Randy & Jen - October, 2008

Trip Report – Hedo 3 and Hedo 2

 

10/25 – 11/2/2008

 

A tale of Two Hedos

 

Before I begin, I want to make 4 disclaimers about this trip report.

 

·         It’s being written through the very obviously biased eyes of a couple who had never been to Hedo 3 before, but had been to – and enjoyed – Hedo 2 thirteen times in the past.

 

·         This report will clearly indicate which resort we prefer, but it in NO WAY takes away from the VERY cool people we’ve met at both locations.

 

·         This comparison is based on the one specific week we were there.  We know how things can change from week to week at Hedo, so this report may be completely invalid by the time you read it.

 

·         This is gonna be really long.  So long, in fact, that this comparison might be invalid by the time you’re done reading.

 

That said….

 

My husband decided earlier this year that after thirteen trips to Hedo 2, he wanted to try something different. Since we wanted something different that was also in Jamaica and also called Hedo, we didn’t have to Google too much. We made a decision to forgo our usual Hedo 2 Halloween trip this year to give Hedo 3 a shot, and next thing we knew, we were leaving Montego Bay airport and heading (yipes) east.

 

Arriving at Hedo 3 was strange, but cool.  It reminded me of old dreams I used to have way back when where I would go to school but once I got there, even though it was supposedly my school, it didn’t look like my school.  We were greeted by friendly, smiling faces saying “Welcome to Hedo!” and we had to laugh.  Stranger still when we were asked if it was our first time there, we said yes, it is.   We were virgins again!    Sorta like those dreams I used to have back in high school.    But I digress….

 

They gave us a corner room on the bottom floor in the quad.  From what I could tell, it seemed like the best room in the house to me.  The quad pool is just as nifty as has been described to me and the room was just as nice as I had heard. You couldn’t beat walking out that back door and having the pool right there at your feet.  When we first got into the room, the first thing I noticed was the bed.  It was big and comfy with a nice fresh new comforter.  Wow.  “Score one for Hedo 3” I said to my husband. Then I lied down on the bed and noticed that the mirror above the bed was nice and flat somewhat honest….. unlike the house-of-fun mirrors that they put on the ceilings at Hedo 2 that, if you the lie the wrong way on the bed, may convince you that you really need to never taste food again.   Excellent.  “Score two for Hedo 3, “I said.  We unpacked and went to explore.

 

Now, before we left for Jamaica, we jumped online and found people who were gonna be there with us. (Thank you, Denny) As it turned out, we were going to be sharing Halloween week with a large group known as “The Wild Bunch.” We took some time chatting a bit with them before the trip, and as always, that proved invaluable in supplying us with friends before we even walked in the door.

 

We found our new friends instantly and they were, as expected, cooler than we expected. Of course we spent the first day meeting and greeting and drinking and chatting and bullshitting and all that. One of the group had supplied a great CD for the DJ by the pool and it was a perfect backdrop to the festivities. I made a mental note to score another one for Hedo 3, because I had never in my life seen someone actually get a requested CD played at the nude pool at Hedo 2.  I think they keep the CD player there locked up in some unforsaken dungeon that even Delroy is afraid to enter.

 

So, the day was good and fun and after the sun went down it was time to go wash up and get ready for dinner.   We washed up (great  Jacuzzi tubs at Hedo 3 if you like that kinda thing, but I actually can’t imagine a time at either Hedo when I personally wanted to spend any alone time in the bathtub) and went to dinner.

 

We entered the dining area hungry and ready to eat and (insert squealing tire noise here) WTF was this? The dinner buffet was just SO limited, so lame, so small and so…. Well….. yucky.   (read: leftover sausages from breakfast, laid out on two plates, under a heat lamp) Very surprising, cuz we had heard from some people that the food at Hedo 3 was better than Hedo 2.  Uh-uh.  Not this week.   We’re not snobby eaters by a long shot, but apparently we’ve been spoiled by Hedo 2 cuz the food they had laid out was SO subpar to Hedo 2 that I thought maybe there was just another section of the room that I wasn’t seeing.  Of course we didn’t starve at Hedo 3, we mostly just ate Jerk chicken from the Reggae Café for lunch and either Munasan or Pastafari (which were both good, and pretty much the same as what you’ll find at Hedo 2) for dinner.

 

We hung out that night at the Piano Bar, the Disco and the hot tub. The crowd seemed to disperse (go to sleep? Go to some orgy we didn’t know about? I dunno) kinda early.  Not a problem. We’re always kinda sleepy travelers on our first night, anyway.

