How To Invite Strange Men To Your Hotel Room

On hanging out with strangers in foreign countries and living to tell the stories.

Welcome to CHAPTER FIVE of my island memoirs, originally published in 2011 and adapted to include current times and life situations. Each chapter is free to read for the first week and then it’ll drop behind a paywall. Coconuts are free…rum is not 🍹

When it comes to sun destinations, there are two types of travellers:

🏖️The type who land, roll out a towel and sit on the beach until day 7 when it’s time to fly home….OR…

🧭The type with ants in their pants who cannot stay put because there’s a whole country beneath their feet that’s begging to be discovered.

If I were Type A, this entire story would have ended before it began.

Winter of 2006 was my fifth trip to the island and the first time I’d be celebrating my birthday there. The thought of returning to the same town I’d already seen several times felt like such a waste of money.

However, this time I was travelling 100% solo, which is scary when you’ve chosen a new town where you know absolutely no one.

By this time, I’d been a regular member of the Jamaica chat forum (mentioned in Chapter 4) for quite some time, so I used other trusted members as lifelines. Plenty of them had been to Ocho Rios a time or two, enough to give me a few pointers on where to stay and who to call for a ride.

I had no idea what “Ochi” had to offer, but I was sure excited to find out!

Ocho Rios is 3 hours away from where I had been on my first few trips. I couldn’t rely on anyone in a new location.

One member gave me the phone number of a local taxi driver in Ochi, assuring me that he was super friendly, trustworthy, and fair-priced. Perfect. But I also wanted to try meeting people who might like to shoot pool or go clubbing, and I didn’t want to count on a random taxi driver to entertain me.

So, what did I do?

Got on my clunky old desktop computer and hit up Myspace. 😆 Remember the days before Facebook? Don’t laugh. It served its purpose.

I logged on and executed a general search for Jamaicans in the Ocho Rios area. With nothing to go on, I just kept flipping through photos until I stumbled onto the profile with the biggest smile. This dude had to be friendly with a smile like that!!

I’m not even joking when I say that all I did was send the following message to this guy named Cliff: