Travel / Jamaica

The Best Thing About Living in Jamaica, Part 7

Knowing where the untouristed beaches are.

Do you like beaches?

Great. So do I.

Sometimes they are better without people on them, aren’t they? I’m glad we agree.

Jamaica is famous for its beaches. But let me tell you about what a beach with no one on it 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 for nearly a year now. Arriving in this place after spending three years in a large, teeming, chaotic and always hot city in a developing country on the coast of East Africa, it sometimes does feel like a relief to be here. But we could use the same words to describe Kingston, sometimes — excluding the East Africa part — but definitely including the traffic part.

I love living here and have been writing about it a bit, as a non-Jamaican who has only scratched the surface of this great country.

This is the seventh article in this series, and if you are interested in reading the first 6, you can find them at the bottom of this article.

I feel incredibly lucky, as a foreigner, to be able to experience this place not as a tourist or a traveller, but as someone who is able to live here for an as yet undetermined length of time and soak it up as much as possible. I am intrigued by the place because I have found that it refuses to throw its arms around you on arrival and welcome you right in, as friendly as the Jamaican people are. There is a necessary waiting game first, a period in which we get to know each other, there is a bit of a dance. It says, “I’ll wait a minute for you to show me that you are serious and only then, when you are ready, I will show myself to you.”

The place just will not be rushed.

Even then you are going to need to be happy to go and find it yourself. The best parts are not found in cruise ship offload areas and they are not at the all inclusive package hotel. You have to first wonder about getting to a certain place — whether it’s possible — ask a few questions along the way, maybe get off the main roads, maybe be just fine with getting lost periodically.

It seems like there are endless trips to do. Backwoods dirt tracks to a jungle waterfall, lunch at your favourite jerk chicken stand, hiking in the Blue Mountains 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. Here’s another one….

The Beaches near Kingston

Most people who come to Jamaica for a beach holiday, will book a week at a resort on the North Coast, somewhere between Ocho Rios and Montego Bay, where the nearest international airport is. A bit further afield is the resort town of Negril on the westernmost tip of the island, which features miles and miles of beach that is uninterrupted by hotel property walls.

The truly intrepid will find themselves on the more remote South Coast in and around Treasure Beach.

But most travellers to this country won’t spend any time in Kingston, the capital and economic hub. So what about the more than one million people who live there? What do they do to get their fill of the beach?

On the western side of Kingston Harbour, past Portmore in St Andrews parish are the Hellshire beaches, some of which do have a much more local party atmosphere. If you want to spend the afternoon, have a swim, eat some fried fish and drink some white rum with some friendly people that you only just met, that’s the place for you.

Many Kingstonians, however, would seem to prefer to drive across the entire breadth of the island to the North Coast and spend their days at beach clubs with paid entry, security, day beds and service staff bringing the drinks (since you can’t bring your own in).

I am not knocking it, I like a slick beach club as much as the next guy. But on weekends when we prefer a few less people around, that we pack up our own rum and cooler full of ice, point the car eastwards, and maybe pick up some jerk chicken at a roadside stand on the way by.

It is on these beaches to the east of Kingston, on the coast of the southeastern quarter of the island that we are unlikely to encounter any tourists or travellers.

Hell, even people from Kingston don’t go there. I asked Iké, the owner of the Jamnesia Surf Camp near Bull Bay, St Thomas why that is and his answer was that going there was “already too country for them”.

It’s 20 minutes away.

What he meant was that St Thomas parish just next door and the poorest of Jamaica’s 13 political divisions, is the least developed and that meant for many people that it is also the most dangerous.

Maybe he’s right, since it is St Thomas that bears the brunt of the hurricanes that come out the Caribbean during the season every year and as a result, the place always seems under construction, with things never quite being brought to completion in the respite between storm seasons.

It’s a bit rougher, a bit more unpredictable and perhaps a bit more makeshift, but that is precisely what makes a trip out that way more worthwhile. You won’t find any day beds, but if you find your way to Sugar Loaf Bay, you might have some waves all to yourself.

And if not, you will be guaranteed to have some quiet time. Living in a city like Kingston, that makes it worth it alone.

Would you like to read a little bit more on this fantastic island? Here you go:

#6 Bars and restaurants off the beaten path

#5 Stunning natural beauty

#4 Participating in farmers’ markets

#3 Rum Estate Afternoons

#2 Backwoods Road Trips

#1 Jerk Chicken stands

The nuts and (Usain) bolts of setting up shop here

And the joy of a rum cocktail recipe just for fun