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Spring-break Jamaica can feel edgy and rough

Email|Print| Text size + By Irin Carmon
Globe Correspondent / August 28, 2005

NEGRIL, Jamaica -- The script called for free-for-all partying, Jamaica style, and the student tour package reps were cast as our enablers. It was the final week of the season, and the youngish staff seemed exhausted. But in the first day's orientation, they still gamely attempted to use the phrases ''hook up" and ''get trashed" as often as possible.

After all, we had ostensibly paid to have one of those vacations we would recall in old age as the last stand of crazy youth, assuming we would remember anything after all that ''getting trashed."

We seven students appreciated the effort, but in truth, the package vacation worried us a little. It's practically impossible for students to travel to Jamaica for spring break any other way, but we wondered: Would the package completely insulate us from local culture?

After the travel dust had settled, we did what we had come there to do: nothing. We sunned ourselves on the stretch of Negril's turquoise shore claimed by Crystal Waters, our cottage-style accommodation.

Then sunset brought decision-making.

Our spring break had fallen late, and most of our peers had long since left the beach. With only a tenth of the spring breakers of peak week, it would be quite a feat to fill the tour group-sponsored National Lampoon Delta Party. Among thinning ranks, who would gush over the Playboy merchandise? We weren't interested in paying the $30 cover charge (which included open bar) to find out.

So after quizzing the hotel staff, we headed to Alfred's Ocean Palace, a reggae bar down the beach. On the way, we were detained by the bartenders at Fun Holiday, a storied spring breaker bar. Bereft of customers, they were calling out drink deals.

Jamaica was proving expensive, so we went in, followed later by a few other American students.

The bartenders staged body shots (drinks taken off the flesh of another partier) and sprayed drinks directly into people's mouths. They appeared somewhat bored, but seemed to feel a responsibility to give us the vacation they believed we wanted.

It all resembled an awkward, if well-equipped, high school party. We continued on to Alfred's.

At Alfred's, the $3-$4 cover was unquestionably a good value. The live reggae was a draw for locals and tourists, in a balance we liked. We were also vindicated to see that when it came to their own social time, the tour company representatives who had earlier hawked the sponsored parties chose Alfred's.

A few nights into the vacation, the dynamic shifted. We saw the beach, which had been a little sketchy even during the day, become outright threatening at night, open to buying and selling of cigarettes, anklets, drugs, hair braiding, sex.

We had been warned about hustlers and, as a group fairly well-traveled in the developing world, thought we could handle some solicitations. Nonetheless, after a couple of nights of hucksters and snarling stray dogs emerging on the badly lighted beach, even the sound of breaking waves was making us jump.

So some of us chose more protected entertainment: tour company parties. At least we would be free of the barrage of offers from prostitutes and the subtler advances of gigolos. (In an inversion of the sex-tourism paradigm, the Rough Guide to Jamaica refers to ''rastitutes," or ''rent-a-dreads," mostly young and attractive Jamaican men who have liaisons with female tourists, who are usually older and richer.)

''I don't party in Negril," Charlie, a Jamaican entrepreneur and guide, told us. ''Too many gigolos."

The six women among us were a little young and broke to be sugar mamas, but this didn't put off some men.

Still, some of us doggedly refused to go to sponsored spring break parties anyway. It went against what we wanted out of our vacation, even if that vacation was already being spent within the confines of a tour package. We didn't want to be shut off completely. So what if it wasn't always comfortable?

The partying dilemma went deeper than it seemed. It got to the heart of what it means to be a short-term vacationer in the developing world. In Jamaica, the relationship of mutual exploitation between tourist and local is so brutally manifest that some of us could think or talk of nothing else. We were torn. Sure, we were on vacation, and we had a fantastic time just being with each other. But on many levels, we wondered: At what cost?

Irin Carmon's column on student travel runs monthly. Contact her at irincarmon@gmail.com

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