I discovered Dennys website only after our first trip to Hedo II. We took this first trip the last week of 99. During the next three years, I frequently visited the website while hoping that we would have the opportunity to return. Denny, please accept my belated thanks for putting together a truly excellent website.
Most topics of interest have been covered in great detail in previous reports and on the Message Board, so I will try to focus on subjects that have not been as thoroughly discussed in other areas of the site. In addition, I will address everyones favorite topic sex and if that is all you want to read about you may skip forward to that section without offending me at all.
C and I frequently have to manufacture time to exercise. Thus, even though many people on vacation have zero interest in doing any exercise unlikely to lead to orgasm, we consider it a treat to be able to work out on our own schedule for several days in a row. While at Hedo II, we developed a routine that we highly recommend to others.
Every morning, I got up and ran the beach for about 30 to 50 minutes, depending on how I was feeling. The beach at Hedo II itself is not well suited to running as the sand, for the most part, is too soft. However, if you exit the property toward the main part of 7-mile beach (away from Grand Lido if you are facing the water, to the left), you can run down the beach at least 5 or 6 miles.
When you leave the resort, the guard will ask you for your name and room number. You need not bring a key. One or two of the guards at the other resorts will ask you where you are staying and after you say, Hedo, they will nod and you can continue on without even stopping.
The hard sand running path, depending on the tide, narrows in spots, to the point where you may need to maneuver some to avoid the water. Also, about a mile from the resort, just past a blue house, you have to run on a dirt path just off the beach, for about 200 yards or so. The dirt trail is excellent, and it leads directly back to the beach, where the beach and packed sand running path on it both widen considerably.
This is a truly excellent place to run, in contrast to the road outside the resort. I do not recommend running the road. Dodging whatever traffic is on that road adds a totally unnecessary degree of difficulty to what is supposed to be a casual run.
To add even more local flavor to these morning jogs, I brought my Walkman with me and tuned into one of the local drive time radio shows. The deejays reminded me of Howard and Robin with Jamaican accents, though, not surprisingly they engaged in far more intelligent discourse on a wide array of subjects. A BBC station is also available if you want to catch up on all the cricket scores and hear some news and analysis that may not be available to you back home.
Each morning upon my return to Hedo, I first headed for the soda station to drink as much ice water as possible (the regular drinking water is no problem for those who like me might be concerned). Then, I would strip down, throwing my shorts on the beach chair that I wanted to reserve for later, and plunge into the ocean for further cooling down. Next, I would walk down to the coffee station at Delroys and get a cup of coffee to bring back to the room for my wife.
We then would head to breakfast at the main restaurant. The breakfasts at Hedo are, in my ever umble opinion, outstanding. They feature cooked to order omelets, fresh hot waffles, carved ham, bacon, fresh fruit, pastries, bagels, and just about anything else one might fancy. It took some willpower to eat in moderation. We concluded that breakfast is without question the best meal at Hedo II, which some readers might not be too thrilled to hear, but I think many visitors would agree.
After breakfast, we proceeded directly to the new gym, now about a year old. The gym, as you may have read elsewhere, is a clean, air-conditioned, spacious two-room facility with glass windows. It puts the old open-air gym to shame.
There are several treadmills and stationary bikes, and I believe only one stair stepper. I have a strong preference for real StairMasters rather than imitations, so I never used it. There are a good variety of machines for lifting, plus dumbbells in a wide range of weights. The workout facility is not as plush or large as the Lakeshore Athletic Club, L.A. Sports Club or any of the other world-class big city gyms, but I found it to be better than some chain fitness centers in which I have worked out. For a hotel or resort, it is truly excellent. So, do not forget to pack your workout stuff unless you oppose working out on vacation on religious grounds.
Rumor has it that there are two beaches at Hedo, but I only walked past the prude beach prior to my morning runs, so I will limit my comments to the nude beach where we assume the majority of visitors to this website will want to hang out.
