Ok, we had a wonderful time in
Meanwhile, I have been e-mailing friends this funny story about our trip. I had hesitated to post it here because I do want my kids to read this one day. However, they do need to know what mom and dad were like in preparing for them, and this trip was kind of part of that, sort of. LOL!
I’ll just put it down with this disclaimer -
You know, I had this thought going down. We love
I decided we were going to take an off-the-beaten-path tour to Nine Miles, where Bob Marley was born and take a tour of his home, etc. We hired a cab for the day and off we went. Great driver, nice guy, very knowledgeable. We went into the center of the country, through the mountains and valleys, and small towns. Just gorgeous – it was worth the trip just for that alone. We get to Nine Miles and he parks the mini-van. I get out of the van on my side to a guy with a bag he’s holding up to me. Inside the bag are these corona cigar sized white things. Yep, they were the biggest joints I’ve ever seen. Right there, in the parking lot, in front of the place where we pay for the tour, in front of God and country, right out in the open. Adam gets to my side and realizes what is going on and was speechless and slightly intrigued (he won’t admit it but I could tell). I politely declined for both of us and Orville, the driver, kept the other dealers away from us so we could pay for the tour. While waiting for the tour, we sat in a bar and had time for a fruity rum drink. Actually, very nice bar. There were other tourists sitting at the bar smoking. We were seeing people leaving the tour, whole families with kids. Mom and dad, and grandma and grandpa were all smoking and passing around - kids were clueless or used to it, don’t know. We tried not to act shocked - don’t know if we pulled it off. All wanted to share with us. No one was pushing it hard, it felt more like no one wanted us to be left out. Finally we said that we had random drug testing where we worked (it’s the truth with Adam), so they stopped asking us and were cool about it, and acted like they felt a little sorry for us. The bar also had the biggest and most intricate hookah I’d ever seen, more like a piece of artwork, and they let me take a picture of it (the pic I took doesn’t do it justice) – also offered to let me smoke out of it. Again, I had to politely decline. I have this thing about needing to be in some sort of control of my surroundings in a foreign country.
All the adults were stoned – the bartender, the gift shop workers, the tour guide (who kept saying at the end of everything “One Love, One Blood, Rastafaria”). At every stop on the tour, he would sing a Bob Marley song – a guy with the banjo would play (we were told he was Bob Marley’s uncle). At one point there were these local kids – couldn’t have been older than 6, on the roof of this building looking over at us and they were singing backup to our tour guide – they let us take their picture. We were told we couldn’t smoke in the crypt where his body laid, but other than that, we were around the most mellow people we’ve ever been around, and it was kind of fun. By the end we were all one big happy (mostly) mellow family. It was an interesting and educational tour.
On the way back to the mini-van, there was one last try to get us to buy some.
The rest of the week, if anyone at the resort asked us if we went on a tour, and we told them Nine Miles, we would get a couple of “ya mons” and snickers in return.
I know what his songs are about, and I know what Rastafarians like to do in their spare time, and any other time. I know this stuf is all over, but usually people are pretty discreet about it. Should I have had a clue given where I was? Nope, I sure didn’t. At some point after we got there, someone told us that is the only part of
Have fun laughing at my naivety