Shane Aquart

I went to Barbados via Jamaica. I stayed overnight in Kingston, with friends- if I weren't so used to Kingston it would be a shock to leave the ordered neatness of a place like Cayman and to arrive in the haphazard semi-disintegration of Kingston - the dirt, the smell, the noise. Naipaul, whom I now seem to have over-quoted, once wrote that Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, was the noisiest city on earth. He obviously hadn't spent enough time in Kingston, at the corner of Lady Musgrave Road. I've been to Port-of-Spain. It compares but doesn't compete.

The yard at Lady Musgrave is encircled by a 'hedge' of lignum vitae trees, huge and bushy and old, their limbs brushing the ground. When they're in bloom small purple and sometimes white flowers grace their mottled limbs. Lignum vitae is an extremely hard and slow-growing wood that when cut is self-oiling. It doesn't dry out. Lignum vitae made the first 'watches' possible, and therefore the first measurements of longitude. A man named John Harrison used self-oiling 'bearings' made of this wood to manufacture two marine chronometers with continuous mechanical movement, allowing for the first time accurate measurements at sea of distance over time.

They, however, do nothing to keep out noise. The feeling of some bass beat reggae bashment party filled the early Sunday night; you could feel the thump thump of the bass in the air, but couldn't hear the music over the din of traffic and the chatter. At this corner, as if it were a natural amphitheatre, you can actually hear the sound of people talking to each other in their cars; the voices, the music, the growl of engines, the whine of motorcycles. Truck drivers never just come to a stop here, they have to vroom-vroom, heel and toe down through every gear, the Jake-Brakes grabbing at the engine's compression. Cars, the same. Bikes don't just pull away from the light; the squeal away through long wound-out gears, leaving you with and echoing Waaaaaaah as they disappear down the road.

The music from the cars is never lullabacious. It is meaty, full of bass, wilding; never soft. Then suddenly I can clearly hear Tanya Stephens singing It's a Pity from somewhere, distinct from the thrumping bass in the background - and I remember thinking of the noise as it used to be outside the Collonade Hotel in London, when I was going away to school as a boy, my first real realisation of the noise of a big city. The noise of life in Jamaica sounds different, more in your face, and it smells; it smells of food that's smoking, of hot dry grass, of ganja, of unburnt diesel fuel and heavy exhaust. Naipaul is definitely wrong. Port-of-Spain is not the noisiest place on earth.

The traffic never stops, but in the cool of the early morning it certainly is lighter, and the view of Jacks Hills and Beverley Hills in the soft light of 5:45 is nice. Looking back from these tall hills down onto Kingston, always gives one a false sense of the beauty of the place; the down-close reality is rough and gritty; but the hills are alive with something else altogether. I love Kingston. For all its noise and dirtiness, the poverty, the degradation, the lurking violence, the traffic, I still love it; I love the way it feels to me, the way it smells, the way I know it and the people in it. I like the jingle of the way people here talk to one another, as if they're always angry, the vocabulary of an anger that's always just below the surface. It's familiar to me. I don't want to live here but I want to be here, often. I was born here, in a hospital just down the road.

Quod spiro et placeo tuum est.

I can see that Kingston's been evolving. I've come to notice it more and more during the course of the last few years. Something very First World is going on, something new in the visible process: the roads better finished, the cleaner streets cleaned by street cleaners, sweeping the streets in the early hours before dawn. Certainly, still, there are huge holes in this, pockets of the still very dishevelled ghetto-ship, but even that seems to be improving, not perfecting, but improving around the edges, de-devolving. The effects of the '70s, the plundering of the inherited, the nationalisations, the failed social revolution based on the unsound political model, the bullsh-t rhetoric, are all starting to fade. But the petty corruption that blossomed in that time of confusion has now became the endemic weed, like the arrival of an outside child into the happy marital home. It is a reminder that (political) ignorance knows no bounds. Maybe it will never go away. Kingston is becoming an adult city. 'The old is discarded and the new is introduced. Both measures accord with time; therefore no harm results." (I Ching.)

And there's no reason it shouldn't. Jamaica has the world's purest deposits of bauxite, that rich red dirt from which aluminium is made; it has what is arguably the world's best sensimilla, from which the best ganja, marijuana can be rolled into lovely joints across the sea in London, New York, Paris. Jamaica certainly has the world's most expensive coffee and a ready market for all of it; it has a great and varied tourism product; a fantastic emigrant repatriation of funds; a very strong reggae music industry, knowing that entertainment is the U.S.A.'s largest export; and a very, very busy drug trans-shipment facilitation. It has all the possibilities.

