6

Am I the Only One Who Can’t Stand the Caribbean?

In the entire galaxy of travel, the greatest mystery to me is the Caribbean. Not the sea itself, which is aqua blue, clear, warm as bathwater, and nothing to complain about. It’s the islands above it and the people who travel there that baffle me.

Specifically, I find myself wondering why anyone—much less the 35 million people who go to the Caribbean each year—would blow presumably limited vacation days and budgets on a place where the definition of “paradise” is fluid enough to include sullen service, neglected hotels, and restaurants where waiting forty-five minutes for a small mango juice is considered an immense honor. The whole place needs a fresh coat of paint, a platoon of chefs who understand how to prepare seafood, and a ban on thirty-year-old white women having their hair cornrowed by fourteen-year-old black girls. This is just part of what makes the Caribbean the evil twin of Latin America—a wretched hole with an artificial culture that everyone has somehow been fooled into believing is a magnificent place to flush away their disposable income.

Give me five minutes and ten blank pages and I’ll roll out a list of beefs that will at last expose the Caribbean as the world’s largest tourist trap: mangrove swamps billed as exotic sightseeing opportunities, watered-down rum punch on sputtering catamaran cruises, “Hey, mon!” accents brought home by every third visiting frat boy, the tourist ant chain that daily crawls up Dunn’s River Falls at Ocho Rios in Jamaica, reggae music that doesn’t sound anything like Bob Marley.

Cathartic and childishly easy as it would be to give these observations the public airing they deserve, I realize these are easy targets with applicable counterparts in tourist destinations around the world. I could spend all weekend listing minor irritants of the region—conch and other low-tide gelatins as culinary mainstays, aggressive “guides” who badger tourists for work and payment at every corner, nothing-special duty-free shopping that turns ports like St. Thomas into sweaty outlet malls—but what would be the point?

Filling a chapter with a laundry list of complaints—hotel dinner buffets set out at noon to wilt in the tropical heat, Asian-made baskets pushed on bewildered visitors at the straw market in Nassau—wouldn’t convince anyone, as I’ve tried to do in the past, that the world should declare a travel moratorium on the Caribbean and give it the next decade off. Kind of the way no one went near Croatia after the war there or how you leave your hungover friends alone for a few days to get their game face back after a big night out. Everyone sees the birthday girl the night she turns twenty-one—no one sees her for the week after. Likewise, the Caribbean needs some alone time to put itself back together. It shouldn’t be that hard for 35 million people to find somewhere else to go for a while.

Building a convincing case out of such an extreme position might appear to demand a lot of thoughtful analysis. But if rabble-rousers like Mussolini, Rush Limbaugh, and Dr. Laura can construct entire careers out of crackpot observational zealotry, I don’t see why I shouldn’t give it a shot. Demagogues make a lot more money than travel writers.

 

Before presenting the brief on the pestilence of the Caribbean, it might be useful—if only in the interest of context and full disclosure—to list a few other beloved places I’m supposed to like, but don’t. These include but are not limited to:

Graceland: Or any Elvis kitsch. If the guy wasn’t overmarketed before, he is now. When exactly did Presley make the transition from American icon to White Trash icon? I blame the trustees in charge of marketing Graceland.

Most of Las Vegas: We went to the moon in 1969. Big fountains, replica pyramids, and endless rows of twenty-dollar craps tables aren’t that impressive. Nor is a city where you can’t walk to the building next door without burning six hundred calories.

Colorado: Give me a year in a proctologist’s waiting room, or even Utah, over a Midwestern state posing as a Western one, the soul-crushing blandness of Denver, and McCondos covering every other decent hillside.

Austin: Apologies to “Big Dick” Friedman, but if it wasn’t surrounded by Texas, it’d be called Sacramento.

New Zealand: Nice people, nice mountains, but unless you live in Australia, save yourself the time and trouble and visit British Columbia instead.

Baltimore’s waterfront: Or any once-relevant city’s $65 million downtown renovation project.

B&Bs: Whenever I see “B&B” on a Web site or brochure, I imagine sharing a bathroom with strangers, awkward chats with the owners, and “savoring” breakfast with a talkative couple from North Carolina.

