I've been back since Wednesday night, and I've only now put the last load of laundry in the dryer. My suitcase is still on my bedroom floor, waiting for me to take it outside and shake out the sand into the snow. The delay on this is equal parts procrastination and paranoia... I'm actually leery of investigating too deeply into the pockets and crevices of my bag, for fear of what might be inside. I had a stowaway, you see, and I'm still pretty creeped out about it.
When I finally started pulling stuff out of my suitcase Thursday after work, I noticed something I didn't recognize alongside it on the floor. Further examination revealed it to be a tiny gecko lying belly-up on my hardwood. Those little critters were cute as they were scurrying around outside our hotel in Negril, but finding one in my bedroom is another story. Jamaican field mice is what those things are, and exotic rodents aren't any more welcome in my home than domestic ones are.
Lucky for me, the little guy was dead. He actually looked a little flattened, so maybe the jostling of my shoes and my 20-pound toiletries bag during the trip from check-in to cargo hold to baggage claim had something to do with it. Regardless, I held my breath and quickly scooped him into a paper towel and tossed him in the trash. I shuddered a few times for good measure and spent the rest of the night feeling entirely more jumpy than usual, but after that, I put it out of my mind. Then I relayed the story to a friend via email and got this unwelcome theory in reply:
Um, not to freak you out, but that gecko might not have been dead. The cargo hold of a plane gets very cold and a gecko is a reptile, cold-blooded. Once he warms up he might revive. You took out your garbage, right?
I hadn't, but I probably don't have to tell you that's the first thing I did when I got home from work.
But enough about little dead lizards. Perhaps you'd like to hear about the rest of my trip.
Let's see. I could tell you about the taxi driver who was also a policeman and some sort of prostitute and ganja dealer. (Every taxi driver we had tried to give us his number to get return business from us; this was the only one who specified that we needed to call his "boss" instead of him directly. We met her, and she definitely had a pimp vibe going on... not that I would really know about such a thing.)
I could tell you about our tour of Mayfield Falls, where the brochure promised that a guide would "entertain [us] about the legend of the falls and its twenty-one natural pools, its underwater caves, its natural jacuzzis, and cliff jumping" and also "explain the many species of herbs used by locals for healing." We did have a guide, and he did point out a leaf or two, but moreover the whole experience felt like some bizarre low-budget photo shoot, with two guys ogling us in our swimsuits, snapping picture after picture that they later tried to sell to us on CD for the oh-so-reasonable price of $45 US.
I could tell you about our visit (on a day pass) to the notorious resort whose name starts with "Hed" and ends with "nism" and has an "o" in between.** But, as they say, what happens in Jamaica stays in Jamaica, and maybe it's better to leave to your imagination what we did or didn't witness and what we did or didn't do there. In truth, the overall atmosphere was decidedly more mellow than I expected, but I still can't think about that day without hearing a line from an old REM song: "I have seen things that you will never see."
I could tell you all of these stories and more in all sorts of tedious detail, but I do believe that sometimes random snippets presented out of context can actually be more amusing than complete and linear stories. In that vein, here are a few quotes recorded for posterity in my travel journal. Make of them what you will.
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Tyrone the taxi driver, explaining his "other" job(s): "If there's something you want, I get it for you; if there's something you want to try but don't know how to do, I show you..."
Stef (reading from the Lonely Planet guidebook): "There is a high prevalence of venereal disease in Jamaica."
Lisa: "Great. And I sat on all those toilet seats."
Stef, to Lisa, eating our hotel's takeout on the beach: "This is probably the worst pizza I've ever had."
Lisa: "Yeah; it's pretty bad."
Random lady walking by: "Good pizza, huh?"
Stef: [*Pause*] "Did you have it?"
Random lady: "Yep!"
Stef: "Hmm."
Lisa (at the mystery resort): "Nude means you can wear a hat."
New friend we made, talking about I don't even remember what: "That's not porn; that's sexual enlightenment."
Fruit bowl guy who wanted money for a photo with us: "Do you want the marijuana in the picture?"
Stef, watching the clock for the expiration of our day pass: "Our pumpkin turns into a carriage... I mean, our carriage turns into a pumpkin at 3:00 a.m."
Stef, at Mayfield Falls: "It feels like something bit my ass."
Lisa: "Just smell your leaf, Stef."
Lisa, recognizing at a bar the Slavic woman we'd met earlier in the week: "You remember her... you know those breasts... we're really familiar with those."
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And I guess that about sums things up (at least, as thoroughly as I'm going to at the moment). All in all it was a great time, and I hope it was not the last of Lisa's and my "no-boys-allowed" trips together. No problem, mon.
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* This is just a fun but inconsequential fact from our guidebook that I wanted to work in somewhere, but when I didn't manage to do so, I decided to put it here. Sometimes the titles come easily and sometimes they just don't.
** I'm not being cryptic and coy here; I just really don't want to start seeing search results for this in my Sitemeter referrals list!
1 comment:
A woman I knew sort of well told me once she and her husband went to that resort on their honeymoon. I felt like I knew her much better after that.
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