Above it all, the green-blue hills of Kingston loom like an invitation to a party you want to go to at the end of a day. The savannah, the Liguanea, becomes more and more sure, the further one drifts from those blue hills. One passes with this desertification southward from prosperity into societal and architectural devolution. The blue hills are an emblem of promise; you can stand with your back to Kingston harbour, amidst the ghetto districts of Trench Town or 'Tel Aviv', and see in the hazy distance what success looks like, with its cool temperatures, lush green watered grass, big houses with room to move about in, gardens full of shade and carports full of Mercedes-Benzes. You can see the possibility of all of that from down there.

I drive up Hope Road, past Government House, to Old Hope Road, to the roundabout at Papine, near the University of West Indies campus at Mona, turn up and left to the Gordon Town Road. There are four goats crossing the road as if they own it; the she goat is black and white like a Friesian cow, with an udder that's equally as large. Where are the minibuses that jib and jibe, jockeying around the circle, blowing horns, all styled up, like nature looking for a mate, the drivers are slicking, pimping their rides, trying to attract the customers - Nuff Niceness, Shiloh, Batty Rider? They seem to have been replaced by 'deportee' motor cars: Toyota Corollas, Nissan Sentras, all of them white, cars and wagons that have been thrown out of Japan and like garbage washed up on the shores of the Caribbean.

This university corner has always been full of people, coming, going, standing still to 'labrish', to chat. In my youth the mixture of colours on any street corner seemed or was greater. Some say that that's just a wistful memory, that corners like these were always very black. But in the Jamaicans that I see and know who overrun places like Kendal and Oakville, Fort Lauderdale and North Vancouver, those that lurk the streets of Fulham and of Grand Cayman are of that far-more-mixed shades of brown and yellow and white and black. The 'foreign' Jamaica, those 2.5 million children of the diaspora, are far more the socially and racially mixed people of my youth. Jamaica today is not. And today as I make the bend, the corner is, as if to confirm my point, empty.

Above Irish Town there's a place called Strawberry Hill; beyond that, The Gap, a restaurant, and the military camp at Hardware Gap. You're about 1,000 feet below the peaks of the Blue Mountains; Blue Mountain Peak itself is 7,400 feet above sea level. It's cool, it's raining and it's misty on the day I drive up. The drive takes you from tropical to temperate; it's winding and narrow and at first bushy but not truly what one would describe as lush. At the road to a little place called Settlement it starts to get 'ferny'. Settlement was a land grant village, a reward from ghetto life in the '70s.

This road takes you up to those famous Blue Mountain Coffee estates; estates like Mavis Bank produce which is the world's most expensive coffee. The Twymans, on another farm, export a 'single estate' coffee as if it were an aged whiskey. Coffee is a bush, a deep green bush on which grows a small bitter fruit about the size of a small olive; when the fruit is red it is ripe. It is picked and the seed inside the fruit is extracted and dried; that's the coffee bean. When not roasted it's a kind of dull yellow-green, a lighter shade of pale than guacamole. My grandfather was once the chairman of Jamaica's Coffee Industry Board, the government's coffee control body. Estates like the Twyman's - there are, I believe, four of them - are exempted from government control; their coffee is true gold.

Somewhere above us in the mist is the teahouse and botanical garden at Cinchona, which I remember as an aerie delight: Grandpa driving his Jaguar across an open field, as if it were a tractor, to get there; the Eucalyptus trees with their papyrus-like bark; the water constantly dripping from the eaves, and a tall thin woman with very black hair. The road up is narrow and winds back and froth across the steeply climbing land face. It is often precipitous on one side and claustrophobically close to the ever-changing bank on the other. After the turn off to Cinchona at the village of Section the road tatters increasingly as it falls, only a little less severely, back down to Buff Bay on the north coast, near to Port Antonio.

As children my sister and I would come up to these mountains with our grandparents, to picnics at Hollywell park, just above Hardwae Gap. Wild strawberries grew on the hillsides between spindly pine trees: Strawberry Hill is a scattering of luxury villas clinging to the precipitous hillside below, overlooking Kingston and comprising a hotel belonging to Jamaican music mogul Chris Blackwell. Hollywell Park doesn't seem so different today; it is as empty as it was in those days, and as a natural preserve doesn't need manicuring and has benefited from that, so that it doesn't look unkept. And neither does the old canon in the quad of the military base at Hardware, on which a million and a half photographs were taken in the youths of a million and a half people.