Florida: Excluding Amelia Island and certain parts of the Gulf Coast and the Keys.

Yankee Stadium: When the new Yankee Stadium finally opens, the sports media will go on a yearlong caterwauling binge bidding farewell to the House That Ruth Built. Don’t believe a word. The stadium’s mid-1970s makeover destroyed whatever traces of authenticity were left in this claustrophobic rat hole. New Yorkers deserve a place to watch baseball that’s at least as good as what they have in cities like Milwaukee and Arlington.

Minor League Baseball parks: While I’m on the subject, it’s always annoyed me that as a baseball fan I’m obliged to revel in the purity of the remarkably dull product you get in these temples of the mundane.

St. Tropez, France: Amazing how shit service and one lousy dinner can put you off a city for good. And, really, how many $23 million yachts do you need to look at to feel crappy about your life of chronic underachievement?

Distillery and brewery tours: Hey, they make booze in giant vats! Who knew?

Natchez, Mississippi: Impressive mansions, but any slave-state locale that runs glory-days “heritage tours” should take me off their mailing list.

Eric Clapton: OK, not an actual place, but I’ve been needing to unburden myself of this for years. I suppose it’s not Eric Clapton’s fault that he’s the most overrated guitarist in history, but the fact is twelve-bar blues is the absolute most basic and boring musical form ever invented. Wonder why every bar in America can put on an impromptu “Monday Night Blues Jam” and have half the failed musicians in town show up and put together a set that actually sounds pretty good? Ten-year-olds can play blues scales. If you want to make a god of a white British blues guitarist from the 1960s and ’70s, take Peter Haycock from Climax Blues Band. Start with the perfect guitar solos in “Running Out of Time” from 1975’s seminal Stamp Album, then move on to 1976’s Gold Plated. On the topic of unpopular rock guitar opinions, the guitar solo in “My Sharona” is one of the greatest in rock history, right up there with “Free Bird” and “Stairway,” and you don’t even know the name of the guy who played it, which is Berton Averre. This observation says more about the nature of rudimentary rock guitar competency than it does about Jimmy Page, Allen Collins, Gary Rossington, or the Knack.

So that no one comes away with the impression that I’m a joyless crank except when listening to my complete collection of Climax Blues Band recordings, here are some places I like but am pretty sure I’m not supposed to:

Utah

Queens

Orange County

Interstates

El Paso/Juarez

Caracas

Singapore

Manila

Volgograd

Hotel beds in dumpy cities, flicking channels till four in the morning.

That Wilson Phillips song that goes, “Hold on for one more day.”

To help me better understand why I like presumably lame things like “Hold on for one more day” yet hate presumably awesome things like the Caribbean, I decided it would be helpful to speak with a person who actually likes the place. I concede enormous holes in my knowledge of the Caribbean, and it’s possible I’ve simply had a run of bad luck down there, somehow managed to miss the best parts. In a remote, rational corner of my brain, I know the entire Caribbean can’t be reduced to those annoying Red Stripe “Hooray, beer” ads and the dead reef at Buck Island off of St. Croix used to lure “ecotourists” on fish-free snorkeling excursions. I decided to call David Swanson.

Already I’ve gone out of my way to complain about travel writers, and I’m going to do a little more before I’m through. David Swanson, however, isn’t the type of travel writer I complain about. He’s a solid reporter and good writer who’s more interested in presenting facts about a place than details about himself. Like all people of maddening contradictions and redoubtable hypocrisy, I apply a double standard when it comes to narcissism and self-indulgence in my own writing.

David and I have one of those convenient relationships that was established on the phone and Internet and remains entirely outside the physical realm. Based solely on the sound of his voice, I’ve constructed a picture of David—about five ten, well dressed, fifteen or twenty pounds overweight, brown hair over the ears, and a beard that’s always neatly trimmed, though not irritatingly so. David and I have spent enough time discussing business that we’re comfortable talking about superficial personal stuff, but I’m not sure if it’s fair to say we’re friends.

Most relevant to my immediate purposes, David has a ton of experience where I do not. He’s made a career of the Caribbean. Written entire guidebooks covering the region. Been a contributing editor to the Rum and Reggae series of travel books. Works for magazines like Caribbean Travel & Life. By his own accounting, he’s been to every island in the Caribbean that has a hotel room, and then some. Most astonishing, after all that schlepping through what I consider a miasmic hellscape, he claims to retain positive feelings for the region.

