28 January 2007

Back again from another weekend in my favourite part of the country, Portland. Things are becoming very routine, same Goblin Hill Villa, same housekeepers, same menus, same rum punch party on as Saturday night with the same overly exuberant dancing from the same German lady. In an earlier life, I would scorn anyone who would be so unadventurous as to repeat holidays over and over again revisiting the same places. Having now spend the best part of year in Jamaica, I can whole heartedly recommend doing this. If you find somewhere that has acceptable service and the quality is relatively consistent, then why try anywhere else? You are only risking disappointment.

The only difference on this trip is that myself and Little Madam followed the rest of the family up to Portland after work / school on the Friday. This was my first time driving through rural Jamaica in the dark and it was a hair-raising experience. The roads here are constantly rutted and pot holed, but only on this journey did I realize that pot holes are nocturnal creatures and very sociable ones at that, congregating in their hundreds on roads that only a few weeks earlier seemed relatively clear.

On Saturday, we spent our usual morning on Longbay. I got to try out my new kite that the Lady of Leisure had bought me as a “funky” birthday present. This may be a very clever excuse for nit finding anything I would actually want in Jamaica, but in actual fact I did find it cool and was well chuffed with it. I had never flown a kite before but the principles are straight- forward enough, and I’m a clever lad. After a few short minutes, I had the kite flying albeit on a short string. I was tentatively getting used to the tension in the string and the reactions to eth gusts, and pretty successfully in my opinion. My style was obviously not flamboyant for one spectator who confidently strode over to me to show me how it was done. A young fit lad with no t-shirt, he was trying to impress the two girls he had bee sitting with. Within a minute he had my kite stuck firmly in a palm tree, although this was not necessarily bad from his perspective as he was impressively nimble in rescuing the kite. The next attempt lasted a little longer but the crash was even more impressive lodging firmly in the thatched roof of a beach hut. The lad knew when to stop and thankfully went off to rescue the kite. I seriously doubted whether I would be agile enough to get to the roof, and if I did get there, there is no way the roof would have held.

I don’t know how impressed his lady friends were but I think he should leave the kite flying to the experts, I’m a natural. Not 10 minutes after its latest rescue, the kite was at its maximum height soaring trying to escape into the mountains in the backdrop.