Hedonism Review – Part 1 First Impressions on Day 1

We are in Jamaica. We’ve got… oh wait, hold on. Red striped beer because… Jamaica.

[Laughter]

Hi everyone! Welcome to Jamaica. We are at Heathenism 2. This is our first time here and our first time at any resort. We’ve reviewed many of them through hundreds of interviews and

we were dying to come to this one because we finally pulled the trigger.

We are going to give you our first impression right now. We debated whether we went to Desire or Heto and through conversations with a lot of different people. We were basically steered towards coming down to Heto because of the type of crowd, because of the type of activities that are here, and really people tend to be a little bit more sexually active here at Heto. We’d even heard this morning Desire and some of those other resorts being a little bit more rule-based and that Heto has less rules, especially for playtime, around the pool. We saw a lot of playing around the hot tub pool area, the bar.

It was quite exciting. It was. Obviously you have to fly to get here unless you live in Jamaica and we actually heard last night there were a fair number of people who are from the island of Jamaica that come here on their vacations and enjoy the wonderful experience that they can have here at Heto. But for those of us who live in more vanilla places, less tropical, if you’re west coast,

you probably want to fly to Miami or to Dallas, spend the night and then fly in or fly to the island the day before because you’re not going to be here for a full day. So don’t waste your money. Fly in the day before, stay someplace else and then drive in. I mean there’s five minutes from here. You can take a taxi and it was super fast to get here. We were here right in the morning and away we went. Now if you’re east coast and you can fly here in a single day, consider doing it in one day. But I’ll say the way airlines are going these days, even getting an early morning flight, a lot of times those flights get bumped and weather or other things, depending on when you’re flying, you still may not get here until two o’clock in the afternoon and you have blown an entire half a day. Another pro tip that you might want to consider is get here that day early and check in is at around two or three. Say you’re here at nine or eleven. Make sure you pack a beach bag with your sunscreen, your bathing suit, your sun hat, glasses, whatever you need for your time here while you’re waiting for your room to be open. Because you can’t easily crack into your suitcases and get all that stuff. And then you just hit the resort, the beach, and go for it. Yeah and you can start drinking right away or partying right away or whatever-ing right away. Exactly. Your suitcases are basically stacked up in the lobby, so like pawing through them in the middle of the lobby. It’s not really easy to do so skip that, bring yourself. First impression, it’s an older resort if you are used to the Hilton or… I’ll make the big leap and go four seasons, right? Like if you’re expecting like luxury gold-plated toilets, you’re not going to get that here. But to kind of put it into realistic perspectives, it’s as good as any four-star hotel that we’ve stayed at in Sacramento or and actually better than some of the places we stayed in in Miami and Fort Lauderdale before the cruise. They were pretty run down there. So here, older resort, they do their best to maintain it. I mean there’s guys out here raking the leaves right now as we sit here, so they maintain the property. But it’s a jungle island, it’s humid, things rust, everything’s not perfect. I wouldn’t say things are rusty here. No, like I can see spots of rust on like the ceiling fan here and there. We’re nitpicking at that point. Like it’s really nice. The AC works, the rooms are really nice. Yeah, room service every day, things are very clean. Which kind of brings us to the rest of the service, which is food and alcohol. Food is top-notch. It’s pretty darn good. I would say it’s, I want to say it’s better than the cruise food, but even then that’s hard to compare because it depends on which cruise line you’re eating food on. Because which cruise line has different food and which chef they brought on. What day the buffet is rotating through. So if it’s… Exactly. What’s in season and and here you’re going to have food that is based on the culture, right? Jamaican culture, so a lot of jerk chicken, things like that. And I find it fabulous. I’m a big seafood lover, so I’m absolutely loving all the clams and fish and I don’t even know what else I ate last night. There was a bunch of stuff that I didn’t know the names of and I just looked tasty and so I was just chowing it down. So food, really really good. And that’s just the buffet. There are three other restaurants, Blame, the sushi restaurant, and another one I can’t remember the name of. So you have that option. We’re going to explore and find those other restaurants and we’ll be able to give you more information on them. There’s plenty of good food choices. Lots of fruit, lots of… If you’re into pastries and desserts, tons of different choices for desserts. We also heard there’s a lobster bake fest, fry broil, something every Friday night on the beach. So I can’t wait for that. Yeah, that’ll be nice. What are you going to do? Are you going to… Do you like lobster? Oh, I love lobster. Okay, so we’re good. A lot of lobster. Entertainment. Oh wait, before we do entertainment. Can’t skip the alcohol. We cannot skip the alcohol. A little bit of a personal background with this. We’ve been on the cruises before. We never buy the drink package. We don’t recommend the drink package. I know the cruise lines are going to hate us for saying that, but

