It might not have been Montego Bay, but the ganja was every bit as good as anything the Caribbean could offer. And even though our nearest black neighbour was across the hills in Umlazi, there was always Themba at the garage.

Themba was never without a brown paper bag stuffed with swollen, gummy heads of Durban Poison. Take a walk down the alley, give him R1, dip your hand into the bag and walk away with what looked like a small shrub growing from your wrist.

Back at the kaya, the music was always the same. Uprising. Exodus. Babylon by Bus. Rastaman Vibration. Maybe some Tosh. A bit of Burning Spear on the side.

Flash forward. I’m long out of the kaya and heading for Jamaica on honeymoon. For so long, my Mecca, my Lourdes, my Bethlehem.

Bertram, thickset and not a dreadlock in sight, was waiting for us at Kingston airport. Two days went by, and still he hadn’t whipped out a spliff. I had already accosted a fit-looking young Rasta in the hotel bar, but he told me his old lady never allowed him to smoke.

His old lady was sitting across the room, fat and pink, drinking some sort of tropical cocktail. She came over from Dorset twice a year to be serviced by her island stud. I was appalled. How could it be easier to score in Durban North than Kingston? It made no sense.

A few days later, having dinner at Bertram's place, I broached the subject. Turned out he had a chest problem. After an awkward silence, he went to a back room and fetched four bottles filled with some kind of aloe-based alcohol and stuffed to the hilt with heads the size of a baby’s arm.

"So I drink it instead," he said.

Ah, yes. An island paradise, indeed. But it’s also a hotbed of politics, violence and poverty.

"...You’re mad, I said, as we drifted away..."

Bertram wouldn’t take us into Trenchtown for fear of his own life, let alone ours. But he did take us deep into the Blue Mountains where we drifted on a bamboo raft down the Rio Grande river, a trip interrupted only by young Rastas paddling out of the jungle in dugout canoes to offer us ice cold Red Stripe beer and copious amounts of ridiculously fresh marijuana which our versatile oarsman rolled with one hand while guiding the raft more or less downstream.

Not a bad life, I said to the chilled vendors. They laughed. Their dream was to live in Miami. You’re mad, I said, as we drifted away.

Things turned a bit weird when Brenda started imagining that the rocks on the banks of the river were skulls and that she was participating in her own funeral procession. She never touched the stuff again.

Later, back in the car, Bertram took us from 1000m to sea level in around thirty seconds. Be one with the curves, he said. I was pleased to hear Brenda laughing, but when I looked at her I saw that she was weeping, which took a lot of fun out of the moment.

The undisputed high point was visiting Marley’s old house in Hope Road, now a museum of sorts. There was nobody else there, just us and Miriam the housekeeper. His bedroom was as he had left it. One of his guitars stood in the corner. A framed portrait of Haile Selassie hung above the bed. I wandered into the kitchen and ran my hands over the holes left by bullets fired when gunmen burst in one evening, wounding Marley, his wife, Rita, and the manager of the Wailers.

In the passage, the walls were adorned with Ethiopian artifacts and awards Marley had won. Outside stood a crudely painted statue of Marley with a soccer ball. The front wall was covered with a fading mural depicting scenes from the song, 'Trenchtown Rock'.

A few days later, I interviewed Chakademus and Scarcher at the studio where Marley and the Wailers made their early recordings. For five minutes they spoke in a patois so dense that all I could do was pretend to take notes. Then they laughed, slapped me on the shoulder and gave me a copy of their single. It was called Miami Vice.