Stories from Jamaica: the road to Geejam
Posted by Lucy on November 28th, 2011Fresh from his recent undercover Smith mission to review Geejam hotel in Jamaica, New York master of spin Lucien Etori gives us a great big helping of the gorgeous Caribbean island that’s inspired greats from Bob Marley and Ian Fleming to Usain Bolt.
One of the reasons I was effervescently excited about this trip to Jamaica, besides the fact that Mrs Smith and I would be celebrating our engagement there – an unending joy in and of itself (she made me write that) – lay in the knowledge that we would be staying at Geejam.
Geejam is part of the Island Outpost collection of ultra-luxe hotels (which includes Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate, where James Bond was born), a group formed by Chris Blackwell. There are myriad reasons Chris – pillar of the music industry for 60 years – is a personal hero of mine, but the main one is that he introduced Robert Nesta ‘Bob’ Marley to the world. Need I say more?
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Coming from the mire of America’s recession, I particularly enjoy my stop at Kingston Airport’s bureau de change. The exchange rate (85:1) means my $100 comes back as many thousands of Jamaican Dollars. I feel rich. Monopoly rich.
We meet our official Jamaica Tourist Board driver. His name is Garfield and we like him immediately. I mean, how can you not like someone called Garfield? We never find out his last name but, like the surnames of Prince, Elvis, Madonna or Bono, it is superfluous. He is simply Garfield. It is a lovely 34ºC (94ºF) in Kingston, and I immediately regret not packing at least one mesh tank top. Garfield’s minibus, complete with lovely little headrest doilies, embarks on a meandering Northeasterly course up and down and through the Blue Mountains.
It’s a visually vibrant drive, full of hairpin turns, schoolchildren in immaculate uniforms, fearless little goats, and barefoot rastas selling breadfruit and bananas (sometimes, puzzlingly, just one breadfruit and one banana). The foliage is so exuberantly green and the sky so cloudlessly blue it looks fake. Like a video game. We even manage to avoid the terrifying, despairing Kingston traffic. The sea is well-behaved, calm. This is good.
Garfield arranges an impeccable soundtrack of booming 1970s roots reggae for us. He is also an unending font of trivia about the ‘Yard’, as Jamaica is known by its citizens. From him, we learn the famous Blue Mountains are not blue at all (they just look that way from a distance), and we tackle the critical question: why are Jamaicans so blazing fast on a dead run? He posits a fascinating and thoroughly viable theory involving the island’s typically vertiginous topography, and how it conditions the calf/thigh muscles of inhabitants from an early age. I like his theory and will be impressing people with it at various social and kinesiological events for a good long while.
We also learn that KFC had to develop a special molar-melting, Jamaica-only spice for its fried chicken – so hot it’d perm your chest hairs – because nobody would eat it otherwise. He is full of droll tales, Garfield. All told in that slowly lilting, patois-inflected Jamaican accent. I’m certain we fell asleep a few times as he spoke.
After a solid three-hour drive up and then down and out of the not-actually-Blue Mountains, we reach Port Antonio and our destination, Geejam. It’s in a huge bird sanctuary; you drive upwards to the hotel’s beautiful wood front door as if you are ascending to heaven. We bid Garfield farewell, walking into Geejam and towards the first of many adventures…
Read Lucien Etori’s full Geejam hotel review; find more hotels in Jamaica; or discover Jamaica’s destination secrets on the Smith site.
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