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We took a trip to
The plane left VERY early on Monday morning, so everybody got together at one of the airport hotels on Sunday night (cheaper to stay overnight and leave your car there than to park at the airport) to catch the plane Monday morning.
We flew into
The north side of
A recent hurricane actually had some impact on our
trip: this hotel opened early because of
Hurricane Willm.
When Hurricane Wilma ‘sat’ on
This meant that there was still some finish up work being done (for example, some painting – done with the painters holding on to rope ladders!) around the hotel, but the hotel was *very* nice (see the pictures).
The hotel had a number of the functional areas clustered around the lobby with three wings of rooms spread out: one to the west, surrounding a pool, two to the east with another pool and then several ‘entertainment areas’, such as the spa/health club and water sports area.
At most all-inclusive resorts, ‘restaurant choice’ can be a
big deal; this trip was no different.
Usually an all-inclusive resort will have a buffet breakfast available,
frequently either (or usually both) a buffet lunch or ‘grill food’ (hamburgers,
etc.) and then usually the main buffet and other restaurants for dinner. I’ve encountered variations on this (in the
Frequently, guests will be limited to the number of “non buffet” dinners they can go to; for example, if you only stay three days, you may be limited to one non-buffet dinner. If you stay four days, that may be two non-buffet dinners.
The buffets I have been to are *excellent*. However, they are *buffets*. The other restaurants usually feature waiters and menus and are just more of a ‘dining experience’ (good for ‘dates’ on your vacation, for example). Determining where you will eat your dinners and what days is frequently a ‘major’ (and fun) decision of staying in an all inclusive. The buffet is nice, but the nice restaurants can be one of the high points of your trip.
Frequently, dining decisions are made soon after you get to
the hotel; all reservations are usually made at one place (frequently guest
services) and (most of the time) for your entire stay (unless you are trying to
catch a cancellation). For example, after
arriving, check in, put your bags in your room, then go down to guest services
and make your reservations for next night at
This Hotel Riu was trying
something different. There was no
limitation on “how many” restaurant reservations you could make, but you had to
make your reservation *that day*, at the specific restaurant. Starting at
The Hotel Riu has the twin steak houses, the Asian restaurant, the Japanese restaurant and a (apparently) REALLY good gourmet restaurant. The gourmet restaurant is difficult to get reservations for: it can only seat 64 people per night (in two specific seatings) and there are at least a thousand people staying at the hotel. Competition for those 64 spots was fierce!
Jon usually gets up ‘early’ (around
After that, the activities of the day begin. However, on this trip, one of the big activities was to try to get into the gourmet restaurant (which we never managed). The closest we came was Jon settling in an hour and 15 minutes before the reservations opened: the guy directly in front of him in line was the last person to get a reservation.
However, the Asian restaurant was good and the steak houses were *excellent* (and the steak houses never had a line for reservations!).
Monday was a day of quiet and rest, eating in the buffet and walking along the beach. Gabe was introduced to the aggressive Jamaican beach vendors. The ocean is public, but apparently, the hotels have some form of license/deed for the beach (and security guards to enforce it). This meant that ‘anybody’ could be in the water, but only hotel guests and staff could be ‘on the sand’.
So, there were usually four or five Jamaicans, standing up to their knees in the water with a variety of trinkets and souvenirs for sale on their arms.
Gabe got Tasha a pretty necklace and was introduced to the ‘street vendor haggle’ process (he did well).
Tuesday was the Ocho Rios
Highlights tour. Ocho
Rios is Spanish for “Eight Rivers”.
Since
There are eight different rivers that flow to the ocean in
the area of this town, which explains the name.
One of them,
The objective is to climb up
It is a lot of fun.
Monday, we looked into the various options.
Excursions are a significant part of the tourism industry in
the
At the beginning of the tour, we found that
One tip: try to schedule any excursions you take on days when the cruise ships are NOT in. A cruise ship will pull up, dump two to four thousand people at the dock who all want to see something in the eight hours they have before the ship leaves. Excursions are usually much more crowded on days when the ships are in.
Our first stop was a ‘craft fair’ (what we in
Teresa and Jon went almost directly to the top to work back down to the bus. At the top of the hill, we found a grassy area that was also being used for selling (people that don’t have a stall set up there). Teresa found two exquisite hand woven baskets for a really good price (after a certain amount of haggling) and bought them.
The sellers at this craft fair were fairly assertive. They were *not* aggressive or annoying, but they *really* wanted you to come in and look at their shop and they, very politely but firmly, made completely sure that you *knew* they wanted you to come in.
They were very nice people, we enjoyed that stop.
