Dispatches | Island Scene-Port Antonio

 On the quiet side white sands await at San San a small beach on the eastern outskirt of Port Antonio

Jamaica’s Forgotten Jewel

Executive summary by Darmansjah

Well away from the tourist bustle of the west coast, Port Antonio beckons with secluded beaches, a low-key-vibe, and echoes of old-time Jamaica, by Christopher R. Cox

Rare is the hotel that admits to having rats. But Steve Beaver, co-owner of the ultra-lux de Geejam in the hills outside Port Antonio, is proud to point out the large rodent on the villa’s staircase. It’s not just any rat, mind you-the stenciled artwork is the trademark of Banksy, the reclusive British street artist who tagged the steps during a stay at this seven-room Jamaican hideaway.

Continuing the tour, Beaver walks me through Geejam’s state-of-the-art recording studio, where the likes of Gwen Stefani, Bojork, and India. Arie have cut tracks. An adjacent wooden deck overlooks the lusah , three-hectare property, which tumbles down a hillside to the limpid blue Caribbean Sea.

“It certainly allows your creative juices to flow to the max,” Beaver says. “If you can’t get your muse on here, you’ve got a problem.”

No problem here, mon: far removed from the big-box hotels and hustle of Montego Bay and Negril on the other end of the island, Port Antonio and the bucolic surrounds of Portland Parish area an escapist fantasy come true. Given that the Caribbean travel industry was virtually created here more than a century ago, this might come as surprise. Yet winter cruises to the tropics and luxurious island hotels can all trace their lineage to “Porty,” as the locals call it-a time-warp town on Jamaica’s long-overlooked northeast coast offering a berguiling mix of faded glamour, authentic character, and ruggedly beautiful scenery. Who needs a muse?

passage to porty, overlooking Port Antonio's Titchfield Peninsula and Navy Island

WITH SAND-RIMMED coves backed by luxuriant hills and abrupt, mist-shrouded mountains, Porty has been blessed by nature and endowed with a rich and colorful past to match. When the British chased the Spanish from Jamaica in 1655 ,the Admiralty establisehd a base on Navy Island, jsut off a headlnad separating Port Antonio’s pari of fine, sheltered harbors. After surviving the Bounty mutiny, Captain William Blight resumed his mission to transport Tahitian breadfruit to the West Indies (to be cultivated as cheap food for plantation slaves), careening his ship here after a successful-and uneventful-passage. But it was another exotic fruit, the banana, that had a more lasting impact. In 1870, a Massachusetts captain named Lorenzo Dow Baker carried 160 bunches from Port Antonio to the United States and made a killing. He quickly returned to Porty and started an import operation that would become the United Fruit Company (later Chiquita). In the process, Port Antonio was transformed into a boom town, with handsome municipal buildings and palatial houses. On their return trip to Jamaica, Baker’s “banana boats” carried a different cargo-wealthy travelers eager to escape the America winter, a swell set that the put up in his 400-room Titchfield Hotel.

Salted cod with ackee fruit Jamaica's national dish

The glory days were short-lived. In the mid-1930s, “Panama disease” ravaged the banana groves. Then World War II shut down tourism, and in the 1950s, Montego Bay’s new airport lured tourist to the better beaches of the island’s est and. Port disappeared from vacation itineraries, except among well-heeled wanderers with a taste for adventure and desire for privacy-traveler like Errol Flynn the rakish Hollywood actor, who limped into Kingston in 1946 after his shooner, the Zaca was damaged by a tropical storm.

caribbean cool, the sanwood villa at geejam, where clebrity guest have included...

While waiting for repairs, Flynn killed time exploring Jamaica, and was smitten by Port Antonio. “It was an instant love affair,” recalls Patrice Wymore Flynn, his third wife, her self a starlet at the time.

The footloose screen idol began buying property, including the old Titchfiled Hotel. After thier marriage in 1951, Flynn brought his new bride to Port Antonio, where they lived aboard the Zaca.

“I thought I’d been taken to the end of the world,” Wymore Flynn says with a laugh. “But I learned to love it as much as he did. It was great for us because it was one place we could go where the paparazzi weren’t following us and people weren’t asking for autographs.”

Between pictures, the Flynns invariably returned to Porty, where their acquaintaces included two other celebrity expats, Noel Coward and Ian Fleming. The stories are legendary: how Flynn won Navy Island in a card game; how he drove a car into his swimming pool: how he buzzed the Tichfield Hotel in an airplance. Flynn died in 1959. his widow moved to Portland Parish in 1968 and never left. Now in her mid-80s, seh oversees a 720 hectare cattle ranch near Priestman’s River and still drives herself into town in an old SUV.

THE MOST POPULAR link to Porty’s bygone jet-set era may be the annual Port Antonio International Marlin Tournament, which first cast off a half-century ago. The boozy week long fishing competition brings boats from around the island, as well as nearby Haiti and the Cayman Islands, and teams from as far afield as Canada. Along the marina’s dock, the smell of fuel mixes with the peppery scent of jerk pork while reggae rhythms underscore countless exaggerations about the magnificent blue marlin. Fishermen crack their first cold beers at 8:15 a.m. forty minutes later, luxury power boats parade samrtly up the channel between Navy Island and Tichefiled Peninsula trhottle up when the starting gun is fired, and head to sea trailing rooster tails of foam.