 

Next day we’re back at the pool. Normal fun Hedo chatter but something was missing…. What was it?  Oh yeah…. Music.  It’s noon, how come no music?  Well, as it turns out, there is only music by the nude pool when the DJ rolls the equipment down there and starts playing it.  Ok. Not a huge deal.  I’m kinda a music person and I love the background sounds of reggae (or SOMETHIN’) while I’m hard at work drinkin’ and socializing.  But okay.  Eventually the DJ showed up and played a few hours of music before closing up shop to wheel the music elsewhere.

 

I wanna mention the SIZE of the two resorts.  Hedo 3 is much smaller.  And that’s a plus.   And that’s a negative. It’s a plus because getting from place to place is a breeze.  Finding someone you’re looking for is easy. Forget something in your room?  No prob, be back in 3 minutes.  That’s very nice. It’s a negative because the small size gives everyone less room to disperse, which we found kinda meant that if the party wasn’t in one spot, it probably wasn’t really anywhere else, either.  Because the resort is so small, and the crowd is so small, everyone always seemed to us to kinda in the same place at once. That place might be the pool, or the disco, or the piano bar, or whatever…. But everyone kinda moved in one big pack from place to place all day/night, which we found a bit claustrophobic.  It also meant that they should have had more bartenders at any given place while all the people were there. If it was the disco, or the Piano Bar, or the big bar near the dining hall, there never seemed to be enough bartenders for all the people that would descend on that one bar at one time.  Waiting 5-10 minutes for a drink became the norm…. which was annoying…. which brings me back to another reason that the small size was a plus.  After waiting for a drink enough times, I realized it was just easier and faster to leave that bar and walk to an empty area of the resort (the disco, the piano bar, the big bar near the dining hall) where I could always find a lonely bored bartender to give me my drink without any wait time.

 

That evening was another fun time, meeting and hangin’ out with new mostly “Wild Bunch” friends. Later into the night, we went out onto Hedo 3’s small beaches, looking for a private corner for some quality alone time. That’s always been one of my favorite things to do in the late evening at Hedo 2 and I expected it would be the same at Hedo 3.  Unfortunately, the small size of the resort worked against us on this one. It was difficult to find a dark spot to enjoy each other without being literally feet from another guest or resort security. Now, we like exhibitionism just as much as the next Hedo couple, but sometimes we want to play all alone under the stars…  we were able to find a spot, but with Hedo 3’s sunken, walled off beach, we realized afterward that we were never alone to begin with, it had actually been a mosquito/sand flea orgy. Oooops.  Won’t make that mistake again.  Good thing the beds in the room were so nice.

 

The next day was The Wild Bunch’s annual shock-and-awe style water balloon attack on the unsuspecting guests in the quad. Without getting into detail that might bore people that weren’t there, I have to say that it was one of the friggin’ funniest things we’d ever seen at Hedo. I wanna score one for Hedo 3 on that one, but really, that score goes to The Wild Bunch that dreamed it up, organized it and executed it beautifully.  The same goes for the PJ party light parade, pirate night and the sexy scavenger hunt which was open to everyone and anyone at the resort, but again brought to you by the Wild Bunch.  By day four we were realizing that we hadn’t noticed any entertainment coordinators on the grounds our whole stay, unless, of course, you counted the Wild Bunch who I ‘m pretty sure were not paid for the week, but certainly should have been because from what we could see, they were pretty much the pulse of the place and we were starting to wonder what people did for fun at Hedo 3 during the weeks when this group wasn’t there.

 

We awoke our fifth day to the first grey sky of the trip. Oh well, the perfect weather couldn’t last forever.  Grabbed our stuff and headed to the nude pool.  More hangin’ and blabbin’ with our new friends. A slow morning, but understandably so with the dreary weather.  It wasn’t until early afternoon that the DJ came rolling along with the music. She loads it up and starts playing….. what?   WTF?   Karaoke music?  Now, mind you, she doesn’t have a screen and she’s not actually leading any Karaoke activity…..  she’s just playing a Karaoke disc with a karaoke version of Gwen Stefaini’s “Escape”  Okay, seriously. It’s a slow drizzly day and you think you’re gonna get the party started with that?  So I decide it’s time to come to her rescue.  I take the 2 minute walk to the room to grab a CD.  I bring it back and say “would you please play this?”  She asks what it is and I tell her that it’s a mix of party songs, mostly about pussy. She says “We have certain songs we can’t play here” I say “well, I’m sure none of those songs are on here. Can you please play this instead of Karaoke?”   So she puts it on.  The first song is “the pussycat song.” If you’ve been to Hedo 2 before, you’ve heard this goofy song about the pussy cat that’s “rockin’ in the rockin’ chair…. Rocked so long he lost his hair…. Bald pussy”   etc.   Well, she plays the song, but keeps her hand on the volume.  Every time the song says the word “pussy” she mutes the volume.  Not kidding.  Every time.  I’m sitting there still stunned when she ejects the CD and brings it back to me explaining that they can’t play songs there with “that” word.   WTF WTF WTF?   Aren’t we all ADULTS?  Naked adults? At friggin HEDO?   I know she was only doing what she was told, but WTF?  She explained that management doesn’t allow that word to be played. I told her that I learned most of these songs from hearing them played at the pool at Hedo 2, but apparently those were the rules and she wasn’t about to risk her job. I wasn’t gonna argue. Back went the karaoke for a short time, until the rain started to fall harder and it was time to roll away the stereo equipment. 

