Alternative tourism

Anthony Gambrill

The Ritz-Carlton, with its reputation for five-star treatment and all that goes with that, has decided that Jamaica, with its present and inevitableturmoil-to-be, is likely to diminish the Ritz-Carlton brand.

Apart from a few fortified villa compounds and traditional carefully preserved secrets like Jamaica Inn, what we are left with are hundred-dollars-plus-a-night (nothing excluded) and $350-back-on-your-airfare-gated enclosures described by one foreign observer as promoting trivial narcissism in their travel ads on American (and Spanish?) television.

Are we becoming an English-speaking Cancun? I mean, unless Usain Bolt wins races and sets new records, Jamaica is going to drop off the world's media radar like Governor Romney when he lost the American election.

Although sun, sea and sex still draw a crowd, particularly with the help of a predictable recurrence of appalling winter up north, it is time for us to find a new approach to our tourism product. Following on the old adage, 'turn a problem into an opportunity', I believe we can identify some negatives and restyle them as positives. It is with this in mind I would like to outline a few ideas I have packaged as 'alternative tourism'.

This will mean indoctrinating tour operators, JUTA and other taxi drivers, courtesy cops (if there's any left), tour desk personnel and itinerants on the beach, who usually peddle braiding, ganja and sessions with their sisters. These people always have been on the front line when interfacing with our visitors.

The indoctrinators will obviously come from the ranks of those who manage - so to speak - our traditional tourism product including the Jamaica Tourist Board, Tourism Product Development Company, Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association, ad and PR agencies, ministers and shadow ministers of tourism, consultants to ministers, suitable academics at the University of the West Indies and the University of Technology and the diaspora who constantly want to give us advice (from a distance).

But down to the nitty-gritty. Here are a few categories and within each a few possibilities for an alternative to smoking weed at Bob Marley's grave or looking optimistically for marine life in a glass-bottomed boat. Take, for instance, nostalgia. Everyone likes to look back a little teary-eyed at what was or might have been.

NOSTALGIA TOURS

There's nothing quite like a visit to a disused bauxite plant. Situated in the lush countryside of St Elizabeth sits Nain, the silent network of majestic structures that used to be the pride of Jamaica. As you wander through the plant, former management staff - unemployed for several years until now - describe how each component contributed to Jamaica's export earnings. Pause and purchase an authentic Bangladesh-made clay jar of red dirt to take home as a treasured souvenir.

St Thomas and Portland offer a variety of nostalgic experiences, including acre upon acre of land on which bananas were grown when they were known as 'green gold' and made American importers in Boston and New York rich. Take the south coast road and marvel at what a road might have felt like several decades ago. Passing Morant Bay, admire the huge factory shell where world-famous Goodyear tyres were once crafted and the information technology building that was never occupied.

On to Port Antonio and San San beach behind which a hotel was planned, but never built, Dragon Bay where a hotel was built, but remains empty, the site of the legendary Titchfield Hotel where tourism began, and Ken Jones Aerodrome, where if any planes do take off, they were likely hired by informal exporters of ganja.

Sligoville in St Catherine offers a classic opportunity for maximum nostalgia. Here is an abandoned mini-stadium built for the local member of parliament, whose favour the unsuspecting Chinese wanted to curry. Almost everything of any worth has been looted, leaving the site resembling a sports complex in Baghdad firebombed by the Shi'ites, or Sunnis, or both.

Next door in Clarendon is Vernamfield, with vegetation sprouting through its runways and on a moonlit night, you could think you can hear the World War II US airplanes taking off - or is it just the sound of another cargo of ganja on its way to Florida?

CULTURAL NOSTALGIA TOURS

This is a category more likely to tug at your heart strings. Starting on Pechon Street, you can follow the rusting tracks that once took the Jamaica Railway Corporation's trains to Montego Bay and Port Antonio. If you are on foot - any future train services, however short-lived, depend on the political ambition of the minister of transport - you possibly won't get farther than Gregory Park (presuming you can still breathe after passing Riverton City). Here, you can buy a bag juice and admire one of the many abandoned railway stations, a classic example of which can be found in Port Antonio.

There is already the Bob Marley Museum on Hope Road in Kingston and the aforementioned grave site at Nine Miles in St Ann. But should a visitor wish to enjoy a 'living' Marley experience, he or she will have to find himself/herself to Miami, where the extended Marley clan has resided for several years.

One cannot leave the parish of St Andrew without stopping in Port Royal. For more than 60 years, going back as far as Schweppes' iconic Commander Whitehead, who had fronted for a group of investors in the 1960s, Port Royal has been earmarked for restoration, rehabilitation, resuscitation, regeneration or what you will.

Filing cabinet drawers are filled to the brim with development projects. From the vulgar Disneyesque, to the impractical underwater tour of the sunken city, to the reconstruction of a single street as it would have looked in 1692, countless plans have been drawn up, costed and filed. Even as you try to imagine what might have been, you won't even be sold a souvenir T-shirt proclaiming 'I saw Henry Morgan in Port Royal Jamaica'.

Anthony Gambrill is a playwright and author. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.