The buildings of Strawberry Hill are all white wood and shingle roofs; the roofs descend from a steep 'A' pitch to a gradually sloping apron over the verandas. These wide verandas with their picket balustrades are cool and shady. The boxing around the interior eaves and open woodwork detail over the doors allow for the flow of air; large windows and doors with jalousie shutters bring the inside out and the outside in. The warm wood tones, mosquito nets, muslin curtains; the hardwood floors, the crisp white linens on four-poster beds, the very colonial Caribbean feel - I'm in love with this aesthetic. The original estate house blew down in Hurricane Gilbert in 1989. I didn't know it. Gilbert lingered over these ridges, trapped, it seemed, hooked up on some peak or the other; loathe to leave.

This is not the only hotel that Mr. Blackwell owns; there's a piece of Jakes in Treasure Beach on the south coast of Jamaica near Black River; there's the Caves at Negril; Goldeneye, Ian Fleming's old house in Oracabessa, where James Bond was invented, and Pink Sands on Harbour Island, in the Bahamas. He had also owned a swath of South Beach, the Marlin, the Tides and Compass Point in the Bahamas; he's sold those properties off. The only one I don't know is Pink Sands. But it's a property that Mr. Blackwell's Island Outpost group manages but does not own that I like best: Noel Coward's Firefly. Firefly is a one-bedroom bungalow perched on a hill overlooking Port Maria. This delightful 'house with a view' is now a museum, donated to the people of Jamaica by Coward's long-time companion and heir, Graham Payne. The museum is vaguely interesting, but the house is almost perfect: a bedroom, a studio, a kitchen, a living room and a piano with a view out over the sea, the rooms upping and downing on narrow steps, utilising space to efficiently confine the house into the least possible space while still maintaining a comfortable size to each of the rooms. And it's not as if there was a need to conserve space; the house sits on acres of lawn.

I stood out on the lawn, near his grave, the breeze in my face. A John Crow, a vulture, circled on the thermals of air created by this quickly climbing hill. I drank ginger beer. I wished it were mine.

But standing on the cut stone, restraining wall at Strawberry Hill, face to face with a hummingbird, I am more than happy. It is a swallowtail, the national bird of Jamaica - they call it a Lovebird or a Doctor Bird - with the hum of his wings actually sending vibrations against my eardrums; I can feel it like the sound of a long drawn out 'L'. He hovers close enough for me to reach out and touch him, slides right, slides left; if the wind were blowing in the opposite direction I would be able to smell him. He flies erect, not bent over flat on his stomach, but vertical, tail trailing, long beak facing me, his head turned sideways so that one jet black eye is looking at me. He has a lush metallic green chest and indigo wings. He is lovely.

The bird becomes bored with me and flies away, and when he does I'm left with a view across the chasm between us, onto what looks like an old church. It sits on the opposing hill, its whiteness stark against the blue-green of the surrounding hillsides. It seems as if it has been decommissioned, the lonely graveyard surrounded by a rusting fence, a fence that was once finely-worked and attractive, a wrought iron fence. The overgrown drive, the wild-ening eucalyptus trees, the dried leaf litter on the ground: it looks deconsecrated - but not left without the essence of a god, it isn't. The hill feels warm, smells fresh. I wander a minute through the derelict graveyard. The stones are old, greyed. I don't make note of the names, only look at them vaguely and at the thoughts the living have left to accompany the dead. 'Loving father, devoted husband.'

I go back to Strawberry Hill for a coffee and the dream of a cigarette. I don't smoke anymore.

'Éhow the strong get weak and the rich get poor, slave to love.'

I've got a song by Roxy Music playing through my head and I'm standing beneath the outreaching branches of a huge Guango tree, it must be 200 years old, and looking out, as cool emanates up from the grass at my feet. Guango trees are like the grand oaks of the Deep South, large and majestic. Here, like the trees of the Deep South, they drip with Old Man's Beard and orchids. Bromeliads climb their rough bark and prosper in the damp crooks of their large limbs. In the mystic Mayal and Obeah traditions that came from Yoruba Africa, in the spirituality of the enslaved (what has been popularised in our collective jargon as Voodoo) the Guango tree is a place to lock away bad spirits, casting them into the very trunk of the tree.

There's another John Crow, exactly like the one I'd seen before at Firefly, floating alone on a thermal, waiting on the smell of something dead to bring him down to ground. Below me is Kingston, closer now again. Skyline Drive, Jacks Hill Road, Mona Reservoir, Hope Botanic Gardens are all below me.

