Travel: Harmony, good hope and super sass: Tumbling rivers, azure shoals - James Bond's Jamaica leaves Katie Hickman stirred by glamour, not shaken by danger

The 'supermodels' were coming to lunch. Naomi and Kate? Or Christie and Cindy? It hardly seemed to matter. They were supermodels, and that was enough. No one in our party knew them, but that didn't seem to matter either. Jamaica is a small island, where word travels fast and everyone gets to know everyone else.

As if they were not already glamorous enough, Christie and Cindy (or Kate and Naomi) were staying at Golden Eye, the former home of Ian Fleming. It was an appropriate setting. Fleming liked to be surrounded by beautiful women, not only real ones but also those he wrote about, and blessed with such names as Goodnight, Solitaire and Honeychile. What if he had still been alive, I wondered: would the supermodels have ended up in a Bond yarn, pistols and poison pellets hidden in their stocking tops?

Four Bond novels are set in Jamaica: Live and Let Die, Dr No, The Man with the Golden Gun and Octopussy. I don't know to what extent Fleming put himself into the character of 007 (a far more interesting, morose and flawed figure in the books, I find on re-reading them, than he was in the films), but the island's fascination for Bond, its strange undercurrents of glamour and danger, are surely felt by the author. In Dr No, as Bond flies in once again to the turtle- backed island, he watches the rich blue of the Cuba Deep turn to the azure-and-milk of the inshore shoals, until at last he is flying high over the Blue Mountains of the interior: 'The scattered dice of smallholdings showed on the slopes and in clearings in the jungle, and the setting sun flashed gold on the bright worms of tumbling rivers and streams. 'Xaymaca', the Arawak Indians had called it - the land of Hills and Rivers. Bond's heart lifted with the beauty of one of the most fertile islands in the world.'

Jamaica's beauty is real knockout stuff, straight to the guts. Floating on a raft down the Rio Grande on the north- east coast, even the most world- weary would at times feel almost overwhelmed. All along the sheer switchback gorges, the jungle swoops down vertically to the water's edge. Here are flame-of-the-forest trees, violently orange, and swallow- tailed humming birds which sip at tropical blossoms along the water's edge. In the humid clasp of the forest the greens are so green that, even without the heightening properties of the island's famous weed, they take on the aura of hallucination.

The Jamaicans, ever inventive, will sell you almost anything as you float by, from a cold Red Stripe to a hibiscus flower. At one point an entire calypso band appeared before us on a spit of sand, and a little further down, around lunchtime, a palm-leaved hut came into view with two rickety wooden tables beneath it, and a proud sign outside: Miss Betty's Riverside Restaurant.

Miss Betty herself walks a mile or more each day down the forest path from her hilltop house to the waterfront. She wore a flowered pinny and her Sunday-best hat, stiff white straw with a veil. She had only two things on her menu, jerked chicken and freshwater prawns, caught that very day right on her doorstep; but in the three weeks we spent in Jamaica they were quite the best food we ate.

The Miss Bettys - so decorous, sassy and God-fearing - are thin on the ground in Bond's Jamaica, which was pre-independence (that came in 1962), and revolved around Government House and High Commission chaps with double-barrelled names, when no assignment was ever too dangerous to preclude a drink at the cocktail hour. Even Quarrel, Bond's sidekick in both Live and Let Die and Dr No, is, curiously, not a Jamaican. He is a Cayman Islander, although with his brown skin and pale- grey eyes, the legacy of Cromwellian soldiers or buccaneers, he might have 'passed-for- white'.

White Jamaicans are rather better represented than black, especially when they're female. Honeychile Rider, for instance, whom Bond first spies collecting shells on Dr No's island, naked except for a diving knife at her waist, is one of the more refreshing of Fleming's heroines. An expert swimmer, diver, and sailor, she survives undaunted the torture Dr No devises - for her body to be picked over by man-eating crabs - largely because of her strange, solitary upbringing among the ruins of Beau Desert Great House, with only the beasts and insects of the forest as her companions.

The legacy of the 'Great House' is everywhere in Jamaica. The names (Harmony, Unity, Fellowship, Good Hope), like the architecture, live on gracefully, belying the terrible cost in human suffering of the plantations that spawned them.

Some white Jamaican families remain, although their lives are very different now. Kew Park, near Bethel Town up in the hills behind Montego Bay, has been lived in by the Williams family for more than 200 years; the house is even older, its foundations dating from the 1600s. There is reputed to be a ghost in one of the bedrooms, and in the library is a collection of 18th- century manuals, a little mildewed now, on the husbandry and management of slaves.

