One of the things Jamaica was meant to do was fill us with lots of fresh local food.

It turns out that July is not the best month for this and thus our first few days seemed to involve endless servings of rice and peas - to the extent that by the second week no more could be stomached. There was a general absence of vegetables and even a lack of the Jamaican national fruit, the ackee. Nothing was in season apart from apparently mangoes and bananas and this came as a bit of a disappointment.

One foodie highlight was Juicy J's, off the trail and serving local people with homecooked dishes which were satisfying and cheap and worth revisiting on more than one occasion. The trick here is to not look at the menu as it bears no relation to what is being cooked up on that particular day. The blackboard tells you what you need to know. Oh and for goodness sake Americans, don't walk in there look confused and order a club sandwich.

Just above this sign there is a rather gnarled old tree with bright red things growing on it. Next time I'll be ordering mushrooms.

Along similar lines is Sweet Spice - we got a takeaway towards the end of our stay but it would have been well worth a return and a sit-down if we had had the time. The oxtail has to be the VERY BEST I have ever had in my life - just dripping with tastyness and bone-suckingly wonderful.

Then there was the roadside jerk (which was a bit less dripping with ooze than we hoped) and the visit to Paul's Reggae place (do you want to buy some pot?) clearly they were not so stoned that they couldn't cook up a very nice pair of fish.

Laurel also did well with food in Jamaica and seems to have found alot more confidence in her tastes and ability to deal with food. She ate a ton of bread and loved munching on biscuits, crackers and anything from our plates that wasn't slathered in hot spices. Not much is off limits now

There was the hotel restaurant King Neptune's fish-under-the-sea bar which was consistently dead and really wasn't up to much. Still it rescued us with some quickly whipped up fayre a couple of times. Breakfast there was also a bit iffy - the first time we had some reasonable microwaved stuff, the second was a poorly thought out buffet.

Of course as we were self catering we had the option of the best of both worlds and firmly took this to make our own breakfasts which was incredibly satisfying as we watched from our veranda, the room only folks trudge to the restaurant mug in hand to fetch coffee.