There’s a Culloden just down the road from Auchindown. Rather more exotic than
its battleground namesake near Inverness, this tropical Culloden is
nevertheless overlooked by a great house built by one Archibald Campbell,
behind which stand the eerie remains of a 17th-century castle with
gravestones of MacDonalds and MacLeans in the graveyard.
House and castle are set on a sea-facing slope and backed by lush, creeping
forest which threatens to swallow them. Some of the locals wouldn’t be sorry
if it did, because the house was built during an unloved era of colonial
history, when large plantations had hard taskmasters and the locals were
their slaves.
I can just about see Campbell’s tumbledown house from where I sit by one of
four swimming pools at my disposal, sipping a tequila sunrise prepared by my
British-trained butler, Damian.
The temperature is in the low thirties and I’m beginning to think about lunch,
for which I have a choice of five restaurants, although my inclination for
today is to try the Tex Mex.
This is Culloden, Jamaica-style, with sunshine and cocktails. The resort, on
Jamaica’s southern coast, is the latest addition to the Caribbean-wide
Sandals chain. It has, however, chosen to ignore its Culloden location and
instead borrowed its name from a fishing village a bit further down the
coast, Whitehouse. Evidently the marketing team reckoned a name redolent of
the heart of the world’s superpower had more allure than that of a boggy
battlefield.
Mind you, this particular stretch of land has its boggy history too. The
Whitehouse is built on what was once a marsh very popular with romantically
inclined crocodiles, all of which have had to be sensitively relocated to
Black River further down the coast, to make room for romantically inclined
bipeds.
Scottish connections and British-trained butlers aside, the crucial thing
about coming to this resort is its location. This is the first big resort in
Jamaica to put down roots on the island’s hitherto under-explored southern
coast.
For most of us, north sounds far less appealing than south. Birds fly south
for the winter, houses that face south sell faster, gardens that face south
grow quicker. In tourism terms, too, south generally equals good, and to
discover that a holiday destination is on the north coast of anywhere is
enough to make you think twice about going there at all.
For Jamaica, however, tourism has always been associated with the north coast.
Montego Bay and Ocho Rios are in the north, as are the island’s best
beaches. For decades tourists from Europe have not bothered to cross the
island’s hilly midriff, discouraged by a lack of obvious destinations and
twisting, pot-holed roads.
Sandals Whitehouse looks set to change all that. The all-inclusive resort 90
minutes due south of Montego Bay across forested hills is in the middle of a
ribbon of beach that lines the broad sweep of Bluefields Bay. It is
protected from the heavier surf of the southern shores by a coral reef,
which also provides good snorkelling.
Backing the bay is a hilly landscape heavy with pimiento and fruit trees, and
hardwoods such as cedar and mahogany, so fertile that the style of farming
is referred to locally as “you throw, it grow”.
The nearby villages are basic fishing communities, ramshackle places where
most people seem to be just chillin’ by the sea, practising their “soon
come” culture. The roadsides are lined with the likes of an eatery called
Fish ‘n’ Ting, a grog shop named Cozy Corner — a breeze-block hut — and the
Crazy Vibes Jerk Centre, where you can wash down your dinner with nerve wiss
(a brew made from roots meant to enhance male potency).
For anyone who hasn’t experienced the Caribbean before, this sort of stuff can
appear a bit rough and ready. But I prefer islands like this, where the
culture is endemic and in your face, because this is the real thing, not the
primped and prettified version designed by architects in Miami and flown out
in flat packs.
Sandals Whitehouse has chosen to go for a European village theme in its
architecture. Inside there’s a luxury spa, four swimming pools, six
restaurants, tennis courts, a fitness centre and a French patisserie just in
case you get peckish between meals. It also provides butler service, and has
a helpful note in the room reminding guests what butlers are useful for:
unpacking one’s shopping, attending to one’s wardrobe, serving one dinner on
one’s balcony. And, of course, bringing one cocktails by the pool.
One of the consequences of pioneering new territory has been a shortage of
locally available qualified personnel, so most of the staff have been hired
on the basis of their personality, not experience. What they lack in skills,
they make up for in smiles, and the butler Damian turns out to be a good
smiler, although I don’t get the feeling that he is completely settled into
his role. Neither am I comfortable in mine, as his boss.
The people factor is one of the advantages of being away from the main tourist
honeypots. Here in the south there were no hustlers on the beach, no
ganja-peddlers by the gates or shop touts down the road. The locals had yet
to see tourists as anything other than welcome guests to their part of the
island.
“The hotel is very valuable to the local economy,” says the British artist
William Fielding, who first came to this coast 15 years ago. “People here
are very poor, and you can already see the difference in the local shops.”
Willyman Feelings, as he is known locally, lives in Oristana, virtually the
next plantation house along from Campbell’s tumbledown place at Culloden,
and he belongs to the old school of playboy aristocrats from the Princess
Margaret in Mustique era. He explains to me why the locals regard the old
plantation houses with such distrust. “The plantation owners were very hard
on their slaves,” he says. “And their descendants know their history.
Besides, they think these old houses are all haunted. They’d rather knock
them down.”
Eccentric aristocrats aside, there’s plenty in this lesser known fringe of
Jamaica to appeal to your inner Michael Palin, some of it with Scottish
echoes.
The local Appleton rum distillery runs a tour with a tasting at the end that
rendered me practically senseless for the rest of the afternoon. A trip to a
nearby waterfall had to be called off because of a touch too much “liquid
sunshine”, a rebranding of rain that Scotland could do well to adopt. And
being the hurricane season it was raining, too, on a further excursion out
to a beach-house fish restaurant at Little Ochi, where the jerk lobster was
so good it brought tears to my eyes — or perhaps that was just the spices.
Now that tourists are discovering this coast, other hotels will surely follow
suit and more tourist attractions will open up. For me, though, the sense of
discovery is sufficient attraction.
It allowed me, arriving at the airport for the return flight home, to deploy a
line which I doubt I’ll ever have the opportunity to use again. “Did you
pack your bag yourself?” asked the check-in girl, in time-honoured fashion.
I seized the opportunity with glee and replied: “No, my butler did."
Details: Kuoni (01306 747 008; www.kuoni.co.uk) offers
seven-night all-inclusive stays in Sandals Whitehouse from £1,419, including
flights with Air Jamaica from London Heathrow to Montego Bay and transfers.
Price based on two sharing. British Midland (www.flybmi.com) and British
Airways (www.ba.com) fly to Heathrow from Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen.
For further information on Sandals go to www.sandals.co.uk
