“Someone has taped a handwritten sign to the airport taxi dispatcher's booth that reads 'No price negotiation after you sit down.'”

The ride from Sangster International takes twenty minutes if the driver doesn't stop to chat with the woman selling June plums near the roundabout, and thirty if he does. You pass the hip strip — a stretch of Gloucester Avenue where jerk smoke drifts across the road from Scotchies Too and someone is always playing Chronixx from a parked car — and then the city thins out. The coast road opens up past the Iberostar turnoff, through a corridor of resorts that sit shoulder to shoulder along Mahoe Bay. The Riu Palace is at the end of this line, just before Rose Hall Great House looms on its hill like a colonial ghost story nobody asked for. Your driver will point at it and tell you it's haunted. He is correct.

You check in under a high white lobby ceiling that smells like floor polish and frangipani. The wristband goes on. The outside world, with its jerk pits and route taxis and roadside coconut vendors, recedes behind a gate. This is the deal you make at an all-inclusive: you trade the chaos for the ease. Whether that's a good trade depends entirely on what you came here for. If you came here for a 50th birthday with people you love and a swim-up bar that never closes, it's a very good trade.

The room, the light, the hours between

The rooms face the Caribbean, which here is that specific shade of teal that makes you suspicious your phone is auto-filtering. It is not. The balcony is the best feature — wide enough for two chairs and a small table, private enough that you can sit out at six in the morning in whatever you slept in without alarming the neighbors. Morning light comes in warm and direct, turning the white tile floors into something close to luminous. By sunset the whole room goes amber. You will take too many photos of this. I did.

Inside, the room is modern in the way that large resort chains do modern: clean lines, a bed that's firm without being punitive, a minibar that restocks daily because this is all-inclusive and restraint is optional. The shower is strong and hot within thirty seconds, which puts it ahead of roughly half the Caribbean hotels I've tested with my increasingly specific shower opinions. The air conditioning works almost too well — you'll wake up at 3 AM reaching for a blanket you kicked off at midnight.

What the Riu gets right is the pool-to-beach ratio. The main pool is large and social, with a swim-up bar where the bartender — a guy named Devon who remembers your drink order after one visit — makes a Jamaican Smile with Appleton and guava that tastes like a vacation cliché in the best possible way. The beach is a few steps beyond, and it's calmer than the public stretches in town. The sand is coarse, not powdery, and the water is shallow enough to wade out fifty meters before it reaches your chest.

“The best meal isn't in the resort's five restaurants — it's the jerk chicken from the roadside stand ten minutes east, where a man cooks over pimento wood and charges you JMD 800 for a plate that makes you reconsider your life choices.”

The resort has five restaurants, and they range from genuinely good (the Japanese spot, Kulinarium, does a decent tuna tataki) to fine-for-Tuesday-night (the Italian place, which leans hard on cream sauces). Breakfast at the buffet is reliable: ackee and saltfish every morning, plus a made-to-order egg station where you can ask for Scotch bonnet in your omelet if you want to feel something before noon. The coffee is Blue Mountain blend and it's strong enough to matter.

The honest thing: the entertainment program tries hard. Too hard, sometimes. There's a nightly show in the theater, and some evenings it's a talented fire dancer or a reggae band that makes the whole courtyard feel alive. Other nights it's a poolside DJ playing the same Sean Paul playlist that every resort in Montego Bay has been playing since 2004. The walls between rooms are not thick. If your neighbor is celebrating their own milestone, you will know about it. Earplugs are not provided but should be.

One detail that has no business being in a travel article: there's a cat that lives near the pool bar. Gray, one ear slightly bent, completely unbothered by everything. The staff call her Queen. She sits on the same lounger every afternoon — third row, ocean side — and nobody moves her. She has seniority.

Beyond the wristband

If you leave the resort — and you should, at least once — Rose Hall Great House is a ten-minute walk east along the road. The tour is theatrical and the history is grim, but the view from the hilltop across the coast is worth the $19 admission. In the other direction, the Half Moon resort's public beach bar serves excellent rum punch to non-guests, and the craft market near the main highway has better prices than anything in town if you're willing to negotiate with patience and humor.

You leave on a Sunday morning, early, before the pool opens. The lobby is quiet except for a cleaner humming something you almost recognize — it turns out to be a Beres Hammond song slowed down to lullaby speed. Outside, the coast road is empty in a way it never is by nine. A fishing boat sits motionless on the flat water off Mahoe Bay. The driver from the airport is not the same driver, but he tells you the same ghost story about Rose Hall, and you let him, because this time it sounds different. The June plum woman is already at the roundabout. She waves at the car like she knows it.

Rooms at the Riu Palace Jamaica start around $285 per night for two adults, all-inclusive — which means your meals, your drinks, Devon's guava cocktails, and Queen the cat's silent judgment are all covered.