Welcome, stranger!

Hi there,

this is the record of our ten-month, round-the-world trip with our teenage daughters, from September 2004 to the end of June 2005. You can use the "Step Back In Time" drop down box on the right hand side to look back at the different stages of our preparations, the journey, and a few posts since we got home (but not many of them). To read about:

• Preparing to go - April, May, June or August 2004
• China - see September and some of October 2004
• India - some of October, all of November and some of December 2004
• Kenya - most of December 2004, and all of January 2005
• Thailand - February/March 2005
• Australia, New Zealand and the USA - April 2005
• Mexico - the end of April and all of May 2005
• Cuba and Jamaica - June 2005
• Arriving home - just scroll down this page

Enjoy!

- Mark

Pictures back again - !?

OK, it's like the Twilight Zone in here - the mysterious disappearing pictures are back again. Enjoy!

Meanwhile, here's a holiday snap from Rosa's recent trip (geddit?!) to the Wirral:

Ouch!

- Mark

Where have all the pictures gone??

Hi there, we seem to have lost lots of pictures - I'm waiting on some help from the Blogger help team, but until then, you'll just have to ask us if you want to look back at some part of our wanderings, 'cos this site is now mostly showing text. The photos are stil there on the website where we keep them, it's just the blogger links that are broken. We're all OK back in Coventry, (although Rosa has broken three metatarsals in her right foot), and life continues to be an interesting journey, full of new horizons. OK, put your hand up if you believe that we don't miss travelling ... - Mark

Shiny new photos and stuff

At last, the Jamaica photos are up, along with some more blather from us about the last bits of our big trip - scroll down to see them.

Maybe we'll put something up in a couple of weeks about coming home - till then, keep well, and thanks again for all the comments you left, and the emails you sent, keeping us connected while we travelled far away.

Home at last!

We're back safely in Coventry, welcomed home to our redecorated house by Sati, Lani and Kizzy, all of us knackered but well. There are new photos and text from Cuba below, and stuff from our last two travelling weeks in Jamaica will be up here in the next few days. We are looking forward to catching up with all of you we left at home - and to staying in touch with everyone we met (or caught up with) on the road. Keep well till then!

- Mark

More good fortune

So, we're home, twelve hours later than planned, but a thousand quid better off: BA had overbooked our flight, and offered us 250 pounds each, a free international phone-call, food and a bed in the posh Pegasus Hotel, if we volunteered to take a much later, Air Jamaica flight. Rosa still doesn't think it was worth it: but here's a room shot, and the pool - what would you have done?

Trips what we done

Larry's friend Dival rented us one of his cars, and we visited a fair range of the tourist attractions on offer. Mostly water related, now I come to think of it, not including:

Mandeville

Where we used the internet, had an (allegedly) indian lunch, and hung out in a bookshop - how's that for really getting the feel of the country? No rivers, and no photos.

Milk River

Milk River offers the world's third most radioactive spa waters, great for the skin (though I have no idea why) - so we headed over there with Marva, and bathed for the maximum fifteen minutes allowed (without glowing at night), before taking a couple of side trips to a fishing (and collecting shipwrecked drugs consignments) village at Farquhar Beach, and to the mangrove river at Alligator Hole.

Ocho Rios

Featuring huge cruise ships, many shops, air-conditioning, cable TV, a pool outside our room, long white beaches, a trip to the movies (complete with popcorn), ice-cream and more ice-cream, lots of hustlers, and a magic colour-changing tourist population (white in the day, when the cruise ship passengers dominate, black from late afternoon, when that day's ship has gone, and there are lots of black US/Jamaican tourists left). For photos, see H's blog, below.

Dunn's River

A fine side trip from Ocho Rios - not cheap, but well worth it. And the girls got a go on a jet ski, too!

Black River

Travelling with Marva again, we headed off to the Black River safari, to see crocs, birds, mangroves, and bullrushes.

It was a great trip (I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who's in that part of the world), with a witty, well-informed guide, followed by a good lunch, then on to ...

YS Falls

Not so far from Black River these pretty falls were good fun for (cold) swimming, and had some great deckchairs to sit in too.

Marva had wanted to tour the Appleton Rum Factory, but we ran out of time, after a slow start and buying the 'safari, lunch and falls' package at Black River. Sorry, Marva!

Hellshire beach

Of the few beaches we saw in Jamaica, this was my favourite. We met up with Marva's sister Beverly, her daughter and some friends - then picked up Larry from his welding course with his mate Rowan, and headed off to "the Jamaican's beach" just outside Kingston. Fried fish, bammy and festival was organised, and we chilled (and tried to hide from the sun a bit). Lamani had mixed feelings about his first play in the sea, complete with rubber ring - mostly he felt cold, I think.

