morass wetland, where Jamaica's third national park is in the offing. Heading up the Black River, our tour boat motored past banks of mangroves alive with herons and egrets. Our passing set the birds into flight. For a few magical seconds, a broad-winged egret raced its white reflection down the dark mirror of water alongside us.

With effervescent Michael Fray at the helm, we pulled into a leafy cove, home to Charlie, an American crocodile. About 300 crocs live in the wetland. Michael began calling Charlie's name. Soon, nine feet of crocodilian winsomeness was dog-paddling alongside the boat, looking up with a cold-eyed stare for a hoped-for treat. Michael reached down and patted the croc's head. These animals are non-aggressive, Michael assured us, though I noticed a white feather stuck to the tip of Charlie's narrow snout, traces of an earlier meal he'd managed on his own.

An hour east of Black River, in the heart of Manchester Parish, lies a comely enclave of English traditions. Even its name is beautiful: Mandeville. This city of 34,500 sits at a cool 2,000 feet, well in from the seacoast. No beaches, no convoys of tourists. Just a lofty green world of gentle pursuits—flower shows, afternoon teas, birding, golf. British colonists once escaped from the heat of the coast to this elegant old hill town. Now wealthy retirees flock here. Agriculture and bauxite mining pump up the economy, leaving the city ghetto-free, a rarity in Jamaica.

What do I recall about Mandeville? The immaculate white mansions of Ingleside residential area, looking out over hills that roll on forever in the clear air. Mrs. Carmen Stephenson, a demure local gardening standout whose laughter is as gentle as her prizewinning orchids are showy. The patriarch of Marshall's Pen Great House, Arthur Sutton, a trim, erudite, 94-year-old nature and history enthusiast who could coach Alistair Cooke on urbane civility—and who can trace his Jamaican roots to the island's first child born to English parents, in 1655.

I also remember Christiana, a trading town 12 miles north of Mandeville and another thousand feet up, just about dead center in Jamaica. It was near there that I spent the last afternoon and evening of my travels, at Monica Zijdemans' Hotel Villa Bella. I napped in the flower-filled hillside garden that afternoon, beneath an arching poinciana. Awakening to a fresh glass of homemade ginger beer, I looked across a small valley at a chattering stream of youngsters making their way down a steep hill from their ridgetop school. The steady file of brown uniforms zigzagged down the switchback road like so many copper coins rolling down a slot.

As I watched, I could feel the pang of my imminent departure creeping over me. After my first trip to Jamaica, a few years back, I actually suffered withdrawal symptoms. When I got home, I changed my brand of beer to Red Stripe, and I listened to reggae every night for a month. I didn't want to lose the mellow feeling.

Jamaica is hard to let go of because its images stamp themselves so indelibly on the mind. I close my eyes now and I see a statuesque mahogany-skinned woman walking along a green country lane, a market basket of pink anthuriums balanced atop her head.

For me, Jamaica is a fragment of Bob Marley heard through the open window of a passing car, and the clean, delicate scent of ginger blossoms after a rain. It's the morning sun boiling up out of the Caribbean like a bright red lobster hoisted dripping from its pot, and a chorus of tree frogs tuning up as another long, slow, velvety night settles in.

Jamaica is a catchy tune I can't get out of my head. Jamaica is...well, the perfect image eludes me. But then, no problem, mon. Soon come.

The information in this story was accurate at the time it was published, but we suggest you confirm all details before making travel plans.