Accent on Living
Notes from a West Indies Cruise—Continued
A recent phenomenon in the West Indies and Latin America is the new luxury hotel which has sprung up in all sorts of unlikely places. Even the most out-of-the-way spots are now readily reached by air, and I gathered that most of the luxury hotels’ business comes from those who travel by plane.
The combination of airplane travel and the luxury hotel is not unlike the turnpike-motel way of life here at home: There is nothing much to see along a turnpike or from a plane while on the move, and like the best motels, one new luxury hotel is all but identical with the rest. Some are bigger than others, the view can be mountains instead of ocean, some have a casino and others none, but in their main characteristics these places seem pathetically alike.
Outwardly, the luxury hotel discloses layer on layer of balconies and picture windows. Never having made an around-the-clock check, I cannot say that no guest ever ventures out on the balcony, but I never saw one there, however hopefully I looked. I assume the guest does not frequent the balcony because the airconditioned room behind it is more comfortable in a hot climate, but there the balconies are for all doubters to see ("Each room with private balcony overlooking . . .”).
The great common quality of the luxury hotels is their newness. This necessarily means newness of staff. Without access to personnel records, I base my opinion only on observation and belief: Every employee of the new luxury hotel must supply the management with a sworn affidavit that the employee is entirely without experience in the hotel business and has never before worked in any capacity in any kind of hotel, old or new, anywhere. Bartenders and croupiers are not subject to this requirement, I imagine, since they are obviously old hands. The bartenders, in places where limes are cheap and plentiful, prefer to pour from a bottle a watered-down lime juice squeezed in advance, for the simple reason that pouring water into lime juice is less work than squeezing more limes.
When the word “international” precedes the term “luxury hotel,” it usually means that the hotel is part of a chain, thereby a place to be sought out, or avoided, according to one’s views of hotel chains. International or not, the new hotels bring into being a bewildering display of sportswear, or whatever it is that the guests are wearing.
Take the beret, for instance. Nothing is wrong with the beret itself. It’s a useful hat in a wind; it stuffs readily into one’s pocket; it’s unpretentious; it has informal, slightly Bohemian, overtones. On some men the beret is admirable. Yet there are other men whose wearing of a beret simply serves notice on the world that they are not at all the sort for whom the beret was intended, especially when it is plum-colored or sky blue or in one of the brighter tartans. And when the non-beret type proves to be wearing a brassbuttoned blazer to match and, above knobby white knees, shorts of the same material, the effect is eerie. This was driven home to me by the sight of a man in a maroon outfit, beret and all, who rounded out the scheme by wearing white woolen golf stockings with maroon (matching) up-and-down stripes. It was, in short, a costume, and I have no doubt is catalogued somewhere as the Luxury Hotel Set.
The women who accompany the men of bright plumage seem less startling, somehow, even though on some of them their shorts are no more congruous than the beret is on their escorts. Again, the trouble is not so much the shorts as the anatomical novelties they so determinedly reveal. It may be that, traveling in the same planes and staying at the same hotels, these people become hardened to the sight of one another, but, whatever their reaction may be to this or any other part of their holiday, it is hidden behind the vast dark sunglasses they wear on all occasions. Several changes of sunglasses are probably necessary for the well-turned-out traveler in a tour of luxury hotels, and the same is doubtless true of the beret-blazershorts set: simply not the outfit a man ought to be seen wearing twice.
Among all our ports of call, Colón sticks in my mind somehow as the most memorable, possibly because it seemed to have no luxury hotel but did have instead a vast and attractive old-fashioned hotel called the Washington that looked out over the bay. (Another charming old survivor of what looks like the William Howard Taft period of hotelkeeping is the Tivoli, in Balboa at the other end of the Canal.) By no means especially scenic or picturesque, Colón looks nevertheless the way one might think a small tropical seaport ought to look: its white buildings dazzling in the sun, not much traffic on the streets, and an artless, lackadaisical air that puts the visitor immediately at ease.
Along Front Street, which divides Colón from the Canal Zone town of Cristobal, an arcaded sidewalk extending for several blocks is paved with beautiful old tiles of Spanish design in shades of coral, blue, yellow, green. For the frontage of each shop the scheme of color and rich design is different from the next, as if a succession of rug patterns were laid out for the passer-by. Along this sidewalk, in the dusk of a late afternoon, came a group of very small Panamanian children.
The children, numbering eight or ten, were wearing odds and ends of cotton rags. The oldest I judged to be not more than five, the smallest were toddlers of half that age. They were all singing a strange, reiterative chant and stamping out with their bare feet a conga-like beat in unbelievably close unison; the youngest, who seemed hardly into the walking stage, were as true to the split second as the oldest. They were not begging. They paid me no attention whatever as they passed by, singing and stamping in a wild excitement all their own. I have never seen children so small, so young, carrying out so exacting a venture in rhythm and song with so much assurance. They were in a state of enchantment as they went their way, and so indeed was I.