There aren't so many tourists on Hellshire beach, though there are a few. When I went in for a swim, one young girl shouted in glee and disbelief "white man can't swim!" Later, as I swam, a young boy behind me asked "you a white man?" - as I smiled and turned, he tried again - "Chinese?"

Bob Marley's house

Bob Marley's house in Kingston has no river - and you can't take photos inside. It was interesting enough, although the newspaper cuttings wallpapered over several walls included quite a few unflattering articles from later in his career, which surprised me. The bit of video of some live performance at the end was great. The gift shop, however, was selling some stuff that in our ignorance we couldn't really believe fitted with Rasta beliefs - a whole crocodile skin, for example, and some US book about how socialism was the cause of all the world's wrongs. Killing animals for no good reason, and defending Babylon? Interesting though.

- Mark

Impressions after the first week

Marva's yard

We're staying an hour or two's drive from Kingston, with Marva in Denbigh, near May Pen, in Clarendon.

Marva and Larry run a nursery from home, producing bougainvillea and other plants for landscape gardeners and other trade buyers - Marva is also studying, and teaches horticulture too. It's great to stay with gardeners. There's a lime tree, and a sweetsop, just outside the back door, a patch of sugar-cane, and about a million mosquitoes who love the pond at the bottom of the yard, and love our blood more. We were a bit freaked out by the mozzies at first, but we now have a routine of spraying the bedroom in the day and leaving it shut up, and smearing ourselves with repellent at regular intervals, which seems to be working fine.

Only Heather and Marva had met before, but I think we're all getting on fine. Marva is a hard-working, smart, determined woman with a great laugh, who is very happy to be living back in Jamaica (where she spent parts of her childhood), and especially to have had her two older children, and now Lamani, in a school-system which doesn't consistently fail black kids like ours does. Would she give up her family land in Clarendon, the house she built herself, and the caribbean climate if she could get her old job in Jephson Gardens back? I don't think so.

Larry is a thoughtful guy, with a clear picture of where he is and where he's going. He's a Rasta, brought up partly in the ghetto in Kingston, and partly with his dad back in Clarendon. He can't understand why people leave Jamaica for the "first world"; he can see only two reasons for going to the UK or the US - to get money or to study. Maybe he'll do one or the other one day, but first he has his own yard to finish building (where his dad lives), the nursery business to build up, and so on.

Between the two of them, the world has been blessed with Lamani - a small man with a large voice and a lot of love in him. He has fallen for Rosa and Melissa, in turn - his heartbroken cry of "lady gone" follows us each night as we head off to bed. I like his nearly two-year-old grasp of short sentences: when he's cross with me he tells me to "go up your yard!".

More thoughts and feelings after our first week here:

It's a third world country

• Shootings in the ghetto (two gun deaths a day in Kingston) and corruption in government and in the police force.
• The countryside could be Western Kenya sometimes, to look at - though other parts could be Ireland, or the midlands of England
• Many/most people (around Denbigh, anyway) living in their own yard, with their own little bit of land
• Lots of rubbish lying around - including many roadkilled dogs
• Many potholes, including some spectacular ones

British and US influences

From driving on the left, to press defenses of the "Westminster system" for the civil services, you can tell you're in what used to be the British Empire. Many people have visited the UK, many have family over there, calls to the UK are cheap, and there are lots of big houses built by retirees returning from Birmingham, London or Manchester ...

At the same time, Jamaica has huge US influence - on the TV (lots of US black sitcoms) and in music, in street styles, and through the many visitors from the US. And we're in the Americas: I think I'd not really taken that in till we got here - my distorted imperialist view of the world had Jamaica and Barbados as located in the far, far south-west of England, in some way - and I'm reminded of a south-western burr in some of the English spoken here, as well as of a US lilt ...

Great food, and family nearby

Larry's dad, Styles, often looks after Lamani, and has made dinner for us a couple of times - chicken stew, and snapper - he's a fine cook. We all like one or more of the patties, soups and fried chicken the Juici-Beef Patties chain offers all over the country; curry chicken and goat are both good; and of course there's loads of fruit.

As well as Styles, lots of other family live nearby. Marva's mum Macie (see above) is the other most regular visitor - she lived in Coventry in the fifties and sixties, working as a tailor and a caterer, until she came back to the Caribbean.

- Mark