The Hemisphere: Places in the Sun

WE had to cut corners, but we did it," boasts Dick Clarage, manager of Clarages, the newest hotel on Jamaica's fashionable Montego Bay. "I knocked lunch off the menu, cut the plush stuff to the bone." By such economies, Clarage last week managed to offer the bargain rate of $42 a day for a double room, and the tourists crowded in. This year, throughout the Caribbean, which is the U.S.'s favorite winter vacation land, tariffs are stiff and takers plentiful. More than 1,000,000 tourists will visit the area, spending $260 million. "Good heavens, yes," said a Manhattan travel agent last week, "it's the biggest year ever—up 25%."

The hearty core of the crowd is made up of Miami Beach veterans, propelled farther south by their own growing prosperity and a taste for the new. With conspicuously unnecessary mink stoles in hand and taste buds braced for rum swizzles, they are descending in the greatest numbers on Puerto Rico (which expects a 300,000-tourist, $50 million year), the Bahamas (260.000), Jamaica (200,000) and the Virgin Islands (180,000). And since they expect the new to be somewhat familiar, a gaudy burst of accommodations is going up to greet them.

Banana Daiquiris. In Jamaica, the 176-room Arawak Hotel, built just two years ago, is already outpaced by this year's Marrakech, which boasts 200 Grecian-style rooms with gold-tasseled pillows and family-sized sunken bathtubs; seven less flamboyant hotels will open in Jamaica this month. Off-the-track Ponce, on Puerto Rico's south coast, is finishing a new five-story, 170-room hotel of sweeping balconies and the standard airy grillwork. In the Bahamas, where hotel space is at a premium, buyers are snapping up cooperative apartments.

The annual competition for elaborate drinks is also on, with honors likely to go to Jamaica's new 128-bed Colony, which features a "mad concoction of rum, kirsch and fresh strawberries." The Virgin Islands offer nothing more inventive than a banana daiquiri, but at St. Thomas' new Black Patch Bar customers get a free, sequined pirate's eye patch to go with their drinks. In Puerto Rico's capital, San Juan customers are jamming Nicki's Downbeat Club, where the featured item on the menu is the "jazzwich," a sandwich of pastrami and corned beef.

Discovery Voyage. With the coming of the crowd, the more practiced set of Caribbean habitues has set off on a determined search for the unspoiled and the undiscovered—often to find that the undiscovered is jammed. Samples: ¶ More than 80 airline flights a week touch down on Merida, Yucatan, carrying tourists headed for the two luxury hotels in the area. The tourists, happily mixing fun and archaeology, take on arduous guided treks through the jungle to the splendid, empty Maya ruins of Uxmal (pop. 800 years ago: 160,000) and Chichen Itza. Most talked-about features of the trip: the precipitous pyramids and a tour of a hall called "The Nunnery," adorned with a long row of phallic symbols. Also magnetic: a 60-ft.-deep well, an astonishing hole in Yucatan's flat lime stone cap, where (the guide says) the Mayans sacrificially drowned virgins laden with gold jewelry.