Trip Report Nov. 12-21, 2004
Great trip, great people (guests & staff), great weather! The Naked Truth Tour was a kick! (But this year was my last leading the tourI was feeling as though I missed my vacation sometimes!)
Transit Stuff:
Bring water for the Air Jamaica flights. You will be thirsty, especially on the trip home. For the roundtrips from Chicago to MoBay, the flight attendants made only one drink pass in the nearly four-hour flight.
Immigration is taking longer because Jamaica has a new computerized system the staff is acclimating to. One guest took 2 hours to pass through immigration because many planes had arrived. The lines were out past the singers as you enter the immigration hall.
Customs is cracking down hard on visitors to charge them for goods brought into the country. If you want to avoid that problem and not pay to have school supplies brought in, use the services of JOY (Jamaican Organization for Youth). You can send it a check or the school supplies (which are cheaper to buy in the USA) to Rotary Club of Olney Maryland, c/o Steve Browne, International Chairman, 20901 Georgia Ave., Brookeville, MD 20833.
For more JOY information, e-mail: Steve Browne at steveb@OlneyRotary.org. His organization doesnt have problems clearing school supplies through customs. You can even earmark the supplies for a particular school. If you do carry your own school donations to Hedonism II, you can give them to Donna Grant, the hotel manager.
Room stuff:
The TV holders in the room are perfect for hanging wire hangers from to dry your scuba stuff, etc. If you are 5 7 or less, you wont bump your head on the TV. Ladies, remember, in your FMPs you are taller.
More and more folks are booking ROH (run of the house) instead of designating nude beach garden, etc. This cost-saving reservation gives guests the chance to be put in a higher room category than they paid for. Many guests in November enjoyed this opportunity and were upgraded, but not all were upgraded. I was in a prude garden room and liked it just fine. No inconvenience and I could see the ocean over the roofs of the nude beach rooms.
The low-volume toilets sometimes require you to have a glass of water to throw in the bowl the minute you flush to ensure complete removal of poops. TMI?
Most rooms no longer have clocks, but the CD/tape players are still there. Mine wasnt working well, but after I left a note for the maid on my first day, a new one appeared and my bathroom light bulb was changed. The room didnt have a blow dryer (others did), and one didnt appear when I requested it. I did receive shampoo on request (the wall unit of those supplies wasnt in place).
In the showers, many folks bumped themselves on the four-pronged knobs that control the water. Beware the bruising potential!
Only a handful of rooms have not been completely renovated, but many are decorated with both the old and newsuch as the old Caribbean floral bedspreads with the new granny bed skirts. General manager Richard Bourke says a large punch list of activities remains. Some rooms were renovated with the new showers, but kept the bathtubs too. Some new bathrooms dont have the extreme level of dark gray tiling detail as others.
Richard Bourke says the guest rooms were decorated by John Issas wife (the corporate interior decorator).
Richard Bourke is in the process of preparing a three-ring binder for each room that will contain hotel information such as extensions for various services, guest guidelines of behavior, meal times and reservation information, and instructions for using the shower and telephone.
About 10 ground-floor rooms (at various locations) will be having a new Jacuzzi patios installed outside the windows, which will be replaced with patio doors. This addition is an experiment, says Richard Bourke. He guesstimates the rooms will have a $10/night/person premium and that the water will be switched out after each guests hotel departure.
Food stuff:
Unconfirmed rumor has it that Hedo is considering moving up the meal times by half-hour and cutting them back a half hour at the tail end.
Friday night is now the Grand Buffet, with lobster (and long lines for it), and a huge assortment of gorgeous food stuffs from sushi to Italian. All other restaurants are now closed on Friday nights. Friday night entertainment is still the various circus acts that continue with games on the prude beach with a finale bonfire after dinner.
One wish list possibility by management for the future includes enclosing the Japanese restaurant Munasan (which now has a sign that reads Munasan, not Munahana, its original name). The enclosure could better protect diners from the noise and rain.
The menu no longer changes at Pastafari. Yawn! The beef wasnt excellent, but the snapper and pork are. No more vealboo hoo! The mussels and salmon with capers on the antipasti table is still the tits.