Although I hadn’t had much contact with David in the past year or two, I observed the absolute minimum of perfunctory telephone niceties before launching into the nuts and bolts of the issue. My appeal went like this:

“David, in the past I haven’t been entirely honest with you about my feelings toward the Caribbean. This is because I know that the Carib has pretty much been your bread and butter, and I don’t see the point in unnecessarily criticizing another person’s work. That would be rude. In many situations I’d rather lie than be troublesome. For example, I’m not a fan of antidepressants, and I worry that our nation’s doctors, as willing dupes of the pharmaceutical industry, have tricked a dangerously large percentage of Americans into a nefarious addiction that’s secretly intended to keep them dependent on the government-supported corporate drug lords for the rest of their lives. Nevertheless, in the company of my good friend Dr. Bahr, I do the best I can to stick to conversation topics like New Mexican folk art, how cute his baby daughter is, and how much I’d love someday to visit his villa off the coast of Sicily. Same thing, sort of, that’s kept me from revealing to you how intensely I dislike the Caribbean, how much pretrip stress I endure every time someone wants to send me there and I say ‘yes’ because, like you, I understand that as a freelance writer to decline work is to invite death. Whereas accepting work in the Caribbean is more like inviting an extremely uncomfortable illness, such as the flu or a persistent bronchial infection. The point is that I’m now engaged in a sort of legal discovery, a serious attempt to examine and understand my feelings of contempt for the Caribbean. In doing so, I’d like to confront the possibility that I might actually be wrong—it’s happened, have we ever discussed Super Bowl XXXVII?—that the Caribbean might not be as intolerable as I’ve built it up to be. Would you agree to engaging me in a discussion, consider it a friendly debate, in which you take the pro-Caribbean point of view and try to persuade me and an imaginary jury that I’m wrong, that the Caribbean is indeed a fabulous destination that deserves my sincere reconsideration?”

David agreed to accept my challenge, with one proviso. “Just don’t make me look like a shill for the Caribbean Tourism Organization,” he asked. I assured him I would not. I had no idea how easy a promise it would be to keep.

 

I’d called David on the kind of rainy, chilly Pacific Northwest day that’s supposed to make people pine for sandy beaches, tropical breezes, and cheap rum made by companies they never heard of. I came out swinging with my well-rehearsed rant about the surly locals I’ve run into on every Caribbean island I’ve visited. I told David I didn’t want to sound insensitive—and, yes, I know that whenever someone begins a sentence with “No offense, but,” someone is about to get offended—but the white races pretty much populated the Caribbean by forcing Africans there in slave ships, and that although slavery has been abolished for well over a century, the economic die was more or less permanently cast. This means that the people who live on the islands today seem to be stuck there doing pretty much the same thing their ancestors did. Namely, serving a bunch of (comparatively) rich white people and not getting a whole lot in return. It’s not that I blame the locals for not liking me. I’d feel exactly the same way and probably behave even worse if our roles were reversed. It’s just that I don’t see the fun in traveling to a place where I’m treated with open disdain.

Toss out blunt commentary like this and you typically get back a stern lecture about racial stereotyping and the implication that in a former life you were most likely a shift supervisor at Buchenwald. David merely chuckled politely, ignored my more inflammatory rhetoric, and told me he sympathized.

“It varies by island, but there is some truth in what you’re saying,” he said. “There’s a certain burnout factor, even in hotels where I stay, when I realize that I will be the one doing the work in every relationship.”

Exactly, I said. So why would anyone want to travel to a place where even the clerk at the hotel makes them scratch and claw for a shred of humanity?

“Well, you have to adapt and that’s true of any destination,” David responded. “It’s not fair for you to assume, for example, that what goes in Seattle necessarily goes in Paris. You wouldn’t wear the same clothes to a coffee shop in Paris as you would in Seattle, and you shouldn’t expect to.”

