I will be honest – I am a pretty picky eater, and I wasn’t crazy about all of the food that we had been served at camp. So for me the thought of getting to a place with food I recognized was something I was really looking forward to, especially the all-you-can-eat variety.
But once we got to the place, it didn’t seem right. We were clearly not coming off of a cruise ship, and the food, while limitless, seemed very artificial. The rolls weren’t right, the large central waterfall was as fake as anything at Disney, the crowd was filled with large, maybe not even fat by American standards, people, that dwarfed all the thin frames of the people we had been with all week. The overall impact was unsettling for a lot of the team. They really had a “are we really like these people” kind of reaction, because these people were jarringly different than the people our eyes had grown accustomed to during the trip.
Maybe the next stop will be better.
Our next stop was a prime tourist location, Dunn’s River Falls. This ended up being kind of a mess, you will see from the video that many of our party ended up having a total misadventure. We wanted to go snorkeling and our hosts worked on getting some transportation and supplies. The short version of the story is that we got taken out to the reef on jet skis and dropped off, left to swim back to shore, and left with two guides, who had some very bad advice. They led us to the other side of a reef, and then the low tide came in, stranding about half of us on the other side, some of us became sick, or injured, or stung by the coral, one pretty severely. When we got done, one from our party was screaming and crying from the pain of her stings, and the falls had closed, and no medical folks were around.
Ok, Maybe the next stop?
So after getting the bus down to the beach, and getting some assurance from actual medical folks, that despite the searing pain our team member would be alright in “a few hours”.. we then drove to our Jamaican style dinner. It was at a “Jerk Center” a name which we all found very amusing, but it was essentially a large open pit barbeque/smokehouse place. The food there was really good and the sauces were quite spicy. It would have been a little better if all of the team had been up for eating after the snorkeling. But as it was it gave us a good point to stop and look back over the trip.
More mission, less fun stuff?
The agreement around dinner that night was that we didn’t actually have much fun doing the toruisty things. We felt out of place and maybe didnt fully feel like we fit in with the American cruise cowd. And we all certainly agreed that we would have enjoyed staying back at camp doing constuction work over the Dunn’s River Falls trip. It was an exhausting trip and we were now in sight of the finish line.
Take a look at the video and see exactly how bad of tourists we were.
About the video: My hard drive got a lot full, so the videos had to be put on hold for a little bit while I upgraded that. I ended up getting a 500GB hybrid drive, which was a really nice doubling of size.
Originally posted on the Train For Purpose Blog.