Perhaps my favorite aspect of Hedo is that the nude beach is indeed nude, and neither clothing optional nor overrun with gawkers wearing baggy old shorts. I saw very few swimsuits on the beach and those few were mostly thong bottoms on topless women. There was one guy who one afternoon steadfastly kept his suit on while his better half went first topless and then nude. I was tempted to walk up to him and ask him what political cause he was advocating with his one-man protest, but decided that my time would be better spent ordering up another Red Stripe from Delroy. Another afternoon, a single guy who wandered over to the nude pool tried to hang out near the Jacuzzi while wearing a swimsuit, but a rather attractive woman politely but firmly de-pantsed him before explaining to him the facts of life on the nude side. It was nicely done. Thank you, kind woman, whoever you are.
We did encounter one or two groups of gawkers from other resorts who were passing by on motorboats or wave runners. This led my wife and I to debate whether it would be proper to fire a retaliatory moon in their general direction. My wife felt strongly that mooning would be both ineffective and inappropriate. I disagreed and received some support for my position from other guys on the beach. Regrettably, though, I ultimately had to decide against trying to shoot them a moon when I realized that it would be difficult to get a clean shot at such long range, especially considering the unlikelihood that any of these gawkers would be looking at me with my beautiful wife sitting so close by.
Most folks walk from their rooms to the beach without wearing anything but sun block and smiles. This is most certainly the preferred method as my wife found out the hard way. When we returned to our rooms after our first full day on the beach she noticed a sun burn in exactly where her swimsuit top would have been. After thinking about this reverse tan line for awhile, we figured out that by wearing her bikini top to the beach, she had rubbed off the sun block that we had oh so carefully applied in the room before heading out to the beach. The rest of our stay, we walked to the beach sans swimsuits.
I hasten to add that the biggest issue with being comfortable on the nude beach has got to be sun block. This of course really has not much to do with tanning au naturel, but everything to do with the strength of the Jamaican sun.
We come from Florida and have a healthy respect for the sun. We brought with us loads of sun block with SPFs 30 and 50. My wife insisted on bringing some lotion with only SPF 15, but I never put on less than SPF 30 and I developed a rather healthy tan in just a few days.
We met quite a few couples from the Midwest who had trained for Hedo II at their local tanning booths. This would seem to be an excellent idea if you are leaving behind long and cold winters. Even if you have a base tan though, I recommend thoroughly lotioning up with high SPF sunscreen in your room prior to heading to the beach. There was a nice couple from South Bend, IN (J &J, if you read this, it was nice to meet you all) who had developed George Hamilton Open quality tans with nary a hint of a burn while using suntan oil with minimal sunscreen, but they must be the exception rather than the rule. We saw plenty of sunburns, some of which we fear may have been rather uncomfortable.
By the way, no one is shy about putting suntan lotion on his or her private parts. And it is perfectly acceptable to ask your spouse or significant other to rub lotion on your private parts even if you theoretically should be able to reach them yourselves.
We have gone to Hedo II twice now and I have participated in only a handful of the many group activities promoted by the ECs. I feel guilty about this, as only a card-carrying Catholic can, so I always had several creative excuses at the ready, such as no, I cannot make the nude cruise today, I need to loosen up for naked Twister. I never needed the excuses though. The ECs have a good feel for who is up for the games and who is not, and there seems to always be a small but enthusiastic crowd ready to participate.
I did thoroughly enjoy the nude beach invasion of the water slide one day. I went down the slide several times. It was a blast each time, except the first when I forgot that if you do not hold your breath as you plunge into a pool at high speed, water will race up your nose so fast and so hard it will come out of your ears.
By the way, I never did get the chance to play naked Twister even though several Twister games were played while we were there. I always seemed to be in the room napping when these games started, which is probably a good thing as I am not exactly the most flexible guy, particularly after running and working out, and right hand on red would have been an adventure for the other players.
The Message Board has featured many threads about the most effective way to communicate with home, including threads on the philosophical ramifications of wanting or needing to stay in touch while on a getaway vacation.
We have babies at home. It was important for us to feel that we could be reached at anytime if necessary. It was also important for me to spend about 10 minutes one morning checking on business.
The best way for us to accomplish these goals, with minimal disruption, was to rent a cell phone from DigiCell and use it in your room when convenient. DigiCell has a booth at the airport. They were out of phones when we arrived, but the rep there gave me the number of Bobby at DigiCell in Negril (957-3584). We called Bobby the day after we arrived and he delivered the phone to us at Hedo. At the end of our trip, we dropped off the phone at the airport. It cost us $110 for 5 days, including the calls that we made. I am not sure (I have not yet seen the itemized bill), but I believe that we were charged $10 a day to rent the phone and roughly $1.40 a minute for calls to the States. The phone came with a charger, an instruction sheet and voice mail. DigiCell requires a credit card deposit of $200 - $100 for the phone and $100 for the calls.