When the boats vansih over the horizon there’s plenty of quiet time to explore Porty the low-slung town (population 15,000) is distinguished by grand, slightly musty  buildings, including the Gerogian-style former courthouse and DeMontevin Lodge, a gingerbread Victorian masnion where Frank Sinarta once bedded down. Along Porty’s narrow, shop-lined thoroughfares, Rastafarianmen push handcarts bursting with market ripe bananas and papayas, and local vendors hawk coconut water. Inside shed like Musgrave Market, a handful of souvenir sellers lunge behind a limited inventory of T-shirts and beach towels and patiently await the arrival of the day’s first customer.

Since the’60s, a succession of setbacks-the loss of the Titchfield Hotel to a fire; several crippling hurricanes; deteriorating roads-effectively spared Porty from mass tourism. The poor condition of the coastal highway, which was finally overhauled in 2009, turned the 96-kilometer trip from Kingston into a three-hour slog. That proved a mixed blessing. While intimidating all but the most determinded travelers, it also put off outside speculators and ruffians.

“We’ve never had a bank robbery here,” one local resident tells me. “Ever.” The single road to the outside world was simply too poor to allow a swift getaway.

While not a crime, the shabby condition of Frenchman’s Cove, considered the Caribbeans’s top resort in the 1960s, borders on the tragic. The beach here, nestled in a small cove east fo Port Anotnio, is still gorgeous. But villas that once welcomed such rarefield guests as Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip have been weathered over the course of the ensuing decades and can now be had at near-backpacker rates.

Yet the area is hardly ramshackle. Luxe villas hug the shoreline beside the crystalline waters of the Blue Hole lagoon, while the nearby hills of San San hide discrete, high-end properties like Geejam.

IN AFFABLE Jamaican fashion, the marlin tournament includes a day for local fishermen, who go to sea in open “canoes” (actually eight-meter fiberglass boats powered by 40 horse power engines). Just after sunrise erupts, more than 100 watermen crowd the narrow docks, checking colorful lures and coils of 136 kilograms-test fishing line. But canoes with wishful names such as Lucky Star never carry a compass, marine radio, or life preservers, even though most occupants can’t swim. “If the boat turns over, they’d rather drown quickly,” says tournament director Ron DuQusnay.

in like flynn, fafting excursions down the rio grande were first popularized by fun-loving Errol Flynn in the 1940s

While the locals are out wetting their lines, DuQuesnay, a Kingston surgeon, invites me up into the green mountain on the Rio Grande River. Farmers here once sent their bounty downriver on narrow bamboo rafts. The nErrol Flynn-him again-made a tourist attraction out of the voyage, which now begins at Berrydale and ends 12 kilometers later, where the Rio Grande meets the sea.

“We’d take about 10 rafts,” recalls Wymore Flynn. “We’d have the bar and food on one raft, and we’d take off early in the morning. There was no landing at the end, so we’d have to crawl up the bank at dusk, drunk as lords.”

Why mess with a good thing? Under DuQuesnay’s supervision, we load eight rafts with fishermen, coolers of beer, ice, and mixers for the Appleton rum the good doctor has prescribed. Raft captain Kenneth Irvin, who’s been poling down the Rio Grande for 40 years, pushes off from the story bank and expertly weaves through riffles and small rapids. The river valley is cloaked in bamboo and  unpopulated but for a few children catching crayfish and an enterprising woman who serves up a wood-fired feast of chicken stew, rice steamed in coconut milk, an salted cod with ackee.

The raft landing comes all too soon. But I’ve seen the river in fine, Flynn-like fashion (minus the naked girls he sometimes hired to preen on the rocks) and had a rummy epiphany: It’s impossible to believe that this erst while banana boom town and jet-set hideaway only mean that more travelers are bound to rediscover slice of the old-time Jamaica they may have thought only survived in vintage travel posters and old Harry Belafonte records.

“This destination went into sort of a slumber, and nothing much has happened,” says Shireen Aga, co-owner of Port Antonio intimate Hotel Mocking Bird Hill. “I think it’s on the verge of being a destination for Jamaica again. Life always goes in cycles, doesn’t it? You just have to live long enough.”

Getting There Numerous carries fly nonstop from hubs in Europe and the eastern United States to Montego Bay Jamaica’s tourist gateway. Port Antonio is about a 2.5 hour drive east along the North Coast Highway.

When to Go Jamaica’s peak tourist months are mid-November through April, on either side of the rairy season: lush Portland Parish receives the highest amount of precipitation on the island.

Where to Stay. Geejam San San; 876/993-7000 geejamhotel.com; doubles from US$495

Hotel Mocking Bird Hill 876/993-7134; hotelmockingbirdhill.com; double from US$155

What To Do Arrange custom tours of Porty and surrounds with Jamaica Explorations (jamaicaexplorations.com) Any local hotel can organize a Rio Grande rafting trip.