When traveling internationally, an ATM is your best
friend. Avoid carrying lots of cash and
an ATM will automatically convert your currency into the local currency and
*without* the charge that a currency exchange imposes. I’ve had no trouble using a debit card
throughout the
Our next stop was “Fern Gulley”. This is a steep sided gulley, up the
mountainside from Ocho Rios that is home to 500
different varieties of ferns. The gulley
area is considered a rain forest and it was formed with the earthquake that
sunk
It was a very beautiful place (see the pictures).
Next, the tour stopped a garden area. I don’t remember the name (it was based on
the language of the original inhabitants of
After the garden was a pottery factory (Jamaican artisans produce pottery there from lumps of clay to finished products) and took the tour.
Then we stopped at another shopping area, in downtown Ocho Rios (gated area) that we used to locate an ATM and eat. This excursion took most of the day and did not include ‘a stop for lunch’ (this is unusual: many excursions that run through a meal time will provide the meal). This shopping area was more big ticket items like jewelry (some good prices, some not as good). Nothing particularly struck our fancy here.
Then it was on to
A longish line of people snaked down the hill to the beach. Along the way, each group gets two park guides (one to lead the way, one to follow). The guides request that everybody in the tour links hands and then begin to climb the cascades. At times, you are very happy to have the linked hands, since they can be a helping hand up some pretty steep stretches (as I said, the river falls 600 feet in a run of 1,000 feet).
They can also be an anchor, as we found along the way (some people on the tour just didn’t seem to understand). There are also various take out points along the way (the climb is pretty strenuous, sometimes in running water up to your waist and frequently have water coming over a ledge above you and falling on your head – it was a LOT of exercise).
When the climb finished, we walked toward the exit. Not surprisingly, the ‘easiest’ way to exit is through the craft fair. Teresa had already scouted the craft fair and warned us about it. She wasn’t kidding… these vendors went over into the “pushy and annoying” level that we had managed to avoid to this point.
Teresa tried one special trick one the trip through the
craft fair. The
So, Teresa tried that with one of the more pushy vendors. She looked at him, shook her head and said “No English” and kept walking. He said “Hey, lady, you dropped something.”
We kept walking.
“Lady, hey, you dropped something back here.”
Teresa finally turned around to look.
“No English, eh?” was his smiling comment.
That finished up the Ocho Rios Highlights tour.
<grin> And now a few words on some of the joys of staying at an all-inclusive resort, and the interesting things that happen. At an all-inclusive, both your food and liquor is covered in the price. This means that there are bars open most of the time where you walk up and order a drink.
Gabe and Tasha are both college students, they are both fairly careful with their money and neither of them drink a lot. So, they have not had a lot of experience with ‘exotic’ drinks, partially because the exotic drinks tend to be expensive (and they both work hard for their cash) and they did not know if they would like the exotic drinks.
So <wide smile>, they were taking the opportunity afforded at the resort to experiment and try the various exotic drinks. Tasha would usually order (I believe they just went through the drink list from the beginning) and Gabe would finish off anything that Tasha didn’t like.
Jon found out about this about noon on Wednesday (at the buffet lunch), when Tasha mentioned that she hadn’t liked many of the drinks last night, so Gabe had finished them for her.
This was *after* it was reported that Gabe was not feeling well on Wednesday morning and didn’t come down to breakfast. It was right around the time that Gabe didn’t come down to lunch and Teresa’s maternal instincts kicked into high gear (she was looking for a fever thermometer).
Gabe felt better later in the day and he and Tasha apparently kept experimenting, but not quite as heavily.
Wednesday afternoon was spent snorkeling off the beach, shell hunting and generally ‘being on vacation’. Dinner that night was at the Asian restaurant.
Thursday turned out to be the
It was spectacular. http://www.wrvja.com/index.html
This particular company uses zebra stripped Land Rovers as their transportation. So, our black and white Land Rover pulled up to the resort not long after lunch, the four of us got in and off we went. We stopped at another hotel to pick up another group (they were going to kayak the same river) and headed up into the hills.
Our guide was excellent:
he’s actually guided Mick Jagger (who has a
vacation home in
In the center of the White valley is an area that is called
“
We drove about another couple of miles up the valley to the put in for the tubing. Jon was very impressed: the facilities were clean, the tubes had ‘seats’, and there was one guide per four people tubing (in our case, there were *only* four people tubing, but 1 guide to 4 customers is their usual ratio).
The
About half way down the section of river we tubed, the tour took a break where we pulled out, walked around a little, ate a sample of jerked chicken (SPICY! but good) and rested for a moment. There was huge bamboo in the area, probably eight inches thick and forty feet high: per our guide, it was probably about three years old.
Then it was back into the river to continue floating down to
the
Once we dried off, the kayakers made it back and everybody loaded up, the driver took us back to the hotel. It was a wonderful day.
The next day, Friday, was our last day. We took the bus, made it back to the airport
and flew back into
We will definitely go back to