The day of Travel

Morning tractoration

Although distances covered in Jamaica are short, its a pretty tiny island (80km wide and 240km long), travel is long. Today we woke up early, not really, at around 7. to get out of PTP on a mission to RASTA VILLAGE, a sort of tourist-y group of rastas, or trying to be. In RASTAV we planned to visit their local medicinal garden, said to be the largest on the island, by them.

Fabio and Bongo Steve river crossing

Getting out of PTP is never easy, many taxi drivers dont like coming up the eroded and flooded road, but we got lucky in the morning and got dropped off by the farms tractor about halfway down the hill, near Friendship.                                                   Two people got in a knife fight in friendship last night. They were not friends. Well.. hmm.. oh in Friendship we encountered our Friend Bongo Steve, mentioned in an earlier post, who knew about RASTAV and helped found it a couple of years ago. With him we quickly got a car to drop us off in Wakefield, where we now found a quicker "shortcut" road towards MoBay. Somewhere in between MoBay and RV we got off, in the middle of nowhere, and had to cross an angry river and walk up a small mountain. RV was well organized, run by about 6 or 7 rastas with ITAL food, good music, crafts, childrens school, medicinal garden, a bamboo maze for meditation while walking among other things. We were lucky enough to get a free tour for being Bongos friends and where treated to great food and invited to play the drums. They asked us to come back and JAMMM some other time and bring our own instrument.

ITAL food kitchen

A new word learned today is something like IANI (pronounced something like eye-an-eye. It means WE. EYE is me. EYE is you. I is the universe. I is nature. I is jah.god. I is peace. I is our world.

The medicine garden we found had a pretty good collection. We only got one endemic herb (Search me heart) and might have a very hard time getting it to survive. Search me heart (Rytidophyllum tomentosum) is used for general colds and as a drink when mixed with coconut oil. Its rare in Jamaica, so them Rastas and Mr. Bongo say. They werent too happy about sharing their herbs and we didnt get many. Most of the herbs they had are common in our mountains, so they gave us leaves and told us to bring them back and get locals to identify them for us.

Rasta making herbal tea

Rasta smashing up medicine herbs

Our return journey was met with rain. We ended up having to go to MoBay, walk around downtown to find a bus that takes us back to Wakefield. In Wake we waited a while for a car to take us up to Friendship where our foot journey began again. Just got back from a nice walk.

Anyway. what else. Gonna go try and get our herbs to survive in a potting and compost mix and keep it in a cool shady place for a while. Tomorrow is Sunday.

Enjoy.