Paris seemed like a long way to go to defend the honor of the Caribbean. And it annoyed me that like everyone else David reduced the whole of the glorious Pacific Northwest to “Seattle” and once again assumed that I lived there, even though I never have. I chalked up a point for my side and moved on to my next complaint: the Caribbean’s ubiquitous freelance “guides” who work the islands with the mean-spirited tenacity of NFL cornerbacks. You can’t walk forty yards from a dock or runway without being accosted by an army of belligerents, each one insisting that you’re incapable of so much as buying a T-shirt at the palm-roofed gift shack down the street without their assistance. David laughed again and told me he knew what I meant.

“My first experience in the Caribbean was in Jamaica about twenty years ago,” he began in a gentle tone that I assumed presaged a story with a surprise ending. “We stayed in Montego Bay. The first morning we left the hotel, and this guy on the street came up and asked us if we wanted a guide. We said no. Long story short, we ended up spending the next eight hours with this guy, walking in the rain, buying him lunch, meeting his uncles, taking them all out for beers.

“One thing I tell everyone, don’t ever admit it’s your first time in Jamaica. If someone asks if it’s your first time on the island, just say no. They’re more likely to leave you alone, because they assume you know the scams. If you say yes, you get a different line of patter.”

This was interesting information and sound advice, but I didn’t feel like it refuted my charge. Two-oh. We’d been on the phone five minutes, and already David was playing from behind.

I took a chance on a knockout blow with an argument that’s always tricky, because while it’s emotionally impossible to disagree with, it can be blown out of the water with a fairly simple accusation that the person making it is an arrogant snob. To wit: All the best beaches in the Caribbean have been ruined by tourists. And by “tourists” I mean beaten-down worker drones from the Northeast corridor of the United States who flee the winter snowstorms of their homeland to “recharge their batteries” on some presumably lustrous beach, only to find that getting drunk and high and staring at hotties in thongs for five days in places more beautiful than the one they live in doesn’t reinvigorate them at all, it only makes them even more profoundly resentful of the job/life/spouse they’ll soon be returning to. David replied by telling me the story of Tortola.

Five or six years ago, he said, people on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands looked across the ten miles of water that separates them from more prosperous St. Thomas. Taking stock of the obvious inequity, they came to the conclusion that the citizens of St. Thomas were able to buy large-screen TVs and new cars because that island attracted more cruise ships. The cruise ships dispensed more tourists who pumped more money into St. Thomas businesses, which in turn employed more St. Thomas residents.

Seizing upon this most fundamental premise of the trickle-down Caribbean economy, Tortola came up with the idea of expanding its own cruise-ship facilities. They went to work and quickly increased their port’s maximum docking capacity from one or two medium-sized cruise ships a day to three large ones. Their efforts were successful. Cruise-ship tourist arrivals in sleepy Tortola leaped from 203,000 in 2001 to 467,000 in 2004. The twenty-one-square-mile island didn’t get any bigger, but in three years its number of annual visitors more than doubled.

“Tourists spend their nights on the ship, but they need help once they’re in town,” David said. “As a result you’ve suddenly got a lot more taxi drivers in Tortola. And just like in St. Thomas, the taxi drivers pretty much run the main towns. They form strong political groups. Their votes count and they vote for whatever puts more people in their taxis.”

I asked David what this meant in practical terms.

“Ten years ago, Cane Garden Bay on Tortola had one of the most beautiful beaches in the Caribbean,” he said. “Now, locals are cashing in with wall-to-wall beach chairs rented for five dollars a day to cruise-ship passengers. I went there and literally couldn’t see the sand anymore. I asked locals about the development and felt like I was talking to the Mafia. I was told to butt out. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘there goes another one.’”

I’m not challenging anyone’s desire to own a gigantic TV or make their life easier by renting a beach chair to a guy from Philly. If Tortola wants to jam up its beaches this way, fine. I’ve never been to Tortola and couldn’t care less how they run their show. It’s just that I’d come into this discussion not understanding how a Mafia-run beach with no visible sand and five hundred guys in matching black socks manages to attract almost half a million tourists a year, and I wasn’t getting any closer to figuring it out.

