The Sunset Capital Negril Jamaica

The adventure of our one week all inclusive getaway to Negril, Jamaica in November! Because we live in the province of Alberta, we usually get our first dump of snow in the month of October. So we searching for our tropical adventure, but where to go and when? It took awhile but finally we put a whole bunch of names of places to go, and threw them into Tyler’s hat and picked one, and it was Jamaica! So we picked something that wasn’t going to be in the big tourist place, like Montego Bay. We greatly enjoy the less traveled locations, that’s usually where we find our adventures.

We stayed at the Riu Negril, and we did our research before booking. We look for a couple of things when eye up the all-inclusive packages. Such as: we look for smaller amount of rooms, we don’t like those big 1000+ hotels, just too busy! The Riu Negril only had 420 rooms, reasonable. How many pools, bars? How many restaurants? What sport activities do they have (if any), we were looking to do some SCUBA diving. Customer reviews, those are always interesting to see what people think. How far the airport? The farther the better in our opinion for all-inclusive getaways.

It’s always a bonus when you find out there is a swim up bar at the hotel! But the bars in Jamaica are different then most. They smell awful, and it just wasn’t the one bar, it was all of them.

At the Riu Palace which was down the beach 1 km, they had access to the premium liquor, but everyone from the Palace was always down at our resort. These 2 Riu’s allow you to go between the two of them with the all-inclusive wrist bracelet.

The one thing that really was a big yes or no for this trip was finding a Scuba diving company in the area, or near the resort. Or better yet, how about having the Scuba company right there at the resort – YES!!

We have book in advance to do 2 dives with the crew, very friendly and helpful. We are Advanced Certified Scuba divers, so the list dives available we meet all the criteria. 

THE DIVE DAY                                                                              

The day of diving, we were up early (of course).

Picked out our gear from the massive selection of equipment, and packed it all out to the dive boat at shore. Greeted by our dive master, the boat captain, and 2 other dive master in training, we started our dive adventure! We went down to pick up more divers, which turned out to be dive students from the next resorts working on their open water certification.

We were not told that we would be diving with students, those learning to diving, and they were beginners!! The motto we learnt from our dive instructors from Adventures In Scuba in Calgary is “Hurry Up And Wait”. So that’s we did, actually we did help out when needed. Would of preferred not to do the first dives with beginners, or at least been informed at booking about students divers.

None the less, any day diving is better then a day at the office.

So our funny story – When we were on the boat, the dive master had said to us “You pay double? Ok no problem man” Which we thought we over paid, but really he was saying that we had paid for 2 dives each. While out on the dives, they were spear fishing for some good eats, and they did well.

 

Negril is well known for it’s sunset, as it’s located on the west side of the island, and they were pretty! Making this place the sunset capital in Negril Jamaica. Watching the sunset on the ocean isn’t something we here in Alberta get to see often. So as sunset does come around, everyone has their cameras out to catch the last rays of sunshine. We lucked out with almost no big rain storms, however everyone we talked to had said they get a big afternoon thunder storm. We got a like sprinkle of rain, the sun was still shinning, absolutely beautiful. The Jamaican were calling it “Liquid Sunshine”.

 

The famous talked about food that is a must eat is the Jerk Chicken. They had a BBQ grill right on the beach of the Riu that you could eat at during the day, and it was delicious lunch enjoyed while eating on the grass in the shade.

Something we enjoyed and noticed while we were in Jamaica, was the amount of creatures! The ocean was alive at night, so for someone like us who like to walk along the beach and enjoy the evening we had to keep an eye out for critters. We had seen crabs and stingray at night. Numerous fish during the day, a small non-poisonous jelly fish (looked like a moldy leaf), star fish, the pebbles in the shallow water at the beach were actually a hole much of small crabs in their shells, hermit crabs in the sand, the small gecko who hung out with us on our balcony, the birds that joined us every morning on the breakfast patio. So after discovering the active ocean, we were extra excited to go diving.

Everyone talks big about Rick’s Café, and the cliff jumping. Since we jump off things here in Alberta, why not jump into a nice warm salty ocean! So we caught a cab down for lunch to check it out. The food was great and well worth it.

They have different heights to jump from; the simple risk taker of 10 feet or what the locals jump off, the top of the tree pretty much, about 100 feet up. We did jump, but not from 100 feet. It’s on our YouTube video of Tyler jumping the 30 footer, check it out. We went before it got crazy busy, and greatly enjoyed our lunch on the side of the cliff over the ocean. Beautiful!

Overall great trip and would return for sure. Best part of any trip is the friends you make, and we most definitely did meet some great people while there. Might be some time before we return, only because there are more islands in the Caribbean Ocean to check out