Negril Dislikes

There is tons to like about Negril Beach, Jamaica, and I'll be writing about all of these things on this website. By the same token, there were some things that I didn't like as well. Some might only be important to me. Yet, if you know about them, and they are important to you during your visit, this page might help prepare you.

The largest ashtray:

You can smoke almost anywhere in Negril: in the restaurants, the stores, the sidewalks, the bars, and of course, on beautiful Negril Beach.

I am puzzled, then, that so many folks come to lay in a chaise lounge on this beach-of-all-beaches, smoke, and then toss their matches, empty lighters, and cigarette butts everywhere on the very sand they have come to enjoy?

I have watched beach lounger after beach lounger light up, enjoy their smoke, and then reach down and butt yet another cigarette into the sand, leaving them there, like burnt scattered pegs, some lipstick imprinted, in a miniature croquet game. It ain't pretty.

I have to ask; why do so many smokers use this gorgeous beach as a butt can? There's no shortage of empty Red Stripe beer bottles sitting in or on the garbage tins near the beach. I've contributed one or two empty bottles to that collection, for sure. In fact, at the end of most days, a bunch of us would collect all the empties we could find and put them out on the beach. Local folks would pick them up every night and return them for some much welcome cash.

Any one of these bottles could act as an ideal ashtray.

Please help keep Negril Beach ~ both for your visit and for others ~ a more pleasant experience for smokers and non-smokers alike.

It's A Bit Dark

Right on the equator folks get 12 hours of sunshine, and 12 hours of dark each day. On Negril Beach, depending on the time of year you travel, you might get a bit more sunshine than 12 hours worth, but not much.

The beach is gorgeous at night, and I wouldn't want beach lights to detract from the incredible ambiance as you stroll with a partner, arms linked, feeling the warm water caress your feet and the soft, soft sand squishing up between your toes.

What would be useful is some better lighting at the restaurants that line the shore in off the beach, so that the beach walker would know that they were open for business.

I'm positive some fine restaurants didn't have us dine at their establishement when we couldn't tell, looking in from the beach, that they were actually open. We just didn't bother walking up a dark beach, stumbling over an unlit stair or other impediment, onto a wooden platform, only to find this establishment closed.

Town & Craft Village Access

At the north end of Negril Beach there's nothing. The beach ends in a clump of greenery with a debris scattered path heading into the trees. You can't see the path, as it's to the right off the photo. We followed that path a while, but gave up when we realized that we had no idea where it was going and it was getting late in the day. Besides, there's a resort up there we know, and not much else.

At the south end of the beach, and we walked end to end many times, the gorgeous sand ends in a pier and across the canal Negril Village.

When you reach the south end of the beach, it becomes quite a bit more litter infested (unlike the mid- and north sections that seem to be better kept) and isn't quite as pleasant to wander. More importantly, there is no clear way to get from the beach out to Norman Manley Boulevard, and then into town.

You can wander through a sort of park, that's unkempt and not very pleasant if you can figure out how to get into it, or you can meander, almost accidentally, into the craft village from the beach side. An effort to make the transition from the beach to the road easy for the tourist, and particularly, would benefit the crafters in the village if a path was more clearly marked with multi-language welcome signs showing folks the way to go.

Walking One Love Boulevard

What is the issue here? It is, simply, that if you walk up One Love Boulevard out of the Negril Village up towards the cliffs, there is virtually no place to walk but on the road for much of the way.

While it is well known that the locals are serious, safety conscious, slow drivers (not much chance of that being true) they come flying around the blind corners, passing on the curves, and if you happen to be forced to be walking on the road when that happens, and it does many, many times a day for locals and visitors alike, then a walker will get hit, and a walker will get killed.

I realize that the "town fathers" would like visitors and tourists to take the local cab fleet, but what about everybody else? This road is dangerous for walkers, and there is no alternate route for them to take.

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