So, as mentioned before, out of 2 months in Jamaica I spent literally everything but 2 days in the Southeast of the island and only the last two days in the Northwest. Going from Kingston to Montego Bay is almost like going directly to Miami. Montego Bay is quite obviously made for tourists, whereas Kingston is not at all. In Kingston you eat Jamaican food, and even though it is expensive, it is still cheaper than Montego Bay, where most food offers are American fast food chains and locally looking (or maybe even locally owned) shops that offer a mix of Jamaican and American food. In many places tourist shops are all you can see and every person who talks to you on the street just wants money. So basically you could say that the island is divided in two: the north, which is spoiled by tourism and the south, which is spoiled by poverty and crime. Sounds like a sad place. Driving from Kingston to Montego Bay you pass through the center of the island, which, in addition to that, is spoiled by bauxite industry. But, in the parts that are left without mines, there are beautiful rivers and waterfalls and forests. I also need to add, that despite everything, I met very nice and very helpful people everywhere. Even in Montego Bay where literally everybody wants money from you, I was given a ride by some random guy because he thought I wanted to walk all the way to another part of the city in the dark. He did not expect money for that. In Kingston and the surroundings too, a lot of people are just nice and helpful, although some of them are helpful because they want money. It is generally hard to stay in Jamaica because you never know if someone just wants to be nice or they are nice because they want money.

Another thing I noticed is that most of the island is not very wet, and wherever there are rivers, you can see it from far, because the vegetation is much greener. However, I still got the feeling that the natural vegetation in almost all parts of the island should be rainforest. Only the soils are very shallow everywhere (which is normal for rainforests) and so the fact that huge parts of the island have been cleared (initially for growing sugar cane but now also for growing other foods and grazing cattle), means that only about half of the island is now forested and the rest is very dry because of the lack of vegetation cover. This means that the new natural vegetation is a savannah. This is really sad, I think, and it seems to be a good metaphor for what happens to the people with all the tourism in the north. They used to be Jamaican but now they are more like Americans. They are more used to giving prices in American dollars than Jamaican, they speak more English than Patua, they eat American fast food and they mostly earn their money from things that Jamaicans wouldn't want and that are sold to tourists. What is also a big problem, I think, is that a huge part of tourists are day-tourists from cruise ships, which means that they don't actually care to experience the Jamaican culture or see anything of Jamaica other than gift shops and nice, clean beaches. Nice clean beaches do not naturally exist in Jamaica either, because normally Jamaicans like to through garbage everywhere and it will eventually end up in the sea and very likely be deposited on the shore at some point. They only clean the beaches, where the cruise ship tourists come in.

So what is the real Jamaica? Well, I guess, all of it is real and everybody will get a different perception of Jamaica anyways. But one thing is for sure: if you only visit the northern beaches then you will get a very different idea of Jamaica than if you only visit the Kingston area. I still think that the closest one could get to the "real" Jamaica is to be found away from the beaches and away from the big cities. That is either in the mountains or in the western lowlands. In the mountains I already got some idea of it, and I mentioned before that working there was great because I finally got to know Jamaicans in their every-day life. Which certainly helps when you want to get to know a culture.

One more thing I need to tell here is actually very sad and makes me very angry. This is what a co-worker told me and I did not take much effort to check how much truth there is in it, but I believe it is probably more true than any official story about events that you could read somewhere. It started off with me asking about chocolate. I had noticed that there is no locally produced chocolate, only imported and so it was quite expensive. So I asked my co-worker, how come so many things in Jamaica were not produced locally. Here is what he told me: Some decades ago (in the 70ies or so) Jamaica was very much self-sufficient. They grew cocoa beans and produced chocolate, they mined for bauxite and produced aluminum, they grew coffee and roasted it locally, and so on. In the seventies they had a socialist president who actually did a very good job in making basic things available to everyone. They had a great social program, the economy was good, all were happy. In his second period as a president, however, his politics - or people's perception thereof - changed and some people were starting to be afraid of communism. In this time the political opponent was suddenly supported by the US. The election campaigns led to war-like situations in Kingston and Jamaica. Apparently Bob Marley gave a concert for peace during that time where he made leaders of both political parties shake hands. Finally the other party won the elections and started to privatize everything, to export raw materials and import finished products (rather than producing anything domestically) and to work closely with the US (not so surprisingly). All of this basically ruined the economy and the wealth in Jamaica. They could never really recover from that period.

Now, I have many very good friends who are American so I cannot say anything bad about America in general but why does American foreign politics have to keep messing with other countries? While I care mildly about Jamaica, the middle East and all the other countries US politics ruined, the Americans' involvement in Mexican politics and in the Mexican drug war are like a personal offence to me. This is why American foreign politics make me so angry, and when they are right to take initiative once out of ten times I'd still rather they mind their own business first and leave other countries alone. Supposedly, if a country really needs help, someone else will realize that too. And all those countries that are actually much worse off because of US involvement they would very much thank them if they had just been left alone. Of course now it is also too late to leave them alone but really, if there were no other reasons then the fact that, if I lived and worked in America, I would pay taxes to support all of this, would be enough to not live there.

On a happier note: in Montego Bay I stayed at a hostel, which turned out to be the perfect place to be for the two nights I had. The people staying there were fabulous and invited me to come with them to a place called the Blue Hole near Negril. I wasn't sure at first if I should go, also seeing that I had no clue what it would be, but when I got to know the guys a little I was sure they would not just go lie on the beach all day long or go shopping in Negril and just about everything else was fine with me, so I came. The Blue Hole turned out to be an underground spring that was open and you could jump into it. That was also the whole point of the journey there, which was a little bit strange for me but still I had a fabulous day - and I even jumped (although not all the way from the top, which was about 7m) and enjoyed it a lot! We also played some beach volleyball, but as we had Jamaicans playing with us it wasn't quite as good as it could have been. Team sports and people on this side of the world is just generally a very difficult topic… On the other hand, since the blue hole is quite far away from everything we also still got to see some of the very little villages inland in the western part of the country which also supports my idea that probably little villages inland are the most Jamaican Jamaica gets.

Well, this is how things go. If the people in the floorball project would have been like the guys in the hostel, then I would probably still be in Jamaica enjoying it. But then I couldn't really afford to anyways, so I guess this is the better option. But this also shows how travel experience depends so much on the luck of being at the right place at the right time, with the right people. Of course you can try and make it so that it turns out good, but many things you just can't plan, many things just happen and you have to go with the flow to make the best of it.

Alright, so this is my travel advice for today. I also realized somewhere on the road, that the way other people travel - trying to see the nicest places of everywhere they go - does not make any sense to me. I grew up in what I still -after all the traveling I have done - think is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. If I want to see natural beauty, I just go back there. If I travel, then it is to get to know other places, other cultures and other people. And usually, the culture of a place cannot be experienced in the most beautiful places as the most beautiful places tend to be spoiled by tourists, who travel in order to see those and do not care about anything else. Obviously this is what happens to people who were not as fortunate as I was to grow up in such a beautiful place - which, by the way, starts to be spoiled by tourism too… Somehow this world seems to have a lot of problems that I still find hard to grasp. But then, what I also learned, is that when you are traveling, your intention (if you are really traveling anyways) is to learn about other cultures, but really you always start by learning about your own. Because what you really do is finding the differences between your own culture and the new one. And every time you learn something about a new culture, you learn something new about yourself. This is hard for many people to accept but it is also the beauty of traveling.