 

By now I was feeling sorry for David. I’d known all along I was drawing him into an unfair fight, but at this point I liked the Caribbean even less than I had before calling him. This wasn’t what either of us wanted. The only noble thing to do before letting him off the phone was lob him a softball that would allow him to save a little face and not piss off the Caribbean Tourism Organization too badly. I trotted out my old line about the entire Caribbean needing a fresh coat of paint and ten years without tourists, figuring he’d seize the opportunity to tell me about some of the pristine new condo developments and golf courses and all-inclusive resorts opening across the islands. Instead, he began talking about an oil refinery and a cemetery.

“Curaçao is an island I like,” he said. “It’s written off by most people because it’s not lush and green and filled with resorts. In the middle of Curaçao is a big oil refinery that belches soot all day. Right next to the oil refinery is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the New World. It’s called Beth Haim cemetery. It was established in 1659. This place is like hell on earth. It sends chills up my spine. Because of all the soot, the gravestones are eroding so badly you can’t even read a lot of the names.”

David put a bow on this enchanting package by saying something that I immediately made him repeat. I did so because I knew as soon as I quoted him, it would sound like something I made up in order to pound home a baseless rhetorical point. The expert I’d called to explain the lure of the Caribbean actually said of an oil refinery, a cemetery, and a collection of decaying headstones: “It’s one of the coolest places I’ve been in the Caribbean.”

If it didn’t change my mind about the Caribbean, our conversation did remind me why I rely on writers like David Swanson for travel information. Not because they confirm things I already know—it didn’t surprise me that the best thing about the Caribbean is a culturally significant oil refinery—but because they’re not interested in changing my mind. They like what they like, they give me the basics, and they don’t get uppity if I disagree.

Figuring any more discussion about the Caribbean was pointless, I began asking David how the family was doing and about his recent trip to Dubai. We chatted awhile along these lines, but he kept circling back to the Caribbean. I began to sense that I’d overestimated his willingness to concede the argument. After misdirecting me with a few innocuous anecdotes from Middle Eastern hotels, he swooped in for the kill.

“If we break down your opinions point by point, maybe we can isolate the source of your hostility toward the Caribbean,” he suggested. I’ve never been to counseling, but this is how I imagine they start you off. For the first time in our discussion, I was on the defensive. “You like sunshine and warm weather and sparkling water and you will admit that not every Caribbean beach is a shithole, right?”

I allowed that most of this was probably true.

“You may have run into jaded tourist-industry touts in Jamaica or Trinidad or wherever, but you’ve encountered those types all the way from Bangkok to Belgium, and you wouldn’t condemn an entire nation of people based on the actions of a money-grubbing few, would you?”

I told him that I’d never met a Belgian I didn’t like—most underrated country in Europe, by the way—but that his point was valid. Gaining confidence, David went on dissecting my knee-jerk assessments and comically limited point of view for another minute or two before hitting on what he considered to be the essence of my objections.

“Most of the tourist complaining I hear about the Caribbean is about the visible poverty there, and I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that,” he sniffed. “Most of the issues you bring up ultimately have to do with economics—it takes five minutes of research online to figure out how low the per capita income is for most of these islands. If you’re going to travel in a place where poverty exists, you’re going to have to take it as it comes. There’s something appealing about the soft crumbling of old Havana. It feels like history is happening right in front of you. If you can’t appreciate that, fine. But hating a place just because it’s poor is wrong.”

If I’d let him go on five seconds longer he’d have me nominated in a Republican primary somewhere, but I appreciated his sentiment. It took thirty minutes of talking, but David had finally helped me put a finger on the real reason I’ve disliked the Caribbean for all these years. Only it isn’t because I hate poor people.

 

One of my first trips to the Caribbean was to Casa de Campo, a sprawling resort on the southeastern tip of the Dominican Republic that “boasts” (God, these self-fellating travel-industry euphemisms) three golf courses, nine restaurants, sixteen pools, 350 rooms, and 150 villas. Along with most other reputable guides, Fodor’s will tell you that Casa de Campo is the Dominican Republic’s “swankiest and most famous resort.” It’s the kind of rarefied retreat where megawattage celebrities like Michael Jackson might sneak off to get married—which the then King of Pop had done just recently with Lisa Marie Presley. Within hours of my arrival at Casa de Campo, our guided tour of the grounds stopped for a reverential moment in front of the luxurious casita in which the future not-guilty child enthusiast and the Queen of Deadpan had done one of pop history’s most puzzling deeds.