The Scotch Bonnet is a must-enjoy restaurant on the concrete patio of the prude beach grill, which is also a great venue for enjoying a quiet, beachy lunch after you walk down with it from the main dining room.
The tour desk, which takes reservations for Munasan, Scotch Bonnet, and Pastafari, now opens at 8:30 a.m. instead of 9 a.m. and lines formed daily for reservations, with some people standing in line almost a half-hour earlier. You can still call for reservations from your room at Ext 243 or Ext 240, but the tour desk wont answer till the line is gone.
Staff stuff:
The coordinator Ray-Ray, whose first name is Reynard and used to spell his name Rey-Rey, would like it to be called Rae-Rae instead.
Hedophiles love gossip and apparently word spread that Agustus was fired because a guest didnt like his sense of humor about cigarette butts on his beach. Then the gossip said he was hired back and put on the nude beach. One guest conned another guest (me) into gathering signatures to ask mgmt to return Agustus to the nude beach. A total hubbaloo was made. Management received the petition and promptly posted it at Roberts with the message: Agustus is on a short sick leave. Doh.
General Manager Richard Bourkes frankness and ability to mingle has pleased many guests. He was near-daily seen trolling the bar area during dinner and joining in with the crowds banter.
The coordinators were noticeably quiet on the nude beach in comparison to past years. But, when I was going to show Frank how the inverted pile driver position worked, Koro, one of the straight coordinators, saw me on my back on a chair pad in the sand and took over with a mastery that took my breath away. From inverted pile-driver to doggy, Koro flipped my carcass around with a twist of his leg against mine. Wowsers, Maynard! Be still my beating heart.
Piano Bar stuff:
Each night, a handful of gals would do the piece-by-piece strip number on the piano, but the crowds of 2003 werent there to watch. This Land Is Your Land was sang each night.
Richard Bourke says as soon as martini glasses come in, the piano bar will also have a martini bar atmosphere.
Danny is the name of the piano bar player (Dave left last January 2004 and is reportedly working in the at a place called Secrets Excellence in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.) He doesnt have a shtick yet, so King Arthur the bartender, chaperones for the funny stuff.
Other New Stuff:
I learned a new Jamaican word! Mumby is the term for the gals of more than 200 lbs that you take to bed anyway.
To use one of the two computers in the Internet caf is $5 for 15 minutes, $9 for a half-hour, and $15 for an hour. Rumor has it that sometimes both computers worked at the same time. The one phone in the Internet Caf can still be used to call out of the country.
As Hedo guests age, some of them noticed new contents filled their plastic water-tight thingies worn on the beach around their necks. Instead of ganja like the old days, the thingies are filled vitamins and other health-related pills.
If the police boats come up to the shore at Hedo, guests can be arrested for sexual acts or smoking ganja. These activities are illegal in Jamaica. Richard Bourke says it has happened. He also reports that the parades of nude guests to other hotels must come to an end to prevent the regular patrolling of Hedos waters. (Will be curious to hear of what happens on Thursday.) Apparently a fire marshal was at Grand Lido when last years Spanksgiving Day parade came through, and he was not happy with the out-of-place nudity.
Richard Bourke is working on creating guest guidelines for behavior because more and more guests are pushing the limits of what management calls acceptable behavior. We need to be risque and sexy, but not crass or pornographic, Richard Bourke says. He recognizes that Lifestyles weeks will be more lenient.
We need to be non-threatening to a non-Lifestyles crowd, Bourke adds. Easily half the people are offended by public blow jobs at the oceans edge. He is willing to look the other way after dark at the nude hot tub though.
His preliminary guidelines draft includes that guests use towels or wraps when sitting in a thong (or less) on any dining room chairs. He also is considering enforcing a rule that only permits nudity outside the nude beach and nude beach rooms on special occasions, such as between 3-4 p.m. for the water slide and on toga and PJ night. He hopes to have rules in place by the end of the year after garnering input from various guests.
