Ocho Rios needs a makeover
LAST SATURDAY as Chupski and I left Ocean’s 11 and were trying to head back to the gated community we were staying at west of the medium-sized town of Ocho Rios, it was plain hell trying to navigate a safe way back to the highway.
I must confess that although I have been driving since 1972, I have never been comfortable with night driving in Jamaica. For one, the signage is an afterthought. It is not that I do not know Ochi, but the town is a hodgepodge of roads each fighting for space to link with the highway running from the general direction of MoBay to Oracabessa.
On approaching the highway, it was too late for me to recognise that I was using a one-way road and travelling in the wrong direction. A taxi cab pressed down on me. Foolish cars were there behind me, apparently being driven by people like me who lived in the Kingston Metropolitan Area. Horns were blaring, and Chupski was there beside me saying, “Don’t let them intimidate you. Just wait on the light and move out.”
“Yu nuh si sey di man nuh know di road,” said a woman walking by the taxi cab as he continued to drive down on me, pressuring me into reversing, cars piled up behind me. She slapped down her hand hard on the top of the cab.
As the light changed, I moved out in a burst, and in the cool a/c of the car, I found my arms sweating.
I first visited Ocho Rios as a child in the late 1950s. It was little more than a fishing village, then. One gets the sense that all the urban planners have done done since then is add roads to the village while the residents and business people have piled on.
Quite apart from the development in the east with the big tourism interests, the actual town of Ochi is in a kind of ‘respectable dilapidation’.
Early Sunday morning as the lady slept, I kissed her and drove out. It was 6:30 a.m. I head for the Ocho Rios Market, a venue in need of an immediate fix and development.
In the early morning sunlight, it is so much more obvious that Ocho Rios needs immediate attention. It must not be allowed to grow to the level of, say, Montego Bay, where the fixes are near to impossible.