Kingston gets skipped by almost everyone and it should not be. It has the island's best free green space, the national gallery, and the food that the resorts serve a flattened version of. Give it a day before you go anywhere.

The Blue and John Crow Mountains are a UNESCO mixed site, listed for the cloud forest and, unusually, for the Windward Maroon culture inside it. The Maroons freed themselves, held territory against the British, and kept their own governance and language. You are walking through that, not just through trees.

The peak is 2,256 metres and the classic approach is to leave in the dark to be up top for sunrise. Book the park trust's own licensed guides rather than a private operator, and expect cold at the top even in July.

Portland is the wettest and greenest parish, and the least developed of the north coast. This is where the Rio Grande runs down out of the John Crow Mountains and where the Windward Maroon communities of Moore Town and Charles Town sit.

The drive to the south coast is long and worth it. St Elizabeth is the dry parish, and Treasure Beach is the island's best known community tourism district, with no all inclusive resorts anywhere along its six miles.

Westmoreland is the far west, and it is where Ital cooking is easiest to find outside Kingston. Jamaica grows most of its own fresh produce, satisfying well over 80 per cent of Irish potato consumption, so eating local here is not a compromise.

Leave the last day genuinely empty. Jamaica rewards going back to one place rather than adding another. This is also the day to buy from a maker rather than a stall: calabash bowls, straw work in big thatch and jippi jappa, and the honeycomb baskets still woven the old way.