Richard Bourke would like to see Hedonism resorts marketed as a specific brand and not lumped in with Breezes and Grand Lido. We look like a duck, we sound like a duck, we act like a duck, he says. We are a duck. We are not a swan. He says marketing needs to be more niche-market-oriented to increase the number of younger guests, such as the way Hedonism III is marketed on Playboy TV. Even the old timers want to see eye candy, Bourke adds. We dont want to be perceived as a geriatric ward. Roughly 80% of the guests are now between 25 and 55, with 10% older and 10% younger.
Naked Truth Tour stuff:
I was leading the Naked Truth Tour (set up via Go Classy Tours) this week. Guests were free to join in the daily activities or games and many partook or at least laughed. Morning water aerobics on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were amusing with the many bouncing boobies, mine included.
One days sport was to match the 34 photos of body parts to the people they belonged to. (My thanks to David from Georgia for his digital camera and portable printer.) Women were only identifiable by breast or butt or front pussy shot. Men were only identifiable by gential or butt shots. Ewenice the blowup sheep was easiest to ID , but with so many folks having tattoos and piercings, the game wasnt too hard. One guest, Clitina, grabbed a naked pussy picture and walked up and down the beach to match it to its owner. One man took the picture from her and scratched and sniffed it and reported he knew that pussy.
Horrors! Hedo guests must be cutting back on their drinking. The 220 Jello shots that disappeared in 15 minutes last year and took almost one-half hour this year. Bocce ball concentration was necessary, no doubt! Coordinators led near-daily Bocce games and nude volleyball each afternoon.
The plunger game proved appropriately silly. Six blind-folded women put a plunger between their legs as through they had a protruding appendage and six men stood in one spot, each calling out a different farm animal noise (cat, dog, cow, goat, pig, duck) to attract the gals to insert their plunger into the toilet paper rolls held between their legs.
Other sports included the frozen t-shirt game. The only moisture allowed was body sweat and pussy juice to melt the ice-packed t-shirts.
The weeks finale event, The Drag & Tramp night festivities invaded the dining room with at least 40 unnaturally nubile queens and their 40+ equally pulchritudiness tramps.
Amusing stuff:
One of the funniest parts of the trip was the shave job one single guy, a regular guest, allowed on his chest--someone conned him into letting a man shave a "pussy" on his chest....and instead of doing a triangle, it ended up being an oval with the hair cut out of the middle with a fuzzy round butt hole and a naked taint between them. For about 3-4 days he walked around with what from a distance looked like an exclamation point on his chest...most amusing!
Joe from Pennsylvania, who once deemed that a blowjob consisted of at least six strokes (down/up = one stroke), now says inflation has taken effect and a blowjob is now at least 24 strokes.
Saturday night, the TeaseUm.com babes were part of a program that was meant to titillate. After watching about 8 or so young taut women undulate half naked on stage and caress one another, the main act started, featuring a woman of quite circular breast enhancements and the ability to wrap her white PVC thigh-high skyscraper boots around her neck.
The high point of the act was the repeated insertion of the non-lit end of a lit cigar into her hairless nether parts that actually sucked in smoke and blew it out with great regularity. And we thought the fish references were bad enough, but now we much contend with cigar smoke references? Yikes! I was grateful to avoid the bottled water spray she next produced from said orifice. The hotter event was watching the latex-clad married couple kissing as they danced before the circus act.
On a sad note, Arlenes vibrator, Roger Rabbit, died. When a rabbit dies, even without a pregnancy, a ceremony is just begging to be had. About 50 people gathered on the point of the jetty to lay the rabbit to rest under the sand. The Brits used the airline blankets they stole as dark-colored front wraps to become the chorus for the urology, I mean eulogy. (Joe from Pennsylvania is a cunning linguist who teaches us new words daily.) The urology mentioned the many ups and downs and ins and outs of the rabbits vibrant personality and how it rose to many occasions to provide much pleasure.
For next years ceremony, were hoping to burn in a Viking funeral the tiny red swimsuit (now flapping and faded) worn for 12 years by one distinguished German gentleman (a term used as loosely as the elastic is on his suit).
Chris Santilli (chris@wordcrafting.com )
The Naked Truth About Hedonism II