To say that Hedo II attracts a diverse crowd does not begin to describe the wide array of folks who were at the resort while we were there. Hedo II visitors come from all walks of life, from all over the country and from all over the world.
I saw several truly beautiful women, including my wife C. I also saw other women who have great personalities. I would mention the guys, but as a Hedo friend once pointed out, no one really looks at the guys too much. The guys look at the women. The women look at the women. If you think about it, this is the way it is back in the city as well.
There were hard bodies. There were soft bodies. A good number of the guests could stand to lose 10 to 15 pounds. Very few had 50 to 100 extra pounds to spare. But no one seemed too hung up on looks. A rather heavy-set woman entered the best breast contest (essentially the same as a wet t-shirt contest, hold the t-shirts), and she received a very favorable response from the crowd. Her incredibly large breasts were something to behold, and the fact that she has a fuller figure (no doubt necessary to help her carry those melons around) was not held against her whatsoever.
Obviously, Hedo II attracts an open-minded crowd. It is pretty difficult to find Puritanical hypocrites in a crowd that spends a week partying naked. Still, I think that a healthy percentage of the guests at Hedo II could fairly be described as conservative and family-oriented. One of the more common topics of conversation was where people would tell their friends and family they had been on vacation. The most frequent answers were: Jamaica, Negril, one of those all-inclusive resorts, one of the SuperClubs, or the ironic fiction, Sandals. Very few of the folks with whom I talked planned on volunteering Hedonism.
As for myself, I plan to tell friends, at least those who are not uptight about topless or nude beaches, that we went to Hedo. If I get any sort of ooh, la, la comment in response, that means that the person has no clue and so I will say that the rumors about Hedo being a wild place are complete and utter fiction. If, on the other hand, someone expresses genuine interest about going, then I will provide a more detailed description, and refer them to DennyP.com. My thought is that only those who are curious enough to look into Hedo know much about it. If someone asks you if a bar is any good, you have to assume that they might on occasion enjoy a good stiff drink.
We did notice that the crowd that visited this particular time included what we considered to be an extraordinary number of cigarette smokers. We had not seen so many smokers since we went to Greece, where apparently the government requires its citizens to smoke at least two and more like 3 packs of cigarettes a day even if that means smoking while serving meals or working as a flight attendant on Air Olympic.
It was virtually impossible to avoid being surrounded by smokers in the main dining room, so as happened in Greece, we had no choice but to enjoy some secondhand smoke while eating. We also encountered non-stop smoking in the pool and Jacuzzi, and on more than one occasion, we had to relocate to get away from the smoke.
I am mildly allergic to cigarette smoke and my wife is an ardent reformed smoker, so we found this to be the worst part of our Hedo experience. For us, the smoke problem was serious enough that it may be enough to keep us from returning in the future.
We also noticed that a healthy percentage of the guests, maybe as high as 30% or 40%, sported largish tattoos. I am not a big tattoo fan, primarily because I am a naturist at heart who grew up in the 70s, and the larger tattoos often look to me like body graffiti. At the same time, I respect someones choice to do what he or she wants with their body, so it did not particularly bother me to see so many tats on the nude beach.
To keep this in perspective, one afternoon when about every other person that walked by seemed to have several large tattoos, C noted, accurately, that none of our friends back home have tattoos, with the exception of one of our good friends who is undergoing laser treatment to remove a very small tattoo on her ankle. I have no interest in undergoing therapy to determine what this means about our psyches, so I offer this observation regarding the tattoos solely in the for whatever it is worth category. You may feel free to completely disregard it.
In contrast, we generally were favorably impressed with the body jewelry that we observed. C and I agreed that a gold or silver waist chain would look great on her, and she is considering a naval piercing (not a piercing by someone in the Navy, but rather a belly button ring). We are not going to get too carried away with this trend, though. We viewed the gold chains looped through nipple rings as creating a safety hazard that neither of us is interested in undertaking.
