After several hours of swimming, eating and some casual beverages, we mounted our bikes and started the pedal out of the cove along the coast to the night’s accommodation. However the heat and good times had turned us into giggling schoolgirls and the task of riding in a straight line over zig zagging rocks was pretty difficult. As we swayed and shrieked from hidden cove to sandy bay and beyond, we picked up several more punctures. After the day we had enjoyed there were no grumbled or shouted expletives, just happy acceptance that we were jiggling along to the pace set by the trail and that was sufficient.
Andy and Jonathan have been organising the Fat Tire Festival for six years after taking over from other motivated mountain bikers, and they have it all set up so incredibly flawlessly that you have trouble believing that what happens next is really happening. It is like two guys attempt at shock and awe on a joyous scale. When amazing and impossible collide you have the Jamaican Fat Tire Festival. Take that night for instance. After an hour or so of sloshed scenic cycling we were pointed towards a gate in the middle of what appeared to be nowhere but there. Beyond the gate and over the grand grassy lawn, stood what looked like a knight’s second home or a pirate castle. Fortified by heavy stone and battlements but softened by creeping ivy and bursting flowers, this place really did make us rub our eyes in wonderment. We were to spend that night resting in a mirage that upstaged any cheese fuelled dream. Although grand and magical, the sleeping arrangements were modest enough for us dirty bikers to feel at rest. Lizards crawled over the walls by the bed head, giant banana spiders hung from cotton thread thick webs, and the sound of a symphony of secret jungle creatures smoothed us to sleep. Right up until about 5am when the alarm clock screeched us awake.
The night before, after a few Appleton’s and a belly full of food, a few of us had agreed to get up at what felt like about five minutes after we’d shut our eyes for the night to get some epic light dawn raid shots. With movements more akin to an ironing board than a human being, I lurched out of bed and into the same dirty riding clothes that I had left discarded on the floor. We were up to greet the sun as it popped over the horizon and chastely hid behind a bank of cloud. We waited for the grand light show and that’s when we realised we had forgotten the coffee.
Jamaica produces some of the most exquisite coffee beans in the world but a Jamaican wouldn’t know what to do with them if you poured foam on his shoes and sprinkled chocolate dusting on his head. They are baffled as to what the ‘whiteys’ want with the beans and they don’t see the allure whatsoever. Which leads me onto the next stop on this wallowing tale, the Blue Mountains, home of some of the most expensive and highly regarded coffee beans in the world…except in Jamaica.
We drove across the island, along beach and through hills until the road turned inwards to the belly of the island, where the peaks really do tower over head, tight valleys of steep sided slopes close around you and the air becomes cooler and even more fragrant with the cologne of the land and its fruits. As the roads climb into the bosom of the terrain they become more and more unfeasible. The road seal crumbles into not just potholes but a lunar landscape. This is a place were no road has a right to be and nature shows its disregard for the transport of the hopes of man by slowly chewing parts of it off during each monsoon season. All along this winding whim there are homes and houses, shops and bars, tied to the roads edge and dug into the rock walls, feeding off the life that passes along it and chooses to live here. It is truly extraordinary and in just one ride along this road your mouth will hang agape more than it would during any visit to Shades nightclub. But only just.
After what seemed like hours of a crawling car journey in which we were treated to a Bucking Bronco of a ride, we pulled up at The Hotel Scorpio. Like a giant wedding cake that has been dropped into the middle of the mountains, the Scorpio stands perched upon rock like a drag queen at a Slayer concert. Completely out of place and so garishly resolute that it can only be admired, inside it is like a museum of tat and plastic bric–a–brac. Every horrid ornament that has ever been spat out by a Chinese crap factory is here. Pictures of waterfalls that are backlit by blue lights and accompanied by simulated waterfall sound; horse sculptures moulded in giant presses pumped with plaster of Paris and painted by three broad brush strokes; imitation fire places that are just red fabric blown by a small fan below. You imagine the tackiest trinket and it was there on display. And it was fantastic. To bask in all its bargain basement brilliance and explore all the lower limits of style and decor was a joy. Every corner held more incredible delights of plastic inventiveness. This hotel really did stand at odds with its surroundings, but in doing so added a heightened awareness of the deeply abundant lavishness of the misty dense green mountains that circled The Scorpio.