I was working at the time for American Way, the in-flight magazine of American Airlines. The reason for my trip was to help publicize the fact that the airline was inaugurating direct service from Miami to the resort itself. This meant Casa de Campo’s discriminating guests no longer had to fly into the impoverished Dominican capital of Santo Domingo, then endure a two-hour drive through the countryside to the resort. They could board a plane in Florida and step off a few hours later surrounded by orchids and lackeys. To highlight this historic moment, the first commercial jet to land on the resort’s newly modified runway was greeted by a brass band, dancing sexpots, and white-shirted waiters who marched onto the tarmac bearing trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres for disembarking passengers.

The whole boondoggle was a classic media junket. In addition to me, a number of airline PR people, and my girlfriend, Joyce, whom I’d somehow managed to get on the guest list, a gaggle of travel writers had been invited along for the trip. There was a far-too-serious staffer from a major daily newspaper in the South, a pair of pudgy homemakers from California who’d become travel-writing pros by accepting whatever free trips came their way in exchange for effusive reviews no matter how lousy the accommodations, two or three amusing-in-that-jaded-sort-of-way magazine freelancers, and one or two other shadowy scribes whose affiliations and motives I can’t recall.

For most of a week, all of us were herded around by a rambunctious PR flack from Atlanta who kept us on a bustling schedule—7:00 AM breakfast, 7:45 AM meeting with pool manager, 8:00 AM reception with assistant vice-minister of tourism, 9:30 AM viewing of tribal pottery artisans at work. That sort of torture. The PR flack resembled a sun-wrinkled version of the character actress Annette O’Toole, famous for her role as Nick Nolte’s stressed-out girlfriend in 48 Hours and, later, more than twenty appearances on Nash Bridges.³

Beyond her looks, the PR flack’s distinguishing habit was of proudly reminding her hostage entourage every thirty minutes that her Latin lover of the moment was an extraordinarily passionate jazz flutist renowned throughout the Dominican Republic. Her skill at working this information into virtually any conversation was so impressive that it served as an ongoing point of discussion and ridicule among the entire group. One of the highlights of the trip came on the final night when the evening activity turned out to be a concert by none other than the jazz flutist himself—an inside booking if ever there was one—a man whose nonironic, sensual relationship with his instrument was later channeled with more subdued attention to form by Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy in Anchorman.

Casa de Campo is so big and its guests generally so rich and lazy that everyone gets around the grounds via personal golf carts. Even if you aren’t rich and lazy, this is actually pretty cool, except that Joyce and I kept getting issued carts that broke down, requiring us to call guest services at least once a day to come pick us up from some isolated corner of the property. Annette O’Toole lost a little patience with me each time she heard about this, rolling her eyes as though I was trying to make the resort look bad by stranding myself on rocky shores, miles away from the dessert station at the Mango Tango pool. My standing was further eroded by Joyce’s freeloading insistence on ordering lobster at every meal, including breakfast.

Mostly, though, Casa de Campo turned out to be almost as spectacular as we were constantly being reminded it was. We were plied with free booze and all the local cigars we could cough through. Although the staff was Carib desultory—seriously, forty-five minutes for a fucking mango juice?—there wasn’t much beyond the derelict golf carts and jazz flute to complain about.

The memorable part of the trip came on the day Joyce and I rented a car and drove across the island. We were headed to another resort I was researching for a story on overseas honeymoon destinations I’d talked about with an editor at the now-defunct Mademoiselle. Sometimes, the only way to get back at a place for making you have coffee at eight in the morning with the assistant vice-minister of tourism is to sell a two-hundred-word blurb touting one of their competitors.

The moment we exited the guarded gate at Casa de Campo, we had the sensation of entering a new world, like the moment when The Wizard of Oz shifts from black and white to color. Part of this had to do with liberating ourselves from Annette O’Toole’s itinerary, but most of it had to do with finally seeing an actual living, breathing piece of the Dominican Republic. The national highway and rugged countryside stood in epic contrast to the fussily manicured resort. Yellow, green, and blue shacks with peeling paint and corrugated tin roofs lined the highway. Scraggly goats wandered through barren fields nosing around for clumps of dry grass. Groups of young men loitered at virtually every corner staring at the wealth and prestige zipping past them with the windows rolled up against the suffocating heat. We felt for the first time that we were visiting a foreign country. It wasn’t necessarily a pretty scene, but it was real.