In sum, for the most part, we found the people to be good-natured folks who are quite pleasant to be around. There were those few who seemed bound and determined to eat and drink (and smoke) all they could, so as to get their moneys worth, including the young woman who kept calling my wife dude at the Jacuzzi our last night. However, those incapable of partying to anything less than excess seemed to be far outnumbered by those who genuinely understand how to relax and have a good time.
One day my wife casually remarked that we were always horny at Hedo. I responded by saying that the resort is very romantic. C quickly corrected me. She pointed out that it is not so much romantic as intensely erotic.
C is right. A candlelit dinner in your favorite restaurant is romantic. Getting a blowjob in the Hedo Jacuzzi is erotic. There is a less than subtle distinction that most guys, yours truly included, are unlikely to make without help from their female better halves.
My strong belief, based admittedly on only two visits, is that the vast majority of the Hedo guests are couples looking to rekindle their love lives. The spark that the place can and does generate is powerful, and we sincerely hope that with us, it lasts long after we have returned to our hectic daily routines.
There are those visitors who pop a boner when they hear the word lifestyle, notwithstanding the fact that Webster defines the term as merely the typical way of life of an individual, group or culture. I have come to believe that, except for lifestyle weeks, the percentage of lifestylers (f/k/a swingers) at Hedo II is relatively low. I base this conclusion on my observation that it clearly would have taken more effort for us to seek out and delve into the swinging scene than it did take for us to focus the entire time on each other. Each week, of course, attracts a different group, so I suspect that the action is more polygamous in certain weeks than others. Nevertheless, as many have observed before, if you find yourself on the receiving end of a proposition to which no thank you is your invariable response, the proposer is highly unlikely to say anything other than no problem, mon.
At the same time, you are somewhat likely to see some group entertainment if you are inclined to watch and keep an eye out for same. I will freely admit that I have no objection whatsoever to watching this kind of play, but I only saw only a few very brief instances of what I would consider wild action. For those of you all just dying to know, these included: two women sitting side by side by the pool receiving head from male companions while one of the women stroked a third guy sitting next to them; a foursome in the grotto that I glanced at while walking from the Jacuzzi to the bar and back again (coming and going, I caught two different but equally creative group positions); one woman lying on a raft in the pool while receiving head from a gentleman while two others licked her nipples and a few very brief moments of women going down on each other in the pool before breaking out in raucous laughter.
One-on-one public displays of erotic skill were far more frequent. Unlike on our last visit to Hedo II, when as soon as the sun went down so did several of the women sitting in the Jacuzzi, it was difficult to figure out a pattern as to when and where couples would decide to put on a show. One couple seemed to go a tad out of their way to find a spot where they could be observed exercising horizontally (and they were definitely getting a workout I think that they might want to rethink his Viagra dosage) - in a little nook on the beach, on a raft in the water, just standing by the bar, etc.
No doubt everyone has his or her impression as to which pdas constitute good taste and which ones do not. For the most part, though, we both found the PDAs to be erotic rather than offensive. Surprisingly, they really do not seem to attract that much overt attention. Perhaps people in this MTV age have short attention spans, but even those who made it clear that they were watching, did so only very briefly.
For example, one late afternoon while a strikingly beautiful woman demonstrated her exceptional oral skills on her mild mannered and very appreciative husband in the cold Jacuzzi near the pool (guess who these folks were?), about 4 or 5 folks yucked it up enough to make it clear how entertaining they found all this. By about a minute later, though, they had moved on to something else, leaving only one woman to watch the rest of the action. She was kind enough to thank the couple with a polite golf clap after the climactic conclusion to this romantic interlude. With the exception of their one fan, though, this couple went virtually unnoticed, as did the other couple in the pool who decided to add some symmetry to the scene.
My theory is that most people, or at least most people who like to visit a nude beach, like to watch a little (the multi-billion dollar adult video industry would not exist if this were not the case). Some do not mind watching a little. Some do not mind watching a lot. Some do not mind being watched a little. Some like being watched. And so on.
It would be highly unlikely, however, to shock or offend the typical Hedo II guest with sex between consenting adults.
Perhaps in the final analysis that is why I like Hedo II so much. I love my wife, and Hedo II was a great place for us to love each other around the clock.
Rob and C Tampa, FL