The next morning I take my coffee at the counter of Suzie's, off Constant Spring road. Suzie's is not true rootsification, it's what one might call local-lite. This the Upper St. Andrew crowd coming down off the hills, the Jamaican equivalent of a Sloane Ranger. There are lattes and cappuccinos to go with a buffet of ackee and sal'fish, of rundown, of callalou, of johnny cakes. People whom I know, who know me, who knew my father, my mother, my grandfather, come and go. There's a knit here in Jamaica, the commonality of a history spent in close proximity, of kinship and propinquity. Being a West Indian is like that. It's like growing up in a small town, only bigger.

'I knew your grandfather well, you know, he once told me that you should always drink coffee black, that it's the only way to properly appreciate its flavour and aroma; he was chairman of the Coffee Industry Board then - I still drink my coffee black to this day.' I never had the heart to tell him that Grandpa always drank his coffee with milk and sugar - condensed milk, if he could get it.

'You know I've never seen a game of Polo played,' Chris said to me the other day.

'You should, man, you should; come join me, nuh, it's exciting! It's like a 32-minute horse race.'

After Suzie's, after some 'work' around Kingston, I drive out to Caymanas Park, which is a sugar estate, government owned now, outside of Kingston, to the west. There, on a part of the estate that's still privately owned, is a Polo field.

Polo out at Caymanas (or at Drax Hall or Chukka Cove) of an afternoon; polo in places like Jamaica is not the Palm Beach Rolex Invitational, it's the Red Stripe Cup. It's farmers and friends and beer and rum, it's men on tired ex-racehorses and well-bred farm ponies; it's tea and sandwiches made by the wives and twice-weekly matches where the handicap totals of the fielded teams can often add up to four. It's social polo. But not today. Today it's fast - the horses pound by; X leans out, tapping a backhand on his far side, there's a 'tock' as the mallet touches the ball; there's the smell of dry grass and dust, like the smell of laundry dried in the sun. X turns the ball with a couple of nice strokes, changing the direction of play, and the pony turns to pick up the line. An opponent is almost sitting in X's saddle with him, the horses pushing against each other; there's a metallic 'clack' as hooves brush each other during a quick change of leg, instinctively the pony changes the lead and crossing the line of play, allowing X to take the ball on the nearside for a forehand with a slight slice that turns it right as it goes down the field and he's after it like a bullet, tack creaks, curb chains jangle, even 100 yards away you can hear the hooves drum, the horses snort, teeth chattering against the bits - men on X's team are going ahead of him for goal, another stroke and he'll feed themÉI love this.

She's tall and slim and blonde and sharp-featured and still so very young-looking, into her 40's, skin very porcelain. She's always stylishly dressed and she's married to a guy who, when he's not working, is one of the best dates anyone could take to a party. Roger is a big guy, tall and large and effusive, like a tame bear, with a bush of curly locks that sometimes look as if they were placed just a little haphazardly on his head. We drink beer and rum and chat.

When I leave the after-party Lesley's dancing on a table with a young Argentinian. Somebody calls to the bartender; 'Wha' happen, you lose the rum?' And I know the night's going to be long and wives are going to be lost.

Alexander the Great died on this day in 323BC. I read this in a corner of The Daily Gleaner while I'm sitting at Lady Musgrave Road in the morning. While I'm doing this, I'm also looking at the news on TV, being barraged from all sides by the ongoing saga that is Iraq; and so war, war in general, becomes a sort of momentary mental topic and I write down; 'To cast an armyÉembodying the flower of [É] manhood upon a barren shore thousands of miles from home against the goodwill of the whole world' - something Winston Churchill said - 'is to give hostages to fortune unparalleled in all history.' And old as it, is it seems so apt, doesn't it? He had been talking about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and here we are, the world embroiled in a war that seems designed not to cure any ill. A war whose end result is death, there's no question of that: the riddled bodies of the sons of Saddam Hussein, the decapitation of Nick Berg, the daily tolls of soldiers destroyed by roadside bombsÉ

The airport is calling. I'm leaving on a jet plane, don't know when I'll be back again É

On Saturdays when I was a boy, we often used drive out for one of two trips; either past the Palisadoes and Harbour View on the way to the farm at Yallahs, or out the Palisadoes and down to the Morgan's Harbour Hotel. There I would swim in the sea pool while my mother 'took sun': Palisadoes, they say, is an old Portuguese word that means narrow spit of sand. This narrow spit of sand used to, with a few breaks in between, link the old pirate city of Port Royal with the Jamaican mainland. Port Royal when I was young was a sort of disintegrated battered-brick fishing village that had once been a great-in-the-world place. Port Royal was in its heyday the biggest city in the Caribbean and the wealthiest city in the world, famous for its debauchery, its plunder and its Pirates.