I don’t mean “real” here in the self-important tour-guide sense of some mythical place that presumably represents the “real” Kenya or the “real” Norway, a remnant of authenticated nostalgiana somehow left untrammeled by centuries of tourism. One of my favorite examples of this type of travel-writer disconnect with reality came out of AAA’s Essential London guidebook, which I reviewed for a magazine some years ago. Like an appalling amount of others in the guidebook genre, it was full of useless advice such as the bit instructing readers on “10 Ways to Be a Local,” one of which was “Eat in one of London’s few surviving pie ’n’ mash shops.” If only a few such shops remain, of course, it stands to reason that not many of London’s 12 million locals are eating much pie ’n’ mash. But never mind, this was the “real” London according to AAA.

If tourism applies artificial respiration to traditions like pie ’n’ mash and Dominican folk dancing, I suppose that makes these things no less “authentic” than anything else. Even so, in this case, I use “real” per its traditional Webster’s definition, as in “not fake.” And fake is what Casa de Campo had become as soon as the scent of bougainvillea and Amaretto-soaked cigarillos faded in our exhaust fumes.

Our dalliance with the “real” DR lasted only a few hours. We stopped and paid a dollar or two for lunch. We chatted with a few people, all of them pleasant. We took some interesting pictures of a donkey painted like a zebra that also happened to be sporting a massive erection. Alas, these were pleasures enjoyed in haste. We had a schedule to keep.

At the resort across the island, which was almost as impressive as Casa de Campo, Joyce and I were scheduled for a dinner that turned out to be both the most romantic and most uncomfortable of our lives. While hundred-dollar wines and four-star dinner plates arrived at our candlelit table in a small island at the center of a man-made pond, a group of Eastern European violinists, cellists, and Baroque oboists floated around in a rowboat serenading us with a selection of classical numbers meant to complement our dinner in paradise. Because I was a visiting writer with loose ties to large-circulation American magazines, the scene had been carefully prepared to show me the unparalleled luxury available at the resort. With the fantastic dishes, respectable service, and floating musicians, Joyce and I should theoretically have spent the meal semidiscreetly feeling each other up under the table before rushing back to our honeymoon suite overlooking the beach and humping like safari animals.

The trouble was, the resort’s director of marketing, a congenial Dutch woman in her early thirties, was joining us for dinner. With a superlative forced smile glued to her face all evening, our perky host spent the meal breaking down the fascinating details of the resort’s golf course (I have no idea who Pete Dye is, but he must be rich as Croesus because everywhere I go he’s designed another golf course), its new family-friendly package deals, top-flight chefs imported from the best culinary schools in France, and other property renovations (always with the property renovations) that totaled in the tens of millions. I’d suffered through these obligatory PR meals before. Even so, my mind was as dull as a butter knife by the end of the soup course. Glassy-eyed across the table, Joyce appeared to be taxidermied.

The meal lasted three and a half hours. Everything Mozart ever scribbled on a napkin was performed. The Dutch woman didn’t get up once, not even to go to the bathroom. (Glasser wisdom: Never trust a woman with an iron bladder.) There was, of course, no way to ditch her so that Joyce and I might enjoy the lilting tones of Bach’s Concerto No. 3 in G Major while plotting unspeakable acts of sexual exploration over the gratis veal cutlets and vintage Pol Roger. She was just doing her job, which meant making sure the hotel’s visiting VIPs saw exactly what they were supposed to see and not much else. By the time dessert arrived, I was so exhausted from manipulating the demands of professional flattery that I couldn’t eat. One of the problems with accepting comps at swanky resorts is that you end up paying for them with dinners so boring they leave you wanting to scrape your own face off with a souvenir conch shell.

 

Among the great joys of travel is catching a break and dropping into a situation you might otherwise never be able to afford. Circumstance puts an unexpected first-class ticket in your hand. A friend of a friend just happens to need someone to look after his Mediterranean estate the very week you were planning a tour of Greek youth hostels. As a gift at the end of a job editing a travel guide, a publisher once presented me with a three-night stay at the famed Danieli Hotel overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. Joyce and I clung to every second of it.

