Ocho Rios, Jamaica

On the day we got into Jamaica it was cloudy and overcast. We had booked a tour with a guy named Phil Lafayette. He was great, and there were only 10 people in our tour, compared with the big groups you get if you book through the ship. While we were on the bus waiting for a couple more people, it suddenly started to downpour. The rain didn't really negatively impact the trip though, since we were doing things where we would get wet anyway.

Our first activity was tubing down this river in the middle of the jungle. It was kind of cold and pouring rain, but still so much fun! Thankfully we had waterproof cameras.

Then we went to a place called Dunn's River Falls. This is a really neat waterfall that empties straight into the ocean. This picture doesn't show the whole falls, just the bottom section. What you do is follow a tour guide as you hike up in the falls. For safety, they have everyone join hands so we were in a human chain of like 20 or so people as we climbed up. It was really cool.

They stopped to take pictures periodically. It took probably about an hour to actually get all the way up.

After the falls, Phil drove us around showing us Jamaica and telling us about the history and so on. He was a great tour guide, very memorable. It was sad to see how poor Jamaica actually is though. People live in these small, dirty, old houses or shacks and you can just tell that everyone is just scraping by.

This was actually one of the better looking houses.


We stopped this one time and this Rastafarian guy came up selling coconuts that he had carved into birds and stuff.

This is a picture of a primary school. Phil said that the ratio of students to teachers is about 75 to 1, and there isn't enough classroom space, so they often have to have class outside under this canopy. The kids sit on a tarp and the teacher has just a chalkboard to teach with. Makes me really appreciate our school systems (flawed though they are) and make sure that we always appreciate the opportunities we have for learning.

We also drove up to Fern Gully. Cool.

I think Jamaica would have been more fun if it wasn't raining and kind of cold, but we still had a blast anyway!