Travel / Jamaica

The Best Thing About Living in Jamaica, Part 5

Stunning natural beauty, hands down.

Do you like the outdoors?

Great. So do I.

Let me tell you about what that looks like in Jamaica. And maybe tell you a bit about what it feels like too.

It’s really one of the best parts of living on this island in the Caribbean.

I have been living in Kingston, Jamaica since June of 2021. Arriving in this place after spending three years in a large, chaotic, hot city in a developing country on the coast of East Africa, it sometimes feels like a relief to be here. But Kingston is also described in the same way, sometimes — excluding the East Africa part — but definitely including the traffic part.

I love living here and am starting to write about it a bit, as a non-Jamaican who has only scratched the surface of this great country.

This is the fifth article in this series, and if you are interested in reading the first 4, you can find them at the bottom of this article.

I consider myself incredibly lucky, as a foreigner, to be able to experience this place not as a tourist or a traveller, but as someone who gets to live here for an as yet undetermined length of time and soak it up as much as possible. The place intrigues me because I have found that it won’t throw its arms around you right away and welcome you right in, as friendly as the Jamaican people are. There’s a waiting game first, a period of getting to know each other, a bit of a dance. It’ll wait a minute for you to get to know each other and only when you are ready will it show itself to you.

But even then you will have to be willing to go and find it yourself. The best parts are not in the cruise ship offload area and they are not at the package hotel. You have to ask a few questions, maybe get off the main roads, maybe be ok with getting lost occasionally..

There are endless trips to do. Backwoods dirt tracks to a jungle waterfall, lunch at your favourite jerk chicken stand, hiking in the Blue Mountain through coffee farms in the clouds, spending an afternoon at a sugar estate sipping rum, getting a boat out to a makeshift bar on stilts out on a sandbar in the middle of the Caribbean, off the south coast of Treasure Beach.

They are all moments of greatness.

Hiking in the Blue Mountains

To the north of the capital city of Kingston are the Blue Mountains. These rise up to a peak of 2256m and the area is perhaps best known for the quality of coffee that the geography, environment and hard working hands produce. As in many coffee exporting countries, the cream of the crop, so to speak, is sent abroad. Apparently, Japan buys most of it. However, great Blue Mountain coffee is definitely available in Jamaica. Just not at Starbucks.

But I digress.

To hike the Blue Mountains, you need strong footwear, lots of water and to be prepared to go uphill and for quite a while. But, as you wind your way through the bamboo stands, interspersed with coffee smallholdings and a cacao cultivations, you will be richly rewarded with stunning views of the sprawl of the city below and the hazy vastness of the ocean beyond that.

The further you get into the clouds, the drizzle and the cool air, and the deep breaths that come with it, you’ll be increasingly amazed by the settlements and communities of people that live up there. Life seems so cut off, especially with the urban centre visible below. You wonder if you too could make a life there and realise that actually, maybe the people you meet along the way have it all figured out.

Maybe a place like this is all you need.

This particular hike is from a tiny hamlet called Dallas Castle to an even smaller one called Flamstead. (About 7km over 2 and half with 700m in elevation gain.) Since this was organised through a company, there is a guide who knows the way and is an absolute encyclopedia about the area. The fact that the 20–30 other people in the group are of varying degrees of fitness means that there is plenty of time to stop and just take it all in, be in your own mind and be in your own moment.

It’s quiet. There are no car horns, there is certainly no traffic, the air is clean and everyone knows each other. What else do you want?

Not much, except a sunrise hike to the peak in the future, ideally with no other people.

Quiet Life in Treasure Beach

On the other side of the coin, the part of nature that Jamaica is best known for is its beaches. I don’t know how they rate among the best in the Caribbean, but there are many here and they are stunning.

It is the blinding and varying shades of clear blue that people pay a lot of money for and fly thousands of kilometres to. The North Coast features the best known ones, around Ocho Rios and Montego Bay, as well as the western tip of the island at Negril.

For that reason, that’s where the majority of the inclusive hotels are, where the cruise ships dock and where you find the sort of people who are interested in either. Steel drums (which are actually part of the culture of Trinidad) and bright blue cocktails in plastic cups (which are from no one’s culture) abound.

However, and this is a secret, so don’t tell anyone, it is the South Coast where the most stunning, raw, wild and natural beaches are. Topographically, it is quite different from postcard Jamaica — dry, desert-like and with towering cactuses.

The focal point of this is a town / area called Treasure Beach. Here you will find villas, Airbnb’s and small boutique hotels but you won’t find any massive resorts. It’s too hard to get to without a car of your own and it’s probably better that way.

There are tourists and the area’s main economy is the business derived from them. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a much slower pace, the hard sell is non-existent and you might actually get the feeling that you are getting an authentic slice of small town Jamaican culture.

In the grand scheme of things Jamaica is not a big place. It is, however, a beautiful one. It seems like I could live here for years and still uncover something new each weekend.

Jamaicans, when you ask them “how are you”, they will often reply with “I’m giving thanks”. I love that. I do the same, as often as I can, for the good fortune to be able to live in a place as genuine, real and naturally beautiful as this.

If you are interested in reading my previous meanderings on this country, here are links to a few related articles

Having privilege has certainly opened doors for me while living abroad the past 7 years. These are some realisations that have occurred to me about the difference in motivation, experience and expectations in being an expat and being an immigrant.

A previous article on the topic include some of the nuts and bolts of living life as an expat here.

Here is Part 1 of this series on the topic of Jerk Chicken and our favourite place to get it.

Part 2, on a road trip to Reggae Falls in St Thomas parish

Part 3, on a road trip to the Worthy Park Sugar Estate in St Catherine parish

Part 4, on taking part in a farmer’s market (insert)

And finally, how to make a delicious Rum Old Fashioned cocktail