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We were looking for a place in a beautiful setting, with a restaurant that would allow us not to have to wander about in the morning and evening in search of adventure, that would leave us alone if we wanted to be left alone, take care of us when we needed something. Hotel MockingbirdHill proved to be all of these things during our week-long stay.
Shall we start with the complaints to get them out of the way?
1) The roads from Kingston are, shall we say, unfinished, and you need to leave three hours to get to Port Antonio and the long road up the Hill to the Hotel from what in Jamaica is a major highway, and what in any normal country would be a path to a farm. The entertainment factor, between wandering goats, bicyclists, and other local encounters, makes the time pass quickly, but it's hard work for the driver. You can get a driver if you don't feel like doing the road work yourself. Either way, there is no way around the three hours.
2) The Hotel is on a bluff on a Hill above the ocean in a rural area. That means that you hear the whistles, calls, cries, coos, chirps, rustles, shrieks, caws, and trills of many varieties of Jamaican birds. You can't turn off this noise. The room windows are open to all of nature. Nature includes, from time to time, a local yapper of a dog, owned by a neighbor down the Hill. You may want to feed the dog some of the local ganga, but at 10 at night or 6 in the morning, you may not want to wander out of your room to find the dog, either. Dog gets tired after about 45 minutes and stops of own volition, or somebody's ganga.
3) The Hotel is one of the more expensive places in Port Antonio. That still makes it SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper than many a flea-bag I have stayed at in New York, London, Paris, and for that matter, Akron, Ohio, Charlotte, North Carolina, Newark, New Jersey, and other even less glamorous places. I suggest that if you wish to travel on the extreme cheap, don't come to this Hotel. If you don't need to count every penny, you will find the dollars you do spend are worth it. The costs arise from such things as the fact that they pay their staff a living wage and thus retain high quality people over many years, recycle their water, maintain the property properly, have enough staff aboard to be attentive to the guests, and buy quality foods. As my living in a shack on the beach days are, for better or worse, over, I found the price -- circa $250 a night for the room for two, circa $55 a day per person for two extraordinary and completely filling meals -- vastly worth it. One caveat: the pricing may not work as well for a la carte drop in visitor as for the daily deal, but I had no experience of that, and can't address the a la carte issue.
4) There is no four.
Let's go now to the positives.
1) The rooms are set overlooking the mountains and the sunset, above tropical forest. They are comfortable, and serene, and the more expensive rooms (I was in one) have balconies with hammocks. We spent many hours in ours. Our neighbors spent many hours in theirs.
2) The hotel is comfortable. The furniture is clean, simple, well-kept, attractive, available. There is an upstairs bar and sitting room with a small library overlooking the forest and the Caribbean far below. Magnificent site to watch the sunset. Below is a swimming pool. Clean, lightly chlorinated, perfect temperature, just big enough for lounging or laps, with a shallow end for children and a deep end for stretching the legs.
3) The restaurant is astounding. Every breakfast includes, more or less, amazing home-baked breads, a medley of tropical fruits, good Jamaican coffee, cereals and yogurt (occasionally the yogurt, also fresh and home made wasn't available), cooked to order eggs (we liked the one with onions, sweet peppers and some form of local greens), a small plate of breakfast cheeses, and a small plate of vegetables (tomatoes and cucumber). We basically never ate lunch. No need, no room, no competition. Dinners were a choice of three fish or meat entrees and a couple of vegetarian, maui-maui with a different recipe each night, various forms of chicken, various forms of shrimp, lamb, all in various sauces. But before that is a choice of ever changing appetizers, the most breath-taking of which was a seafood sampler of about ten different items on a single plate. And the soups. Extraordinary soups, island seasonings, deeply seasoned, but never overwhelming, as in, they are not "just hot." Balance and variety, and verity. By the time you get to the desserts, you don't need them, but it's hard to turn down flaming crepes, creme brulee, home made tropical ice cream, fruit parfaits, banana splits, and various rum-based confections. Before you get to dinner, the drinks upstairs are worth drinking -- our favorite was the Mille Fleur Night, a rum and coconut based mixture made up a little differently by Opal and by Clive, two of the hotel's experienced staff. The cook was found by the owners about a decade ago, knowing only how to prepare steamed fish, and has trained up day by day over the years under their tutelage. Years later, his innate talents have had a chance to explore cookery. By now, he demonstrates enormous understanding of food and unique, broad-palated, and multitudinous, recipes that take advantage of local ingredients, applied with a balanced and creative hand.
If you get tired of hanging out at the Hotel -- we never did, though we did decide to enjoy a bit of Port Antonio, too -- you can either hire a driver which the Hotel will arrange for you, or drive around the Port Antonio area. The town is comparatively untouristed, the marketplace a trip and a half. We spent most of our time at Winnefred Beach, 15 minutes from the Hotel, popular with locals and a comfortable mix of us foreigners, people looking to sell you jewelry and beads, boat rides and lunch, and local Jamaicans enjoying their own sands and waters. The Hotel provides snorkeling gear. The reefs have been somewhat challenged, but they are alive, and have their share of tropical fish and different types of corals. The Hotel's co-owner, Barbara Walker, daughter of one of the country's most respected diplomats, now retired, will also set you up for half-day or day-long hikes, river rafting, and the other local adventures. She knows what she is doing and selects people who are reliable, fairly priced, and integrated in the local economy.
Barbara is an artist, mostly sculpture, and her gallery is up from the hotel. Worth a look if you are interested in art, the themes being heavily focused on the travails of being a woman, but her sense of shape, texture, and weight give it some gravitas as well as beauty. Her art isn't pushed at guests, but it is present, and adds soemthing special. Shireen, her partner and co-owner, was in Germany and the Netherlands while we were at the Hotel, so we can't report on her, but Barbara is an available host who does a nice job of balancing being there and giving you space, as both you and she may need.
Oh yes. I had business while I was there, unfortunately. The Hotel made their phone available to me, which helped a lot. They were in the process of getting wireless Internet put in just as we were there. So even that is likely to be available by now. There aren't phones in the rooms. Or TVs. Or TVs anywhere. We didn't exactly miss them.
Go to the bar upstairs, have a Mille Fleur Night and think of the good things that are still in the world.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor, Inc.
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