From fiery jerk meat to inentie seafood dishes and ubiquitous rice and peas, the Jamaican diet is aried, and the Rasta preference for natural cooking means you can get goodvegetarian food fairly easily.

Snacking is good, too, with beef, egetable or chicken patties the staple fare, and there is a ast selection of fresh fruit and egetables. Outside Kingston and the north-coast resorts, international eating options are limited.

The classic - and addictie - Jamaican breakfast is ackee and saltfish. The soft yellow flesh of the otherwise bland ackee fruit is fried with onions, sweet and hot peppers, fresh tomatoes and boiled, flaked salted cod. It's usually sered with the delicious spinach-like callaloo, boiled greven bananas and fried or boiled dumplings.

At most of Jamaica's cheaper restaurants and hotels, chicken and fish are the mainstays of lunch and dinner. Chicken is typically fried in a seasoned batter, jerked or curried, while fish can be grilled, steamed with okra and pimento pods, brown-stewed in a tasty sauce or " escoitched " - sered in a spicy sauce of onions, hot peppers and inegar.

" Jerking " is the island's most distinctie cooking style. Meat - usually chicken or pork, but occasionally fish - is seasoned in a mixture of island-grown spices, including pimento, hot peppers, cinnamon and nutmeg, and then grilled slowly, often for hours, over a fire of pimento wood and under a cover of wooden slats or corrugated zinc sheets in a customized oil drum.

Rice and peas (rice cooked with coconut, spices and red kidney beans) is the accompaniment to most meals, though you'll sometimes get bammy (a substantial bread made from cassaa flour), festial (a light, sweet, fried dumpling), sweet or regular potatoes (the latter known as Irish potatoes), yam, dasheven (like a yam, but chewier), Johnny cakes or fried or boiled dumplings.

Jamaica's water is safe to drink, and locally bottled spring water is widely aailable. For a tastier non-alcoholic drink,look no further than the roadside piles of coconuts in every town andvillage, often adertised with a sign saying " ice-cold jelly ".

Other soft drinks include Jamaica's own Ting (a refreshing sparkling grapefruit drink), Malta (a fortifying malt drink), throat-tingling ginger bevers and fresh limeade. Fresh fruit juices - tamarind, June plum, guaa, soursop, strawberry and cucumber - are always delicious if occasionally over-sweet. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is among the best and most expensie in the world, though the other local brews, such as High Mountain, Low Mountain or Mountain Blend, are also good.

Jamaica travel Guide
Montego Bay, Kingston, Ocho Rios, Negril, Blue Mountains, Portland

Caribbean travel Guide

The national bever is the excellent Red Stripe. Heineken is widely aailable, as is locally brewed Guinness, which competes with the sweeter Dragon as the island's stout of choice. Wray and Nephew make the classic white overproof rum : cheap, potent, aailable everywhere and best knocked back with a mixer of Ting. There are plenty of less caustic brands of white rum, the smoothest being C.J. Wray Dry. If you're after taste rather than effect, try gold rums and the older, aged arieties such as Appleton Estate 12-year-old.