Hartley Neita
THE FIRST hotel I stayed at was the classy Shaw Park Hotel in Ocho Rios. It was then on the side of a hill overlooking the beach and across the main road from the town going east.
In those days, the Jamaica College Sunlight Cup Cricket team was taken on tours through the country. It was a tour looked forward to by the team and those clubs we played. In St. Ann, we played the parish team at Addison Park in Brown's Town.
We arrived at Shaw Park in the late evening just in time for dinner. It was the following morning I discovered that I was in a special place. After breakfast I went outside to find myself in a garden full of lilies, roses, anthuriums, crotons, hibiscus, ferns, orchids and other blooming plants. The colours were from the rainbow. To add to the majesty of the surroundings there was a river flowing down the hill into a pool carved out on the hillside in which we could swim. My dream from them was to own a home beside a river. With a pool and a garden. It was glory.
WHITE SAND
Two days later we travelled to Montego Bay to play a match at Jarrett Park. We arrived at the Casa Blanca Hotel in the early hours of the night. The following morning I walked on to the balcony of my room to be dazzled by the sight of an acre of white sand still dampened with dew and wet with The splash of sea spry during the night. The morning sun glistened on the millions of tiny grains of sand.
Once again, it was glory.
I boarded at school in Kingston and one of our pleasures was to hike in the hills of St. Andrew on Saturdays. Four years before I went to this school, five of the students had been lost in the Blue Mountains for over two weeks while on a Easter weekend hike. The memory of that agony was still close to my time and our parents no longer gave permission to the school to allow their boys to take that trip. So our hikes were on Saturdays, only to Hermitage, Flamstead, Mavis Bank, Guava Ridge and Newcastle.
Our guide was our French master who came from Canada where he had learned his craft in the Rocky Mountains. He was a tall, strong and tough man, red-haired and freckled. He knew the hills of St. Andrew as if they were his backyard. He never led us on the road which wound its sixteen miles from Papine to Newcastle, for example. He led us on short cuts through the bush and streams. The water in the hills was then pure, uncontaminated with coffee fertilisers, so we could sip our thirsts away. Never drink too much water when hiking, our French master taught us.
FORMER PARISH
The first time we walked into the Newcastle compound we gasped. Spread below was St. Andrew and Kingston. The former parish was still rural. There was no University of the West Indies or University of Technology campuses. No Barbican. No Hope Pastures. No Mona Heights. No Blue Castle. No August Town. In the far distance we saw the Kingston Harbour and the Palisades, and the sea. It was stupendous, a sight for sore eyes.
Driving down the north side of Mount Diablo in later years, I saw the beauty of the Moneague Lakes for the first time. Three huge pools of water sprawling over what before was a green valley of grass. These lakes, I was told, rose from the underground caves in the area once in every generation and did not recede until they had taken the life of a child.
Eerie, but beautiful..
Since then, I have enjoyed many beautiful spectacles as I have travelled through Jamaica. There was, for example, the first time I stopped at Lover's Leap in St. Elizabeth. Seeing it is an experience never forgotten, the precipice at the edge of the sea falls for almost 500 metres. Looking downwards there is an eerie feeling that a puff of wind could send you floating down and down to the tiny beach below. The sea with its 180-degree panorama stretches to the horizon 25 miles into the distance where it merges with the sky, where heaven meets earth in perpetuity.
Stupendous. Spectaculars all.
