On 18 Dec 2004 11:51:36 -0800, wrote:

The Road To Negril (Circa: 2/94)
It was February 1994; highway 2000 was still on someone's planning
board. I know many of the more seasoned Negrilistas will read this and
think, 1994?!?!?! You should have seen it in '68, back then we had to
hack our way through the jungle, it was uphill, BOTH WAYS!"

Actually, my first trip to Negril was around 1974/76 or so. The Negril
Beach Resort - later renamed Hedonism - had just opened. It was an
early entry in the All Inclusive concept and they hadn't gotten it
quite right yet.

Cash was not used. To pay for drinks and sundries, you bought strings
of pop beads shaped like shark's teeth that you bought at the front
desk. But drinks were free at meals. Oversight was loose. I noted
people taking bottles of wine from the ice bed when they finished
lunch or dinner. That probably lead to the end of that practice which
I noted on my second visit a year later.

The place was a hotbed of sex with some interesting multi-partner
events in and around the swimming pool - and of course, back at the
rooms.

Except for an expensive and largely deserted hotel next door,and a
dive shack next to it, the entire seven miles of beach from the resort
to the small older hotels in Negril itself, was totally unspoiled and
empty.

On a number of occasions, friends and I walked it - at times unclothed
and cat times clothed - without seeing a single tourist along the way.
At times we slipped into the water and found ourselves being nibbled
and tickled by very tiny fish. One one such occasion, before going
into the water, we had shared a few cups of an herbal tea at a
roadside shack. The tea produced a mild psychedelic high accompanied
by heightened sensory sensitivity.

These walks were always in the morning not long after sunup. Every
mile or so we'd encounter one or two fishermen who were sorting out
their catch. We bought fish for something like 20 cents a pound. We
met an old woman who was huddled under the shade of some tall bushes.
She had a charcoal fire and was preparing ackie. For 50 cents she
cleaned and grilled our fish to go with her own offerings.

One evening I took a motorbike taxi to a small shack on the beach near
the Negril traffic circle. For $3 I had a superb lobster dinner and an
ice cold beer sitting on a wooden plank and a tree stump for a table.

The dive shack guy sold huge baggies of grass for $5. On my first
visit, when I didn't have change for a $20 he gave me the bag and told
me to come back with the $5 when I could. When I came back two days
later I explained that I'd lost the two days to his product and
totally forgot that I owed him. No problem, man.

But when I returned the next year, the change had started and it was
not good. There was a barbed wire fence around the resort property.
Armed guards patrolled it. They discouraged guests from passing beyond
it onto the longer beach. Then I learned that non-guests were being
charged some outrageous fee just to come into the property and have a
drink.

So on subsequent visits I moved down the beach to the similarly named
but totally different situation at Negril Beach Club, close to town.
There were only two or three small motel-type places there and a house
with a large porch and some wood shacks in the back.

Oh, I just recalled, there was one house along the entire 7 miles. It
was reputed to be owned by the author Arthur Haley who just died
within this past month or so.

I went back to Negril two or three more times during the 80s but by
1987 it was "over." It became a victim of it's own success. Too many
hotels, too many people, too much too much. Noisy, crowded, a
grotesque mockery of the peaceful and genuinely friendly place it had
been.

I now go to St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It probably will be the
last place in the Caribbean to be spoiled by over-development. Its
islands are too small to support big hotels with all their
infrastructure needs. About 95% of the accommodations are in
properties that have fewer than 20 rooms. Most are family owned and
operated.

If you saw Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl,
you've seen SVG. It was filmed there. The production company is
returning shortly to start filming two sequels simultaneously.

Farewell, Negril. For an all too brief time you were special.