The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
When the pandemic changed her holiday plans, Mariella Frostrup discovered Geejam in Jamaica
With immediate escape mired in difficulty but the world at some point – surely – our oyster, the burning question is where to take that first bite. Anyone who has read Marlon James’s Booker-winning A History of Seven Killings, or watched The Harder They Come without subtitles, will agree Jamaican patois has its challenges, but topping my wish-list is the tangled, tropical backwater of Port Antonio on the island’s north-east coast. Errol Flynn declared it more beautiful than any woman he had met (though having bragged he had slept with 10,000, his memory could have been hazy).
The Hollywood heart-throb and I have an experience in common. Both of us moored up in this Jamaican backwater as a result of misadventure. For Flynn, an incoming storm in 1946 drove him to seek safe harbour on his yacht Zaca, a fateful decision that led to him buying up a big chunk of this overlooked parish of paradise. For a decade it flourished as the Hollywood Ratpack hotspot “Portie”, making sense of the Errol Flynn Marina in the town today.
For me it was storms of a pandemic kind that washed me up there, when an ill-fated bolt for Jamaica in between lockdowns last Christmas went badly wrong. My relief at escaping the Coviddominated British winter turned to deep regret within seconds of landing at Kingston, when health department officials boarded our plane and told us the law had changed while we were in mid-air, thanks to the new Kent variant. All passengers on this last British Airways flight out were to be shipped to an unknown destination, quarantined for two days and tested.
The 48-hour lockup in a disused Sandals hotel was made bearable by charming staff hurriedly recalled to work, but once released our troubles were not over. As passengers on what local media described as a plague plane (20 people out of 370 tested positive), our negative tests didn’t stop us being persona non grata at our intended destination: GoldenEye.
Forced out on Christmas Eve, we took a friend’s recommendation of a newly expanded boutique hotel (and a closely guarded secret), two hours up the north coast. That is how we found ourselves at Geejam, set up by two British music business veterans, Jon Baker and Steve Beaver, with the dream of enticing the world’s biggest stars to Jamaica’s coolest studio.
It’s a feat they have pulled off with aplomb. What began as a residential recording studio with a few rustic cabanas in the garden is now a 19-room hotel with modern suites, chic white interiors and a lovingly curated array of photographs of past island life. As you would expect of a venue that has hosted
Amy Winehouse, Alicia Keys, Drake, and Florence and the Machine, the experience is more akin to staying at a private club full of the coolest crowd, with DJs and rappers, painters and professionals all regulars.
We took refuge in Panorama, a villa high above the sea, which is part of the Geejam estate. Typical of the low-key charm of the place, no one mentioned that it had been the favoured vacation home of Audrey Hepburn. These days the décor of the 1950s-style bungalow is raptastic: there’s even a grand piano in the glass living room. An open-plan kitchen and four bedroom suites open on to a lawned garden and pool with views over the Sargasso Sea.
Like Geejam itself, it is a blast of modernity in an area where old Jamaica still lingers enticingly in the pool halls and rums shacks, the roti bars, latenight shebeens and dance halls that are revealed to incomers on a need-toknow basis. Allowed to take only local exercise until the last two days of our trip, we had little chance to enjoy rafting the Rio Grande, made famous by Flynn. But we did make it to the sea, paying $10 each to spend the day at Frenchman’s Cove, once favoured by Hollywood royalty.
It has one of the most breathtaking beaches in the world, enjoyed on our New Year’s Day visit with a barbecue. Unique for the slow-moving, jadegreen creek that slides into the sea, it is perfect for a cooling dip after battling the cove’s breakers. Swinging on a rope swing over the creek, it struck me that all my favourite adventures have begun with mishap, perhaps because bad times can so easily switch to good. It’s a salutary lesson for our times.