by Polly Thomas and Adam Vaitilingam   page 130

Portland Accommodation  Jamaica Heights Resort, Spring Bank Road , Tel.993 3305 Mellow guesthouse that offers excellent value in a great location high up in the hills, with its own 'private' river and waterfall, as well as a small pool. Taxis from town charge around J$ 200.

[star] Jamaica Heights Resort, Spring Bank Rd, Port Antonio, Jamaica, WI. Tel. 876/993-3305. Fax 876/993-3563. e-mail: aaaja@cwjamaica.com . 8 units. $60-$75 double. No credit cards.
If you're not particularly adventurous, and if a bland, mass-produced motel beside an interstate highway is your idea of a great vacation, this is definitely not the hotel for you. But if you're looking for a hyper-sophisticated retreat where you might run into a band of holidaymaking rock stars from Düsseldorf, a team of avant-garde filmmakers cranking out tomorrow's cult film, or a place where your artistic hopes and dreams might actually be encouraged and nurtured, this might be the place for you. It's set at the top of a rutted and very steep series of roads, the best of which were privately built by the very worldly and attractively jaded owner, Helmut Steiner, former professor of philosophy and literature in Berlin, who built the place between 1984 and 1996 after skippering his own sailboat around the world. (He awoke one morning after a circumnavigation of Cuba and a nighttime entrance into Port Antonio, and became entranced with his view of the surrounding hills.) Today, with his wife Charmaine and their two children, he maintains the funkiest, most amusing, and most hyper-hip guesthouse in town. Scattered amid the wedge-shaped eight-acre property are a half-dozen buildings, each white-walled with blue shutters, artfully scattered gazebos, masses of climbing vines, and a Moghul-inspired pavilion that was specifically designed for meditating over views of the forested terrain that cascades down to Port Antonio's harbor. Amid sturdy retaining walls that might remind you of a postmodern version of a castello in Italy, you'll find a garden of exotic palms, a gurgling stream with its own waterfalls, the most elegant ping-pong pavilion in the world, and dozens of botanical oddities imported from around the world. Accommodations are spotlessly clean, evoking feelings that are both nautical and minimalist-the kind of place where you might improve both your yoga skills and interpersonal friendships. Each has a four-poster bed and unusual lighting fixtures whose rays filter through soldered-together computer circuit boards. Doors can be opened or closed within this scattered hotel to create suites with between two and four bedrooms. Don't overlook the possibility of renting the entire compound for a worldly, and ultra-private retreat at a place that's much, much more iconoclastic than what you might have found at a typical hotel or guesthouse.
Dining/Entertainment: There's an in-house restaurant that's open only to residents of the hotel and their guests, a swimming pool, a riverfront gazebo for swimming, and the possibility, through Helmut, of arranging any of the land- or watersports available in the surrounding region.