We went to take tea with them one Sunday afternoon and found it a very English affair, with dogs and children, still sandy from a day by the sea, and Earl Grey in chipped nursery cups. The view from their veranda, though, was a different matter altogether, a scene of biblical proportions, like some vast Victorian canvas come darkly to life. As the sun set, groves of fruit trees, laid out neatly beneath us like a map, marched towards vanishing point in a faraway purple wash of hills.

Other properties, such as Good Hope Great House near Falmouth, whose canefields were once worked by more than 3,000 slaves, or the old pineapple plantation at Round Hill just outside Montego Bay, are now transformed into exquisite megabuck hotels - for the north coast of Jamaica is still a place where the rich and famous come to play.

At Round Hill, Ralph Lauren, the American dress designer, recently revamped the club house: British-colonial-meets-Wasp-country-club, all billowing white sailcloth, mahogany and brass. James Bond would have been at home here. At sundown, looking out across the sea, they would have poured his Walker's bourbon, or mixed his vodka Martini, shaken not stirred, and brought his drink to him together with a copy of his favourite newspaper, the Daily Gleaner.

In The Man with the Golden Gun, you may remember, it was by reading the Gleaner - still the source of all information in Jamaica - that Bond was first tipped off to go to Savanna-la-Mar, on the south- west tip of the island. 'For Sale by Auction' the advertisment read, 'No. 3 Love Lane.' This was the bawdy-house where 007, masquerading as Mark Hazard of the Transworld Consortium, first encounters the ex-circus villain Scaramanga, the man with the golden gun himself.

I never did find out whether or not the house actually existed; the beach at nearby Negril, where Scaramanga and a consortium of international hoods were engaged in building one of Negril's first luxury hotels, most certainly did, and does, although not quite in the virgin form that Scaramanga saw it.

These days Negril is a nondescript, post-hippie resort, with not one square inch of its famous white beach untouched.

At Miss Brown's Mushroom Palace, a small shack on the outskirts of town, gospel tunes blare from a dusty ghetto- blaster on top of the dresser . . . 'Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus' and 'Give Me that Old Time Religion'. The tawdry red plush chairs and plastic

tablecloths are still here, snatches of Christmas tinsel rustling in the rafters; and you can still take the magic-mushroom tea for which Miss Brown's is famous, just like in the old days. But some essential spark has gone. Further into town, along the coastal road, a few ageing hippies still cling to the old ways, gamely selling tie-dye T-shirts and handmade candles; but middle America is here to stay.

In Black River, the parish church still stands, stout and English as a country vicar, among the oleander and the cracked gravestones. In 1843 the parishioners erected a plaque in memory of their pious beadle, Thomas Wallace.

Outside it was midday and 90F in the shade. Although the church walls are panelled with dark wood, the space it contains is filled with tropical light. I read from a list on the vestry door that Mrs Blossom Robertson and Miss Carmella Foster were on the flower rota that week.

Although it is only 50 miles from Negril to Black River, very few tourists ever make it so far south. This is the Jamaicans' Jamaica and there are no Golden Eyes here. Reggae blares out over the seafront street facing the church. There's the smoky smell of jerked chicken and a stall selling knuckles of raw sugar cane, the kind you chew on until the fibres get stuck in your teeth. In the dusty high street, with its gingerbread general stores full of Tupperware and jars of spices, faded posters for old reggae concerts peel from the walls. The musicians have names such as Bounty Killa, Super Sass and Terror Fabulous; young dudes in pop-up shades and hairdos with attitude.

The Jamaicans have attitude, it's true. And on this southern stretch of the island - Black River, Bluefields, Treasure Beach - there is an undeniable frisson about travelling. On the other hand, the island's reputation as the bad boy of the Caribbean is easy to exaggerate. Nevertheless, on the glittery north coast, many tourists these days simply go to ground in their all-inclusives, too scared to come out.

I was buying green coconuts in Black River when an old white Jamaican lady in a printed cotton frock, more Driving Miss Daisy than Live and Let Die, came up to me in the street. She welcomed me, and then warned me gently to carry my bag more securely by tucking it under my arm. 'You see, some people are good here, and some are bad.' She smiled, touching my face with her hand. 'And some are very, very sweet.'

FACTFILE

Getting there: Trailfinders (071-937 5400) is offering return fares from London to Kingston with British Airways from pounds 465; a complex routeing with Northwest from Gatwick to Montego Bay with an overnight stop in the US costs from pounds 278 return.

Packages: several last- minute discounts are available. For example, Unijet (0444 459191) is offering a 14-night room-only package to Falmouth Village in Jamaica for pounds 489, including a return flight from Gatwick.

Further information: Jamaica Tourist Board, 1-2 Prince Consort Road, London SE7 2BZ (071-224 0505).

(Photograph and map omitted)