Next Stop: Sweet Jamaica



I never get tired of traveling to Jamaica but I'm especially excited about visiting a parish I've never experienced: Port Antonio in the Northeastern parish of Portland. Noted for bamboo rafting down the Rio Grande, this rustic transport was once used to ship bananas. The whole process was made famous by Harry Belafonte's  classic 'Day O" tune and I can't wait to see the Rio Grande as well as the rest of the lush region. A highlight of my trip will be a visit to Moore Town, more widely known as Nanny Town, the settlement founded by enslaved Africans called maroons, who fought off the British and lived in the mountains in independent communities. Nanny was the female warrior who led the Portland maroons with highly developed ambush techniques and won a peace treaty from the British in 1739 for tax free lands. Nanny is the only female Jamaican national hero and I am thrilled to visit her second settlement (the original was up in the Blue Mountains) and meet her ancestors. I'll also spend some time in Kingston, where I'll explore Trenchtown and Bob Marley's Tuff Gong studios. My trip is sponsored by the Jamaica Tourist Board. Please stay tuned for posts and pix!

Comments

Indrani said…
Wow! What a wonderful tour opportunity for you!
Happy travels.
:)
October 5, 2015 at 7:29 AM
Fly Girl said…
Indrani, thanks it really was a great opportunity and I'm so grateful to have the chance to explore more of Jamaica!
October 5, 2015 at 7:46 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Traveling Through A Liberian Childhood

Image
I like to explore the world with books as much as I like to actually travel. A well-written narrative can transport you to places that you'd never experience with just superficial details like photos and descriptions. I've been interviewing writers about the criteria they use to select books for Summer reading and it made me think about my own general reading criteria. As a journalist, I'm really drawn to biographies, autobiographies and memoirs more than fiction. There's something about using the facts to entice readers into your world that gets me. It's no coincidence that some of my favorite writers--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Zora Neale Hurston, Hemingway, started out as journalists. So when I glimpsed The House at Sugar Beach , at my local bookstore and saw it was a memoir written by a journalist, it was pretty much a done deal that I would buy it. Now it wasn't only that the author Helene Cooper was a journalist, it was that she was a Liberian journalist chro
Read more

Puerto Rico's Taino Culture

Image
The original inhabitants of the Caribbean region of North America were the Arawak, Taino and Carib  native peoples.  The Tainos are a subgroup of the Arawaks and are recognized as the founders of the island of Boriken or Puerto Rico.  These were the people who offered a peaceful welcome to Columbus in 1493.  They didn't know the cruelty and violence that would follow his so-called "discovery" of the land that they had cultivated for centuries. Despite official government pronouncements that the Taino have been killed off by the massacres and slavery that followed in Columbus' wake, they live on.  As demonstrated in the photo above by  members of  the Puerto Rico Folklorico Dance & Culture Cultural Cente r, Taino traditions, food and names remain strong. Throughout Puerto Rico, town names like Mayaquez, Utuado and Caquas echo the Taino language as do the musical instrument maracas and hamaca or hammock. Legends of Taino warriors, like Hatuey, who organized the ba
Read more

Switzerland's Fete Des Vignerons

Image
                                               Once every generation, the centuries-old viticultural festival, Fete des Vignerons, unfolds in Vevey, Switzerland. Watching this spectacle of music, dancing, wine and fanciful costumes, felt like I had been transported to something out of a Dr. Seuss story. With a law that prohibits the fest from taking place more than five times in a century, I felt incredibly lucky to witness this celebration of Swiss wine traditions dating back to the 17th century.  Some of the fetes 5,500 performers in costumes strolled the narrow streets of Vevey after a show that featured fairies, bees, royal courts, playing cards and 17th-century wine growers. The performance was in French but the drama transcended language barriers. It's a difficult experience to describe but if I had to sum it up, I would explain it as the magic of Cirque Du Soleil combined with the pageantry of the Olympics, topped with the history of folk celebrations.  Take a peek at my v
Read more