DAY FOUR - OCHOS RIOS, JAMAICA

TUESDAY, AUGUST 22, 2006

A couple of things about me:
1. I don't know how to bargin.
2. I'm an easy mark.

If I had gone to Dunn River Falls alone, I would have definitely gone home with a DVD of the climb up the falls --- complete with humiliating footage of me falling not once, but twice.


Dunn River Falls

In my defense, though, you have to admit that the concept of scaling up a water fall is a little weird.

But then again, scaling the Dunn River Falls isn't exactly scaling Niagara Falls.


Niagara Falls

But still...trying to make your way uphill on slippery, jagged rocks as water rushes at you is...well, it's an experience.

So, the thing is, you're supposed to go in groups and hold hands to form a human chain to help each other up the falls.

Thank God I was holding onto this big guy's hand. A couple of times, I walked right into a pot hole and needed someone to haul me bodily out. I managed to scrape my legs up so that I emerged from the water with blood streaming down my right leg.

I still have a scar to show for it.



Almost as soon as we got off the boat that morning, the heat hit us like a heavy blanket and it was absolutely suffocating.

Thank God the tour buses were air conditioned.

As the driver wound through the narrow streets that curved along the coastline, he cheerfully told us, "In Jamaica, we have a saying: the left side is the right side. The right side is suicide."

When we stepped out and made it to the site, you could feel the uncomfortable, sticky heat crawl all over you. Standing out under the hot sun was less than ideal and to make matters worse, we had a fair walk to get to the little station where you're able to buy water shoes and lock your stuff away.

Everything was pretty crude, though. The fluorescent coloured water shoes were in plastic buckets of water and we found ourselves sitting on cheap, white plastic lawn chairs, waiting to be fitted before heading off to the locker rental place, only to discover the lockers were basically holes carved into the side of a dirt hill with wooden doors to cover them.

From where we were standing, we could hear the rush of the water.

Even under the shade, it was hot. There didn't seem to be any breeze.

"The water heals," our guide, Joseph, kept telling us, as he led us down a rickety set of stairs towards the beach. He splashed some water at us and it felt so cold, it was like shards of ice cutting across our skin.

He instructed us to hold hands to form a human chain and said that if one falls, just leave them alone and keep going.

Our videographer was like a little monkey, the way he scaled the falls with a hop, skip and a jump, all the while holding onto his camcorder and calling out to us to give him high fives and to smile into the camera.



Yes, the water did "heal", but when you're carefully picking your way across moss-covered stones and rushing cold water (which actually started to feel really good after awhile), the last thing you really want to do is smile goofily at the camera or pose like some B-movie starlet.

That's why I didn't really want to buy the DVD.

Past experience had taught me that nobody really watches home movies --- the shaky camera work created by an unsteady and unprofessional hand isn't exactly entertaining for anybody who wasn't actually in the video.

It's also pretty headache inducing.



When the tour was over and I was hobbling off, the videographer came running after us, trying to make a sale.

I'd forgotten the first rule about dealing with hagglers:

Just say no.

It's not "No thanks." It's just a simple no.

He knew I was the weak link, though, and didn't even focus on either Melanie or Rachel at that point. He kept at me as I hemmed and hawed, trying to think of a polite way of telling him to get out of my face so that we could get on the bus and head over to Dolphin Cove.

I had my hand on my wallet at one point, but Melanie focused on me and kept saying, "No." We finally managed to extract ourselves from the situation and weaved through the market place set up right near the entrance and headed for a bus.



Our next stop was Dolphin Cove.



It turns out we didn't really read our ticket all that carefully, so we didn't realize that this wasn't exactly a swim-with-the-dolphins encounter. For extra money, you could go swim with the dolphins, otherwise, you were allowed into this secluded little tourist trap where you could watch the dolphins resting before another "encounter" or catch a shark feeding or weave through the little jungle trail where you could look at other animals kept in captivity --- say, a parrott or two, which one of the guides can have propped on your shoulder while he takes your picture.



(Not a fun experience. The talons feel really gross and you can feel them digging into your flesh -- but oddly enough, I found holding the birds to be even more creepy. I kept wanting to fling them bodily off of my hands and go running and screaming like a banshee out of the jungle.)



With the heat steadily rising, we felt like the best thing to do was to get back to the boat and have a late lunch before heading out to the pool to nap under the sun.