From Jamaica

There are tourists, travellers and explorers.

 

We were staying with Auntie Jean in a country area, of which more in a future post, no doubt. We had planned to be tourists for at least half a day but that was progressively downgraded. Ocho Rios & Dunn's River Falls were too far; Negril was too expensive. Bluefield Sands was doable but we ran out of time. And there's also a limit to the dependence you can put on relatives to provide transport. Then came the long-awaited rain. We made do with buying a bunch of fish from a dubious-looking vendor at the roadside not far from the Sands.

 

My real mission here is to be the attentive but otherwise drone-like consort of an expatriate, my beloved Karleen, returning for purposes of tying up loose ends with family, friends and business after five years' absence. At this moment, I'm sitting in the "business center" of the Four Seasons Hotel in Kingston. It's really an Internet room with a shelf of well-thumbed books for guests to borrow. I've taken a volume of short stories by Somerset Maugham, typically involving a languid Englishman holed up in an hotel in some far-flung corner of Empire. Like me then, but in the Thirties.

 

I came in here planning a despatch peppered with local colour and spicy anecdotes; but I don't have the perspective and distance. Maybe later, when I somehow manage to get back to Blighty (exiled soldier's affectionate slang for England). Today, there is no big war on, but parts of the airspace have become a no-fly zone. An Icelandic volcano is spewing dust to the upper atmosphere, affecting our booked return flights via New York. The newspapers speak of the Navy being poised to rescue stranded holiday-makers, but that's in the Med, whereas we're separated from home by the Atlantic.

 

And so I'm wondering if we are tourists, or what. The skill of a tourist is to know the best places to go, and the best deals; and how to complain effectively when expectations are not fulfilled. The failure of a tourist is to be upset when things don't go according to plan. When an Act of God, of Biblical proportions, darkens the sky, who shall I complain to?

 

Perhaps we are travellers. One skill is to know how to wait, for this is travelling's principal ingredient. Another is to observe dispassionately how things are done by the locals, and be at their mercy with gladness; and marvel at their ways—their adaptation to their native soil. A tourist seeks comfort in insulation from those ways; seeks only blue ocean, cheap drink, well-shaped bodies and laughing faces; or seeks escape from the stresses of normal routine—a fantasy world to be master or mistress, able to command at his or her whim.

 

The traveller opens himself to the world and its experiences, whilst conserving as best he can his limited purse, his belongings and his equanimity, through all the accidents and adventures that befall him. The failure of a traveller is to let his longing for home overwhelm him prematurely. Another kind of failure is when he cannot distinguish hospitality from robbery—"t'iefing", as they would call it here in patois.

 

The third thing is to be an <em>explorer</em>. We imagine him as an intrepid hero dressed in pith helmet, bush jacket, knee-length drill shorts and stout boots. He's been bitten with leeches. He has hacked a path through virgin jungle with a machete. He goes where no man has trodden before: perhaps everyone else had more sense. (I like to call myself an explorer of the inner life, but it's not true. Wherever I go there, I discover by their writings others who've trodden the same paths and gone further than I.)

 

On Thursday we start the first leg of our return to UK, by flying to Miami, thence to New York. There is no confirmation of our hop across the pond to Heathrow. It all depends on the current Act of God. We might be stuck in NYC.

 

But here's a funny thing. At 19, Karleen worked as a typist at the University of the West Indies. She got friendly with the office cleaner, who used to bring along her little daughter, a very bright child. She wasn't paid enough to send her child to school. So K from her own small salary gave the cleaner a regular sum to help with school fees. A few months ago, having lost touch with both mother and daughter, she looked up the daughter's name on Facebook. This little girl is now a PhD with a good job in New York. She's offered to put us up for as long as we need, till the dust-cloud blows over.

 

I'm starting to feel like an explorer.