if you are a heavy drinker, like you are borderline alcoholic, alcoholic, yeah, then get the drink package. I’m making a little bit of a joke, but we’ve done the math and it’s a lot of drinks. Right, but I will say in favor of the cruise line, if you do buy the drink package, it is kind of nice to just flash your badge. You just, it’s one and done and you forget about it. And a lot of people like the ease of that and they’re okay with spending the extra money, even if they don’t actually drink those dollars. Right. It’s, you’re paying for the convenience and I think that’s what it is. Yeah, and there’s specialty drinks too. Like you can get your Starbucks coffees. Those are all included. I think they’re all included. There’s sodas. There’s all that. That’s the cruise. But that’s the cruise. Here, everything’s included. You don’t have to show any ID. You don’t have to whip out your, your cruise pass. Nope. You basically walk up to the bar and say, fill her up. Fill her up. You can get water refills regularly. They give you a water bottle when you check in, which is really good. They don’t want a bunch of drunk people here who are passing out and dying of heat stroke. Now I’m splitting their hood up like somebody did on day one. We will mention many names. And you can get anything that you want and it’s good top shelf liquor. And you can tell them how you want it mixed. So say you want a gin and tonic with two shots of lime juice. They’ll do it. Yeah. So yeah, it’s pretty nice. You also can bring your own cup. Yep. We recommend the Yeti-like cups. Keep them insulated. Keep your ice cold. You can fill up water to hydrate. And then you can fill up a little alcohol when you’re done drinking your water. And it’s great. And they fill them up. It’s awesome. So you spend less time going back and forth to the bar. Right. And Yeti, if you’re watching this and you’d like to sponsor us, we’d be happy to. We drink out of your mugs all the time. Oh my God. We got the custom engraving for our mugs this time. Got our logo on them. Got our names on them. We got them with the handles because it’s just so easy to hold onto in the pool. The one warning that I will give you, it’s really nice and convenient to be able to walk up and get any drink you want anytime a day, pretty much anywhere on the resort. But it’s also bad that you can walk up anytime of day, get anything you want and drink as much as you want. One of the first stories we heard was centering around that water bottle and being sure to hydrate was, yeah, our first trip to Hito, we drank a lot and we pretty much passed out that night and we don’t remember much of what happened. So I wouldn’t recommend going that route, but to each their own. And if you hydrate regularly, then you should be pretty good. Entertainment was pretty good. It is nightly. When you’re done eating, then the entertainment begins and then they have a disco and a piano bar that starts up once the entertainment is done. How would you describe the entertainment? We’ve been to a few shows. We’ve been to concerts and we’ve watched kind of like that level of performance. So Cirque du Soleil and we’ve been, as we’ve said earlier, to Bliss Cruises. If you’re looking for that level of entertainment, these are amateur performers. They choreographed their own stuff. The band was actually really good. There was a band. During dinner they were playing. There was a three-piece band playing. They’re actually really good. The musicians are… I may have been talking. Yes. The musicians are great. Afterwards, there’s a little bit of a dance routine. That was good. And like I said, it’s fun and it’s sexy and you’re mostly there for kind of being inspired to go do other fun things afterwards. Right. So that’s it. That’s the wrap-up for day one. First impression and we will do another follow-up as the week progresses. So keep coming back to see what we say.