The second stop on our Caribbean cruise was Falmouth Jamaica. Falmouth is a relatively new stop in the Caribbean. I guess they completed the new pier in early 2011. As such, they town is far less touristy than many other stops in the Caribbean. This can be both bad and good.
On the good side, it gives you a chance to explore a foreign country and see the culture and the people as they truly are. So many ports cruise ships visit are so westernized that you don't really get to experience the real culture. The downside to this was how poor and underdeveloped the town was. I've been to a number of poor cities in Mexico so I thought I knew what poor was - but I feel like Falmouth topped them. The town looked and felt very poor.
While in Jamaica we took a self-guided walking tour of Falmouth. It only took us a few hours to see the town, which isn't that big. There were several neat buildings with a lot of history behind them. There were two churches in town that were neat to see. The weather in Jamaica was very hot and humid. I was sweating like a pig during our walk.
Without a doubt my least favorite part of Jamaica was the pressure tactics of the local vendors and taxi drivers. Literally (no exaggeration) every 5 feet as you walk down the street a vendors and/or a taxi driver will employ high pressure tactics to get to to buy from him. This gets old quick, and to be frank makes you not want to be there at all. It's unfortunate too, because most of the Jamaicans were nice people. As our walking tour brought us further into the town away from the vendors near the port, the people were friendly and helpful. But near that port, those people gave the town a bad name.
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