In the event that luck doesn’t favor us, most travelers are willing, on occasion, to pony up egregious sums to feel, even if just for a sweet, fleeting moment, the intoxicating freedom from financial constraints only the very rich can appreciate. Limousine services, for example, pander to the splurge instinct intrinsic in these illusions of momentary affluence. Most of us suffer financially at some point for binges of extravagance, but, on the whole, the mirage is worthwhile.

Not in the Caribbean. Had the director of marketing not joined us at the table, I might have enjoyed the dinner with the classical music more, but I still wouldn’t have been completely comfortable. The drive across the island had brought the economic disparity of the Caribbean into ugly focus. It wasn’t the poverty that offended me. It was the adjacent luxury behind guarded gates. It wasn’t hard to figure out which side of the fence the waiters and busboys would be going home to once dinner was over. The average Dominican earns sixty-three hundred dollars a year; unemployment is at 17 percent; one of every four people lives below the poverty line.

Talking to David Swanson about the Dominican Republic helped me realize after all these years exactly what it is about the Caribbean that I don’t like. Brochures, magazines, and TV ads sell luxury and comfort, but the product ends up being a stark reminder of the world’s dreadful injustices. Going to the Caribbean isn’t like going to Cameroon or India, because those are places you know are going to be fucked up before you even get there. Disheartening as they are, reminders of America’s affluence vis-à-vis much of the rest of the world—kids with distended bellies, open sewers, cardboard shantytowns that stretch for miles—are good for us to face. Americans could stand a few more buckets of cold reality splashed on us. Just not when we’re supposed to be in “paradise.”

Harsh as it might sound, I don’t want to spend a week sunbathing in a place with a cultural foundation so poisonous that even the pirates who made the place famous didn’t stay long. Call it white guilt if you like, but I’ve watched people of every possible ethnic designation lord their wealth and status over the local plebes. No race does it any better or worse than the other.

It’s not that I feel the need to turn away from poverty. Manila is one of my favorite cities in the world, and conditions there can be as bleak as anywhere. Same goes for Rio de Janeiro. It’s just that pockets of extravagance in the midst of widespread destitution depress me. If you’re selling me luxury, give me luxury, not a reminder that my comfort comes at the expense of someone else’s poverty. If that’s what I want out of a vacation, I’ll invite Sally Struthers along.

 

Following the breakthrough articulation of my Caribbean complaint, David suggested I give the islands one more look. He said he knew the perfect place.

“It’s on their license plates and, yes, it’s a cliché, but Aruba really is ‘One Happy Island,’” he said. “People there are generally friendly and warm. But that’s not why I think you’d like it.”

David told me that a recurring complaint among Caribbean travelers concerns places that fail to keep the region’s essential promise: escape. “I grew up in California and at first I didn’t get the Caribbean, either,” he said. “Then I moved to Boston and experienced blizzards. I started looking at the brochures and posters in airline office windows with a little more appreciation.”

As Caribbean tourism expanded and competition between islands became fierce, he explained, offerings became more elaborate. Golf. Eco-tourism. Native culture. In the beginning, though, the masses didn’t go to the Caribbean for the activities or culture. They went there because of the blizzards in Boston.

“The degree to which each island delivers on the Caribbean’s original promise varies,” David told me. “Aruba has always remained true to the basic message. It doesn’t promise you anything more than sun, a beach, and a clean bed. That’s it, that’s what they give you, and they do a great job with it. I’m always delighted to write a favorable review of Aruba.”

After David and I finished talking, I did some research on Aruba. I was surprised to learn that it gets about a million American tourists a year. That makes it the fifth- or sixth-most visited island in the Caribbean, depending on whether or not you still hold the Revolución against Cuba.

In books and online, Aruba looks pretty basic. Crowds of tourists, cruise ships, car traffic, fast-food chains, casinos, shopping. Not exactly the classic image that springs to mind when someone says “Caribbean.” Which is why I sent David an e-mail a few days later telling him that if I do go back to the Caribbean, Aruba is going to be my first stop. Just as soon as someone buys me a ticket.