A relaxed visit to Jamaica, away from the bustle of reggae

Anyone who thinks of Jamaica will probably imagine a reggae party on the beach with lots of rum and marijuana, but the Caribbean island is much more than that cliché.

“This is one of the most beautiful experiences you can have in Jamaica”, promises tour guide Aneif Anderson to some rather skeptical visitors.

Your plan is to take them to a bird park near Montego Bay, but how fantastic can that be?

Once on site, Rockland's Birds Sanctuary appears as a wonderful place in the mountains with a great ocean view.

And the best cannot be enjoyed at first sight, such as hummingbirds that fly freely and feed from the palm of the visitors, who will thus live an unforgettable experience.

Fritz, the administrator of the small park, lets visitors sit on the terrace and gives them a bottle of sugar water.

“All they have to do is sit down, hold the sugar water in one hand and stretch a finger out of the other hand,” Fritz explains. After two or three minutes, two beautiful hummingbirds flutter at their outstretched fingers and after a brief hesitation they land on them carefully.

“The feeling of feeling this creature as light as a feather in the hand, feeling the flapping of its wings and seeing how it seeks sugar water with its small and delicate beak is crazy and truly indescribable.” Marion, from Nuremberg, is impressed.

Obviously, Fritz knows everything about hummingbirds. For example, that these small birds can fly at 50 kilometers per hour, they flap their wings up to 90 times per second, that the smallest ones weigh just two grams, and the largest - at most 20 grams.

The bird sanctuary, as Fritz explains, owes its existence to the Englishwoman Lisa Salmon. She fell in love in the early 1950s with this beautiful place on the sea, went on extensive walks and left food and sugar water everywhere for the birds.

After a couple of years, her house became the center of the world of local birds, and in 1952 the Englishwoman opened the doors of her refuge to the public.

A visit to the hummingbirds can easily be combined with a detour to the Great River, not far from the village of Lethe.

If you rent a vehicle, you have to travel winding mountain roads to the river, where you will have to make a decision at the headquarters of “Chukka Reggae Rafting”: continue to the wild upper part of the river and return along the rapids, or rather descend on a bamboo raft through the quiet lower reaches?

Those who prefer something more relaxed will opt for the bamboo option and will put the next two hours in the hands of Joshua, a stocky rafter with dreadlocks tied in a ponytail.

Only in some narrow passes, where the current is stronger and the river is deeper, does Joshua have to press the raft stick into the rock with all his might. For the rest, there is plenty of time and leisure to marvel at the magnificent riparian landscape with gigantic bamboo forests.

Along the way, we repeatedly meet young men wading through the water, laboriously pushing the rafts upstream. While paying tourists are comfortably driven by car to the base at the end of their excursion, the rafts have to be brought back to the starting site by force of muscles. These young people strive for it in the river against the tide for at least three hours, for just ten dollars.

When Joshua was asked whether he knew the hummingbird station in nearby Rockland, the man tells a wonderful story that still runs through the entire Montego Bay region today.

On the day Lisa Salmon died, Joshua recounts, all the birds suddenly disappeared. People thought they'd never come back, but at Lisa's funeral all her friendly birds came back. True or not, Joshua and most Jamaicans strongly believe in this story.

The best time to travel to Jamaica is during dry periods, which run from July to August and December to April. The rainy season, with still pleasant temperatures, takes place from May to June and between September and November.

For more information, contact Jamaica Tourist Board, 64 Knutsford Boulevard, Kingston 5, Jamaica, or visit www.visitjamaica.com.

dpa