It's easy to look down on the phony islands. At one stall the reporter found boxes ornamented with "Bahamas;" but manufactured in the Philippines. One of the vendors said "This is what the company wants us to sell and what people seem to like to buy. So you give them what they want. And that's CocoCay in a nutshell; it's beautiful, but it has no soul." (Patron 1998, 93)

On the other hand, a travel magazine commented that

Royal Caribbean . . . owns the Labadee peninsula and promotes an arts and crafts fair there. Ghastly though this might sound, it is in fact a seaside environment of some charm, with plentiful beach space and far more interesting paintings and artifacts for sale than the mass-produced trinkets of Ocho Rios and Cozumel. (Hall 2000, 212)

Index
Behind the security wall

(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001