Jamaica me crazy

South coast of Jamaica, near Belmont

The flight to Montego Bay was packed. Usual set of white people vacation goers, families, fat people, the like. My stomach turned as I saw the queue to board the plane; I had visions of screaming children and fat people closing in me both for the entirety of the flight across the Caribbean, but also during my stay there. Ellen, who had never been to Jamaica described it as middle-class over-grown spring-break hell, with the bad taste of economic colonialism thrown in to boot. I didn't really do that much research in advance of this trip; I had a few free hotel nights to burn, so I looked for the combination of cheapest flights and most expensive eligible rooms, and clicked buy as fast as I could, before I could get a call from the office taking my long weekend away.

The plane ride was predictably awful. The vacation actually pretty damn nice.

The fat people from the plane disappeared promptly upon arrival. I didn't even really see them in the airport, at least once we cleared the surprisingly rigorous immigration screening. I picked up a rental car, turned on to the highway and whizzed up the coast, skirting by yards the perfect Caribbean beach vistas, complete with beach shacks, kids splashing in the waves and fishing boats bobbing gently off to the side. We passed a dozen or so all-inclusive resorts. I was pleased to reflect on how pleased I was to not be in there with the fat people.

Our hotel, The Ritz-Carlton Rose Hall, which I chose on the basis of it being A) not an all-inclusive resort, and B) being very expensive but still under the $400 limit for me to use my Hotels.com points, was actually great. A bit on the big side, with 400 rooms, but what it lost in character it more than made up for with comfortable rooms and terrific staff, who appeared only too happy to spread the towels over our lounge chairs and bring us plates of jerk chicken and pina coladas as we dozed and read on the beach. Every request was received with a friendly "ja man!"

We had two full days, and on both ventured out in the rental car up and across the mountains in the interior. The first day we ventured clear through to the south side of the island, the Kingston side, which provided all of the standard developing country trappings I required to make me feel content in having ventured out of the tourism bubble (goats in the road, shack-stores, police checkpoints, ubiquitous mobile phone ads, etc). We had a fine meal at a public beach packed with Jamaican weekenders, then drove back north the long way, wrapping along the western coast, stopping for sundowner in the resort town of Negril

Negril and Montego Bay together are the main resort towns of Jamaica. I was prepared for Cancun, but was quite pleased to find that the all-inclusive fortresses which dot the coast have actually done a decent job of leaving the towns themselves in relative peace. They appear to have only recently entered the " no more stray dogs" phase of development (beach towns start out with a few dogs, which then become a lot of dogs, which then go to no dogs as they are discovered and develop). It's all small hotels spread out along the beach. A few lousy foreigner restaurants, a few good foreigner restaurants, a few really good local shacks. Happy faces all around.

We returned back to our own island, tossed the keys to the valet, and retreated to our balcony to crack a Red Stripe and watch a movie on the laptop.