Good morning Jamaica

April 15, 2016 – Yesterday we caught up on some sleep after a very long trip to get here, made longer by a long delay in Toronto. We took a red-eye flight to Toronto, and then should have arrived in Jamaica around noon the next day, we didn’t get to the hotel until after 6pm. So we just went for a walk around the hotel to get a lay of the land, and went for dinner and a few drinks before retiring for some badly needed rest.

Today we ended up just having a swim, enjoying a few drinks, and then pulling up a chair to read a book and people watch. People watching was a sport itself. The goal of this trip really was supposed to be to relax.

We wandered about the hotel grounds, sat on the beach for a bit, and wandered down to the next hotel, also part of the same grounds and same chain. The doorman tried to get us to take a golf cart ride, but when he told us it was a three minute walk….seriously, we have legs. There wasn’t much of interest to us there, so we wandered back and took the hotel has a shuttle that takes you down the road to a little mall of shops.

Talk about a trap. This is the type of place that resorts and cruise ships dump the tourists wanting to take something, anything, home from their travels. The shops fell into one of three categories that one can encounter no matter where in the world you go if you are either staying at a higher end resort or stopping in at a cruise ship port. I can say this because I live in a city that caters to visitors with money and I work right near a cruise ship terminal.

#1. High end jewellery, everything priced 30-50% higher than it should have been. Case in point – a men’s Omega watch that had a sticker price of $24,000 US (GASP!) that we saw in the Toronto airport for $17,000 Canadian (Wheeze!).

#2. Ticky tacky tourist crap that comes from China that, depending on where it ends up, is branded with whatever city/country/state the consumer ends up buying it in. Vancouver has loads of this junk in Gastown, near the terminals.

#3. The shops that carry the local alcohol/spice/coffee/tea/chocolate, etc. Again, Gastown has this in spades.

So at the Rose Hall Shops we found watches and jewellery one could find on Robson Street, but priced 30-50% higher, shops that carried tacky bags. plate, mugs, and cheap jewellery that had JAMAICA emblazoned across it all, and shops that carried Blue Mountain coffee, Jamaican rum, and jerk spices.

We left empty handed.

Well, not exactly true, I bought a handwoven basket from a woman with a little corner off to the side, not in any shops. I was tired and didn’t have my haggling hat on, and although I probably paid more than I should have, to was still less expensive than any I’d have bought here if equivalent quality.

Back at the hotel I stopped in at the desk where we had made some differ reservations, I wanted to cancel a breakfast we’d booked sleepily when we’d arrived. The two women did NOT want to let us out of it, and that’s about when I realized we’d accidentally booked ourselves into a timeshare sales meeting. They pleaded, tried bribing with special deals, and finally relented when they found out we’d booked a full day excursion tomorrow.

Whew, dodged that bullet!

Time for a dip in the pool followed by a mai tai under an umbrella.