On June 7th 1692 an earthquake sank the city into the sea. It would be mostly unremembered, its greatness a thing of its glorious past. There's the grave of a man named Galdy - who was sucked into the earth, and the earth sucked into the sea during that quake; a second tremor spat him out where he was then rescued by a boat - its white marble, the skull inscribed, the words Dieu sur tout, God over everything. This is a phenomenal story with very, very spooky undertones. Just reading the inscriptionÉHe was Swallowed up.

Six forts once guarded this town; of them, Fort Charles remains. It features Nelson's quarterdeck, where the then young Nelson was said to have paced, sleeplessly vigilant, in 1779; who tread in his footsteps remember his glory. The 'giddy' house, half sunk into the sand, was the Royal Artillery Stores and was left at this awkward, 35 degree angle by another earthquake in 1907. These were the attractions of my youth; they're still there, but no-one really goes to them now. Empty, too, seems to be the Zoo and the Coconut Park at Hope Botanical Gardens, Castleton Gardens, the Mineral Springs at Bath, or the Mineral Swimming Pools out at Rock Fort.

Morgan's Harbour is still there and looks exactly as I remember it, but I don't want to sit in the water. The sea pool was made using an underwater fence running across the bottom of the pier. This is the northern edge. The other two walls are concrete and there are stairs from the beach into the pool, to the left, the wooden and thatched bar, to the right, an old Georgian-era warehouse inside which is the changing rooms. The round portal windows, the brick wallsÉThere's a scene of Sean Connery walking along that wall in 'Dr. No'É

The Palisadoes, a desert surrounded by water; this narrow stretch of pebble and grey sand, pounded from the southeast by waves off the greater Caribbean (it's 400-plus miles to the nearest piece of land) is a peninsula inside which is Kingston harbour, the 7th largest natural harbour in the world. And there is no life in it. Kingston Harbour is dead, a desert itself. Twenty million gallons of untreated sewerage per year are added to 1.5 million tonnes of sediment pouring into the mostly closed off harbour. The porous Palisadoes is supposed to act like a percolating filter for this harbour, but it can't keep up.

None of these places I've spoken about are on the usual tourist route, and none of them truly exist anymore in the sense that they did in my memory. But Kingston airport, the Norman Manley International Airport, is halfway down that Palisadoes strip and so I have to drive down it.

His T-shirt said 'Married' hers said 'Just'. Together they made a semi-sentence; separately I wondered if their words held any significance. Theirs was new love; you could see in the shirts the ardent silliness of their affection for each other. They would have been to a Sandals or a SuperClubs, something All-Inclusive: eat, drink, stay, party, all for one low, low price.

Rugby teams were scattered across the floor and the seats, all returning home after a week of tournaments in Cayman, using Kingston as a transit gateway to the rest of the Caribbean. I had watched much of the two tournaments, one a Rugby World Cup regional qualifying and the other the Deloitte Cayman 7's. I hailed the dread from Guyana who had been the star of the tournament.

'Good Rugby.'

'You see it?'

'Yes, real nice. How does it feel to be the star?'

The Guyanese, the Vincentians, each spoke to me. I'd enjoyed the rugby, they'd enjoyed their time in Cayman. The Bajans, the boys from Barbados, when I said hello looked at me as if I were from another planet and turned away. There it is, Barbados for you; that cut stone wall over which you have to climb.

I heard an earnest young woman behind me say, 'I never realised how prevalent marijuana use was until I came here.' She pronounced the last word as 'hyeh', in a lovely lilt that made me realize she was a Bajan. They - she was with three other women and one young man - seemed too old to be students, but too young to be teachers. Maybe they were late starters, or long timers having to work and do school at the same time. They had as well the look of the soon-to-be born-agains: West Indian women have a bad habit of going straight from being party sluts in their twenties, to the deeply religious children of the Baptist Lord in their middle 30's, with no passing of 'Go' in between. You go to bed with a taste of honey and wake up one morning with the fire and brimstone-breathing church sister from hell.

