Picture a holiday in Jamaica, and you might imagine beach parties with lots of rum, reggae and marijuana. Keep to this cliche and you’d be missing the best parts. This is what awaits you at Montego Bay.

“This is one of the most beautiful experiences you can have in Jamaica,” tour guide Aneif Anderson tells his guests, who look a little doubtful.

Birds? Really?

But they head to Montego Bay and once they reach Rockland’s Birds Sanctuary, they melt at the property, nestled in the mountains with a magnificent view of the sea.

Best of all are the hummingbirds flying about and guests may feed them from the palm of their hands.

Fritz, who manages the small park, first invites guests to take a seat on the terrace and presses bottles of sugar water into their hands.

“Just sit still, hold the sugar water in one hand and stretch out one of your fingers from your other hand,” Fritz says.

The tiny birds flutter over in just a couple of minutes, two pretty hummingbirds who hesitate for a second then perch carefully on the guests’ eager fingers.

“The feeling of feeling this feather-light tiny creature on your hand, feeling its wings beat and seeing it fetch the sugar water with its delicate little beak is crazy and actually indescribable,” says Marion, a tourist from Germany who can’t quite get over it.

Fritz knows everything worth knowing about hummingbirds. They fly at 50 kilometres per hour, their wings beat up to 90 times per second. The smallest birds only weigh 2 grams and even the biggest ones are 20 grams at most.

The Birds Sanctuary owes its existence to Lisa Salmon, an English woman who fell in love with the site by the sea in the early 1950s, he says.

She took long strolls and left food and sugar water everywhere for the birds. Her house eventually became the heart of things for local birds and she opened her refuge to the public in 1952.

You can combine a trip to see the hummingbirds with a journey to the Great River near the village of Lethe.

You drive down winding mountain roads to the river then, once you’re at the Chukka Reggae Rafting base, ask yourself, would you rather head up to the wild upper reaches of the river and back over rapids?

Or would you rather be rafted down the calm lower reaches on a bamboo raft?

If you are feeling chilled, opt for the bamboo option and entrust the next two hours to Joshua, a strong rafter with braided dreadlocks.

It’s a smooth ride, with only a few narrow spots where there’s a stronger current, forcing Joshua to press the raft pole against the rocks with all his power.

Otherwise it is a leisurely trip with plenty of time to marvel at the riverside landscape and its giant bamboo trees.

Again and again, you see young men wading in the water, pushing rafts upstream with a great deal of effort. While the paying guests are comfortably driven to the base at the end of their tour, the rafts have to be brought back up the river manually.

The young men pushing them up the currents struggle against the waters for a good three hours for just US$10.

When asked if he knows the hummingbird station in nearby Rockland, Joshua tells a tale that’s still making the rounds in the entire Montego Bay region: “On the day Lisa Salmon died, all the birds suddenly disappeared. People thought they would never come back, but at Lisa’s funeral all her feathered friends were back.

True or not – Joshua and most Jamaicans are firm believers.