so you wanted to see the surfing…

It will be interesting to get back to Halifax. I am used to hearing people say “he/she is one of the most considerate people I know” but as of late I have been mostly noticing how inconsiderate people are.

Now on to my regular post. I think Kelsey had a great time here in Jamaica. He will tell you about it, I gave him a CD with pictures on it, getting a good balance of exposure to all that Jamaica has to offer.

These photos were taken while on the north east coast of Jamaica. We took a cab to Halfway Tree here in Kingston where it’s easy to catch a mini-bus to Port Antonio. The mini-bus we got had a DVD player and a TV so we watched The Fifth Element on the way over the mountains to the north coast.

Once in Port Antonio we checked with the tourist office to find a cheap safe place to stay the night and then headed to the beach.

By the end of the day we had spent some time on a finless long board and gotten to know some locals at Boston Beach and Winnifred Beach, eaten some Jerk Chicken and had a few Red Stripe.


(sitting in the mini-bus at the Halfway Tree ‘terminal’ )


(heading over the mountains to get to the north coast )


(center lines are never marked and most roads are what would be considered single lane back home)


( a rope swing at boston beach. kelsey can be seen on the long board at the mouth of the inlet – no waves that day)


( you can see the inlet width here )


( cute kid eating some sand – bought him and his brother some sweets a bit later )


( yeeehaww )


( girls going home from school. with not much exposure to white people they were happy to touch our hair and giggle a lot )


( view from our room at Ivanhoe’s B&B overlooking the old city proper. very nice buildings that are all a bit run down )


( this was our second day – this being Long Bay – the clouds just lifting )


( didn’t quite make this one in time )


( the owner of this bar (cool runnings) didn’t show up – we got some shelter from his place as it started to rain )


( Reach Falls – my second time visiting – they were just as nice )


( I love NY )


( heading home in a cab – getting ready for the hiking that would happen the next day – see post )

nathair

7,402 feet – Blue Mountain

At 7,402 feet, Blue Mountain is higher than any American peak east of the Mississippi River and one of the highest peaks in the Caribbean.

Even though it’s Jamaica, hypothermia is not out of the question. That’s because the Blue Mountains are both wet and high. In the lowlands, you’ll be sweating your way through steamy, tropical rainforest. Higher up, the temperatures do the same thing they do on any mountain: They drop. There’s actually a frost-bitten forest of dwarf trees on the mountain slopes, and on the mist-shrouded summit, temperatures in the 30s and 40s are typical.


Sam talking to one of the caretakers of Whitfield Hall a 200 year old coffee farm house


Brownie the house dog – later he followed us all the way to the summit


During the day before the big hike. Those clouds eventually yielded rain which kept half of our group from hiking later that night


Gates are big in Jamaica


Mike O’Brien cooking supper, fueling up for the hike


It wasn’t easy waking up at 1am to go for a 6 hour hike – but we did


This is the only picture with all 3 of us. It was taken after the first hour of the hike (also the hardest) had been compeleted


Kelsey at the peak, waiting for the sun to show itself through the clouds


Fog/Clouds would roll in and out in just a few minutes


see comment for above


Looking south


As you can see, it warmed up on the way down

How One Man grounded a Plane

In what is a bit of old news globe and mail is running a story on a man who was in a Canadian jail after making some odd comments on an airplane. Worth a read.

Kelsey and I are heading to the east coast to get some surfing in.

PhotoBlogs


Open Mic night at Village Cafe, Kingston Jamaica

I somehow got poking around the web and saw some photoblog sites. A great place to start is photoblogs.org where you can add your site or browse through hundreds of others.

I also found an interesting site called the Thursday Theme which gives people a theme to take a picture on each week and users contribute their images.

Last night was very enjoyable. We all went to the gym and then came back to the house to make tortillas. Then at about 11:00pm we went to the Village Cafe here where it was open mic night. Got some pics and listed to some locals “mash it up”.

I got Thursday and Friday off this week which means that I’ll be heading to the east coast with Kelsey to try and get some surfing in. Then Saturday and Sunday we are going for a hike up the Blue Mountains.

Start Stolen Content
One LazyWeb request recently was for dictionary look-ups from the browser toolbar (something neat and favelet-like). Ben Hammersley posted one but the trouble was that it didn’t work in Chimera if you told the browser to block pop-up windows.

I fiddled around with it and now it works from Chimera even if pop-ups are disabled. Drag the link below to your toolbar:

dictionary.com

While we’re on the subject, here’s one that works for the thesaurus:

thesaurus_look-up

And of course you know about the Google one already:

Search Google

Just drag these to the toolbar (or wherever you’d like to keep them) and away you go. You can rename them to whatever you like.

Ocho Rios with Kelsey and crew.

what was jadz doing one year ago?


I had left work at about 3:00pm to pick up Kelsey at the air port. We had just walked down to the grocery store to pick up some food and were working on our 1st 6 pack of Red Stripe looking at the city and surrounding hills.


Later that evening we went to JamRock on Knutsford Blvd. for some supper and then went just up the street to play some pool.


This is the next day. Kelsey Sam and Marcy all met me at work at about 1:00pm. We took the 21a ‘chi-chi man’ bus (called this because the Prime Minister who implemented these new busses is said to be gay, because he didn’t re-marry after his wife passed away). This photo is of Kelsey as we got into the mini-bus in Spanish Town. The mini-bus took us all the way to Ocho-Rios for $150J each ($5 Canadain).


Dunn’s River in Ocho Rios


Dunn’s River in Ocho Rios – which is an amazing set of waterfalls that you can climb. A good variaty of challenging and easy falls.


This is for MikeQ


Jamaican food. Stew Chicken with Rice and Peas.


Snorkeling in OchoRios.