This crew was obviously up on some thingy thing from University of West Indies, Cave Hill campus in Barbados, to UWI Mona in Jamaica: no spliffs, please, we're Bajan. But she didn't say that and maybe, just maybe, she caught some of that Jamaican-ness and smoked a little of that ganja, that ital weed, the chronic, the blunt, a little skliffers, some callie weed, and felt the earth move a little to the left of her Bajan normal - zeeen!

Ganja is like a national flower of Jamaica; dark moist sensiemilla bud rolled into a piece of brown paper wider at one end than the other. It's not the thin, refined, Rizla-rolled marijuana cigarette of temperate climes, it's a big-'ead spliff, baby; the ital weed. The damp red eyes, the mellow vibe: you see it everywhere in the faces you meet, the limp hands that you shake. Like the wood smoke of the village in the bush, you smell it as you travel the road, catching the whiff of it here and there; the old man standing just there is smoking it, the Jones boy wandering down Waterloo Rd completely fried, mad-out-of-his-mind, smoked too much of it, the uncle with the constant roach in his ashtray, the friend, the musician, the acquaintance at a party standing behind you, sweet acrid smoke like burnt sage curling from round his fingers, the politician, the semi-cousin who'd once been very beautiful, the big, big businessman:

'We were sitting in _'s house, we were chatting; the usual, you know, dear boy, solving the problems of the world, and suddenly a voice I hadn't noticed before was saying something so radically true that it was just brilliant and we all turned to look at who had said it; but there was no one there, only a chair shrouded in smoke like the proverbial burning bush. And then the chair seemed to move and _ stepped out of it. He and _ _ were never far away from their ganja in those days.'

My book, my first novel, Gingerbread Man, is on the shelf in the airport bookstore. I pick it up and turn it - it's not one of the ones that I've autographed, those have sold out - and I laugh quietly as I remember that scene in Notting Hill where Hugh Grant tries to talk Julia Roberts out of buying a book signed by the author. The subject of a story about a journey begins to take shape in my head. ('The Caribbean holds for me a deep interest,' I write on a piece of paper.) I've just semi-finished the final first draft of a manuscript called Last Hunt of the Jaguar and am looking for something to write.

Airports, different architecturally, are all the same emotionally - they are not joyful places; even arriving there brings a sense of loss for something left behind. A lot like hospitals, I think, in more ways than one; way stations on the road to somewhere else, equally bad food, constant air conditioning and artificial light. The waiting, always the uncomfortable waiting. When I waited in Cayman, I waited uncomfortably for the flight to Jamaica; when I waited in Jamaica it was equally unpleasant. I stood in Barbados staring out the window at the grey tarmac wondering which small plane would whisk me away. There's anticipation, suspense, nervousness, loneliness, hope É but 'quitting the place we love means that we are condemned to inhabit our loss forever.' When I was a small boy we quit this place; and that is something that makes up part of my psyche even today.

BWIA is not the airline I remember, but that's the story of airlines these days, isn't it: dirty seats, smelly cabins, general falling apart funkiness. One prays that the mechanical is not as frayed as the material. In Antigua we were waiting on-plane, on the tarmac, and a woman from Trinidad, feeling dry, said so to a man, obviously an acquaintance, from Trinidad. He gave her Tea Tree Oil for her skin at a time that she was surrounded by men, and she smelled delightfully of freshly cut wood, almost like sandalwood. 'Is like Obeah,' she said, like magic. 'All dese hya men gadderin roun' me jus' like ants.'

Flight 415 KGN to POS via AGU and BIM - I think: Airline codes can be confusing. MIA is Miami, simple, but YVR is Vancouver. Go figure. I had travelled via BWIA in the heady days of air travel. I still recall when Air Jamaica had fashion shows and when Pan Am Jumbo jets had lounges upstairs instead of seats. The Liat service, which next I took from Barbados to St. Vincent, although convenient, has none of that glamour at all. I think that we all miss air travel the way it used to be.

The first inhabitants of these islands would have come by canoe: the Ciboney, then the Taino/Arawak, and then the CaribsÉall canoers. The Ciboney were a pre-Columbian people, their name derived from the Taino/Arawak word for people who lived in caves. The Taino/Arawaks were those Indians that Columbus first encountered. The Caribs were still displacing the Taino/Arawaks further down the island chain. The Caribs had a bad habit of eating people they defeated.

Columbus came by boat. My first ancestor in the Caribbean would have come by boat. I like to travel by plane, even if it is not quite the way it used to be.