Tres Cheap - Page 2

After securing a room at the Ocean View, my first order of business was to find a means of transportation. To stay ahead of expenses, I look for the cheapest thing on wheels, which in Montego Bay was a derelict Honda 90, a step-through motorcycle with no rear view mirror, soft brakes, and licks of foam sticking out from the seat. Instead of a helmet, I was given a plastic construction hat that strapped around my chin. For just $14 a day, I had immediately gained the social stature of a Third-World pizza delivery boy.

Actually, my assignment was to review hotels. I’d walk through hotel after hotel while mumbling into a hidden microphone attached to a microcassette recorder in my pocket-lobby carpet suffers from mange, pool murky, garden smells like malathion-trying not to look like a crazed tourist with Tourette’s disease.

Speed was essential, not just to make money, but to remain one step ahead of hotel security, whose suspicions I tended to trigger. The trick was to appear as inconspicuous as possible, which is why I dressed in Permopress. Wrinkle-free Dockers and a Van Heusen shirt gave me an anonymous middle-management look. Strangers often stopped me, demanding to know where the bathrooms were.

For four days I rode this rickety motorcycle along the north shore of Jamaica, trailed by a sputtering plume of blue smoke, a sight that never impressed the guards who stood at the entrance of each five-star resort. At these guarded compounds-each one a jungle fantasy of crashing waterfalls, rainbow-colored drinks, and party-size whirlpools-guests pay a package price that includes everything except the Alka-Seltzer. There's no need to go elsewhere. At some resorts, guests are actually warned not to leave the premises. That's the irony of the tourist industry. People pay $3,000 to be isolated from the country they came to visit.

In these compounds, inhibitions are shed right along with the sweaters, encouraged by resorts with names like Hedonism II, where young Republicans pass joints to the young Democrats in the whirlpool-and everybody is inhaling. As a travel writer, you need to brace yourself for some truly extraordinary sights at these all-inclusive resorts, such as naked people playing tennis.

Playing tennis, especially while naked, is hardly an accurate depiction of everyday life in Jamaica. Learning about the realities of this island usually comes as a crash course for anybody who leaves the compound or steps off the tourist bus. In Ochos Rios, cruise ship passengers who decide to explore on foot are met by every charity case on the North Shore-the deformed, the blind, the cripples, the prostitutes, the hustlers and con men who make it a business to greet every ship of fools that drops an anchor. If the tourists make it as far as the street, they are pursued by taxis, whose drivers shout out the window with a ringing laugh.

“Where you goin’ man?”

“Uh, I don’t know.”

“Hop in, I take you dare.”