Blue Mountain Peak is the highest point in Jamaica, 2,256 metres up and sixteen kilometres from the sea. The climb is done in the dark. You set off by headlamp at about one in the morning and switchback up through dripping forest to reach the exposed summit as the sky lightens. On a dry-season dawn the cold night air has drained into the valleys and filled them, so the peak stands clear above the lot of it. It is around five degrees up there, and nothing shelters you. From May to November the summit usually sits inside that cloud instead of over it.
Because you saw almost nothing on the way up, the descent is the real business. Just below the summit the trees have given up on height: gnarled, waist-high thickets bent by permanent wind and kept soaking by the cloud they stand in. Every branch is loaded with moss, lichen and bromeliads. Close to thirty birds live on Jamaica and nowhere else, and this forest holds the hardest of them to find. The Jamaican blackbird pries insects out of the bromeliads, and the Blue Mountain vireo is named for these slopes. Lower down, between about 900 and 1,700 metres, the slopes are under coffee, and at that height a cherry takes some ten months to ripen. Small farms below the trailhead still roast over wood fires in cast-iron pans, so you can drink it within sight of the bushes it came off. These ridges were Maroon country, and the mountain fought on their side. British troops burned Nanny Town, the Windward Maroons' stronghold, in 1734, and the Maroons dissolved into the bush and rebuilt somewhere else. The war was fought by ambush in cloud and steep forest, with signals carried across the valleys on a cow-horn trumpet, faster than a redcoat could march. Britain sued for peace.