 

And that’s when we decided it was time to go to Negril.

 

Making the choice to go Hedo 2 was easy. Telling our new friends that we were leaving was difficult.  Now, granted, we were only taking off a day early, but we still felt a bit like….. traitors.  We explained to them that we had a lot of good friends who spend Halloween at Hedo 2 that we really wanted to see, which was the absolute truth, but we were concerned that after they practically tripped over themselves to make us feel welcome, they would be insulted that we would leave them a day early. As it turned out, after receiving some good-natured and well-deserved shit from some of them for leaving (and could we expect less from Hedo friends?) they were very cool about it.  We were relieved that they weren’t upset and our only regret is that we couldn’t convince them all to come with us.

 

Halloween morning we left Hedo 3 at 8am. After a four hour bus ride though a typical October Jamaican hurricane/typhoon/tsunami (also known in the tropics as a typical afternoon rain shower) we finally made it…. Home.  J

 

Check in was a breeze and we were given a room on the prude side since we hadn’t specified any room choice when made arrangements to transfer hotels. Not a problem. We attempted to walk through the dining area to throw our bags into the room but our attempts at arriving quietly were quickly and wonderfully thwarted by the large amount of old friends that spotted us before we even got a few steps into the resort.  We’ve known a lot of these people for over ten years, and they didn’t disappoint us in giving us a happy homecoming.  Of course we did have to accept some good-natured shit about being traitors by going to Hedo 3.  We can’t win…. Though on the other hand, with such great friends on both sides of that bus trip, it sure feels like we did.

 

We finally made our way to our prude side room to ditch our bags. When we walked into the room I noticed the two single beds and said to the bellman who took us to our room “ummm we like to sleep in the same bed.”  “No problem, mon.” he said as he scooted one bed across the floor, “I’ll get them to put a king size mattress over the two beds soon so it will be one bed” Okay.  I’ve been to this country enough times to speak a little Jamaican and I translated that immediately into “I’ll forget that I said that before I even walk out of this room” Which turned out to be the case….. and fine.  We threw the bags on the floor, took a quick glance out the window (saw trees) took a quick glance toward the ceiling (saw house of fun mirror) and ran to the nude beach, where even in the pissing rain, the party was rockin’  and the stereo was pounding out Prince’s Pussy Control.  Ahhhh yes.

 

That night was Halloween which of course included the annual Hedo 2 Halloween skit contest. I think most Halloween guests would agree that this is the highlight of the week at Hedo 2, if not the year. More than just a Halloween costume contest, some guests spend the whole year dreaming up skits to go along with their costumes and perform them that night to win free nights. It was funny as hell this year as always, and congrats to Diane and Burt for walking away with “Best Overall” skit.  While we were at Hedo 3, we asked Kevin Levee why they didn’t do the skit contests at Hedo 3. His answer was simply “Oh, that’s something the guests started at Hedo 2” Well, yeah, but how come it was never adopted at Hedo 3?  No answer, but you Hedo 3 Halloween folks should give it a shot; it never fails to be a blast.

 

We ended up extending our vacation by one day because you can’t go to Hedo 2 for Halloween and leave the next day, or you’ll miss the big anniversary night bash. This gave us two nights to chat, blab, visit, drink, eat, catch up, play, drink, and even find a few minutes alone under the stars on the beach.

 

Now, in fairness, we know that Hedo 2 has its share of imperfections. Half of our trips to Hedo 2 have been over Halloween week so we are well aware that by arriving on October 31^st and leaving November 2^nd, we chose the best two nights of the year that Hedo 2 has to offer. That said, it might be unfair to directly compare the energy level, the food quality (read: unlimited grilled lobster), the entertainment staff or really anything else for this particular week. But this is all we have for a comparison so for the purposes of this report I’m comparing all of those things and I’m scoring all of it to Hedo 2 hands down.

 

Will we go back to Hedo 3? We wouldn’t rule it out, but we’re not making any plans right now. Will we be back at Hedo 2 next Halloween?  Oh, hell yes. Can we think of anything that could make that trip even better?  Yeah…… a Wild Bunch shock-and-awe style water balloon attack on the prude pool.  What’da ya say, guys??