The Good, The Bad And The Silly: Adventures Around Falmouth

Is it just me or are wind chimes slightly sinister? Does the sound make you picture a deranged axeman who grins inanely to the tinkling sound as he brutally removes the head and limbs of a victim? No? Must be just me then…

The sea breeze here in Falmouth is enough to keep the airbnb chimes doing what they do but not enough to deter the unseen, biting insects from doing what they do too. If Michaela isn’t dabbing cream or gel on herself then she’s scratching around the little red mounds which are appearing everywhere; these little perishers have even put a few marks on my flesh, an area normally well off limits for such critters.

Falmouth was always intended to be a base for out of town adventures rather than a base in its own right, a good choice as it isn’t exactly full of attractions itself. Our next such trip out of town is another chapter in the Bob Marley story, out to Nine Mile, both birthplace and mausoleum of Jamaica’s most revered modern day character.

Having heard that Nine Mile is a “must do” in Jamaica, having also received many good recommendations from travellers whose opinion we trust, and with the Marley museum in Kingston having been so good, we know it will be worth the long drive on the poorly kept roads up into the mountains. Except it really isn’t, turning out to be our least edifying Jamaica experience so far by some distance.

It’s not the touts outside, the bogus “guides” or the hawkers – we expect those and they’re all well mannered anyway – it’s actually the place itself. Firstly, it’s not exactly cheap at almost £30 each to enter (!), but once inside we are subjected to the most blatant unashamed money grabbing onslaught you can imagine.

It actually starts off OK with a room filled with gold discs and framed newspaper clippings, but pretty much anything interesting ends there. What comes next is constant hassle from staff to buy drinks, buy food, buy marijuana, tip the musicians, tip the guide, tip everyone else and even put money in a pot to “pay for upkeep” when we’ve just paid almost £60 to get in. Add a self-satisfied guide who is obviously a wannabe comedian and spends the tour cracking bad jokes rather than telling us anything useful about the Marley clan and we leave Nine Mile feeling we’ve just lost half a day of our lives which we’ll never get back.

And given that it’s his final resting place, it actually feels disrespectful.

It’s a very different story at Dunn’s River Falls where disappointment turns to daft fun. Basically, this is a waterfall which you climb from (almost) bottom to top, clambering up the rocks and boulders through the cold cascading waters. Climbing a waterfall involves, by definition, such things as sticking your head under the onslaught, standing in whirlpools, losing your balance on the rocks, going unexpectedly from ankle deep to thigh deep in one step, letting your calf muscles get expertly massaged by pounding waters.

The more confident we get, the more we find to do, and the more our “spirit of being silly” takes over. There are, essentially, about twenty seven ways to do something daft, and we find all of them.

And speaking of offbeat things to do, there is, just outside Falmouth, a lagoon with some unusual properties. This is one of those strange places where bioluminescence occurs as a result of algae reacting with brackish waters, and thus it’s an inviting evening excursion too tempting to resist. Swish your arms around here and the dark waters instantly illuminate in a kind of electric blue, just for a few seconds before returning to dark. Swimming around creating this effect is as weird as it is amusing – it’s like being a water borne Michael Jackson, if you get my drift.

If you think climbing a waterfall or swimming in a luminescent lagoon sounds risky, it’s past sunset by the time we’ve grabbed a meal in Ocho Rios and we have to make the drive back to Falmouth in the dark. Amidst blinding full beams, cars with no lights at all, swerving taxis and minibuses and the occasional wayward goat, that’s far more scary than anything Dunn’s River Falls threw our way, but we come through unscathed.

Like Port Antonio, Falmouth is a coffee-free zone. Google Maps says there’s a cafe called “Koffee Pot” but it sure as hell ain’t here, nor is anywhere that serves anything other than Nescafe. A token few bags of “real” coffee occupy the supermarket shelves – bizarrely displayed in the liquor section – but neither of the airbnb’s have had a coffee maker or even a cafetière, so absent is it from daily lives here. We’ve had one decent coffee (at Ocho Rios) in nine days now and my caffeinometer is significantly into the red zone.

Something which is definitely not scarce here though is marijuana: it’s such a big part of life, part of religion, part of character, part of everything, as essential to daily life as breathing, seemingly. A cloud of sweet smelling smoke hangs everywhere. We haven’t yet plucked up courage to tell people here that neither Michaela nor I have ever smoked a joint in our lives – we think they would be utterly incredulous. 

There are some places on Earth that simply convey the exotic just by mention of their name. Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Acapulco, Jakarta….they evoke thoughts of romance and excitement in exactly the way that Luton doesn’t. Montego Bay is one such.

So although on this Jamaica tour we’ve largely eschewed the more obvious vacation targets, our base at Falmouth is only 27 kilometres from “Mo Bay” so we just have to go and see it for ourselves. And no wonder this place grew to be so popular, the pristine beaches and unbelievably glorious Caribbean waters are beautiful and spellbinding, just absolutely that perfect combination that is in our mind’s eye when we picture this part of the world.

The beaches are in sections and all of the best stretches carry an entry fee, but that doesn’t stop the jaw dropping when you look out over the gorgeous shoreline. The Caribbean blues are so incredibly deep, the water so clear. Along the seafront, the so-called “hip strip” is filled with bars, restaurants and the odd casino, and is quite probably far too loud at night…but for a daytime visit Montego Bay lives up to its reputation and provides that fix of seeing “the Caribbean beach” just as we all picture it.

The town of Falmouth owes its existence to the export of sugar cane – what is now the cruise ship terminal was once a thriving dockyard as the produce left these shores for destinations worldwide. The sugar cane plantations brought enormous wealth or, more accurately, brought enormous wealth to a small number. It also brought brutal treatment to a much larger number as tens of thousands of slaves toiled in the fields.

A small but meaningful memorial in Montego Bay commemorates Sam Sharpe, a leading figure in the fight towards emancipation. “Daddy” Samuel was one of the many thousands of slaves on Jamaica, but he was literate, devout, and a Baptist lay preacher. Emboldened by developments in London with moves to outlaw slavery in the wake of Wilberforce’s efforts, Sharpe targeted Christmas 1831 as a point of uprising.

Encouraging workers to refuse to return to work after the holidays unless their demands were met, the revolt soon turned from peaceful to violent and the retribution from plantation owners and the authorities was brutal. Sharpe, identified as the instigator, was publicly executed on the site where the memorial now stands.

Sharpe died a martyr for the cause, but after his death the cause was justified and emancipation and the end of slavery was soon to follow. Samuel Sharpe was designated a Jamaican national hero in 1975.

As our time in Falmouth nears its close, we next visit a place where we learn some brutal, horrific truths about those times. More on that subject in our next post.