Travel by DAR

Caribbean: Club Med in Guadeloupe

(First published in Esquire)

My assignment: To check out what's become of our sexual nature. By visiting a Club Med. Dirty work but someone had to do it. I'd been to only one before, in BoraBora. Main memory is stumbling around at 2 a.m. from bunker to bunker rapping on doors -- "Mary Jane? Mary Jane?" -- until one finally opened: "No, Norma Jean, come inside." Well. That's the way they were. That's the way life was.

Times have changed. You can get your cord cut bopping around like that these days. What was Club Med like now, I wondered. How has it altered since, ahem. My assignment: To visit a family Club Med.

No oxymoron intended. The product, as they say in the resort biz, is 38 years old: it's as grown-up as we are. Half the Club Meds in Europe, and a surging number here, now feature "mini-clubs" where kids are not only tolerated but prized, rejoining their parents at 9 p.m. after a full day of water skills, tennis lessons, clowning around. As for those other clubs, those hopelessly old-fashioned sport-screwing destinations like Martinique where the theme song is still "Boom boom, back to my room": not for this baby boomer. Two heirs in tow, I debarked for the club called Caravelle in Guadeloupe.

Nude finger painting parties? A thing of the past. Sangria orgies? Don't make me laugh. The wanton ways of our youth we have replaced with more sublime pleasures: toddlers bumping your knee and spilling your pommes frites, pre-teens staring at you moon-eyed through the endless bottom of Sprite glasses, plus an endless supply of adolescents to wallop at ping pong. More apparent than elsewhere, it is fantastic at Club Med to see how much we have grown up since little Eugene came along: since the diaper-changings, the nursery school bills, since we tucked in our shirts and started acting like role models to our private DNA pools. This we have done with a vengeance not foreseeable back in '68: gone clean for gene. (You young 'uns won't get that; it's ok.)

But you asked about charades. Didn't you? About how Club Med is a week-long, "1984"-type enforced parlor game of totalitarian cheer? A kind of Room 101 torture chamber for travelers where your worst party animal fears are realized? Where you're plunked on an island and pepped to death; forced to be perky while loudspeakers call the faithful to disco or announce yet another round of Big Brother-enforced bonhomie ("Waterpolo: and make it fun this time!"); the sort of place where to avoid being forced to lip-synch to the Monkees you have to assume the mid-distance stare all week or arrange to put your neck in traction?

Won't happen. That little prejudice you had about Club Med being for people who lacked the inner resources to structure their own play -- a group grope for the gold chain set or EST for beach blanketeers -- is wrong. Big misunder- standing. Disabuse yourself of such a notion by acknowledging one simple fact, in all its non-totalitarian glory: Club Med is French. The most individualistic, not to say anti-social, culture on earth. Ever notice Monsieur Mitterand standing tout seul, away from all the other back-slapping world leaders, during a group shot at a summit conference? The French know about not being forced to lip-synch.

To clear up another misunderstanding. You won't meet any of the 373,000 island natives, nor hear any of the plaintive island reggae at Club Med Caravelle. The slow-down drunken grace of the Caribbean will elude you: no click of palm leaves against rotting colonial eaves, no clack of billiard balls in dark shuttered streets. Unless you make an appointment to visit the sulphur-smelling volcano (which can be hospitably arranged), you'll have to catch the slide show to believe you're somewhere exotic. But that's precisely the concept: it's less Guadeloupe than Club Med. Here's what you gotta know: It's not wanderlust. It's summer camp.

That said, kick back and enjoy. You have the most generous assortment of food in the Antilles -- fine cheeses, stunning fruits. Good, dependable wine. Good, dependable company: the conversation among the docs and bankers who visit (many for the fourth time -- the recidivism is the highest in the industry) is pleasantly upper-mid brow, suitable for sunbasking. You have safety -- there's round the clock nursing care, talented counselors who can be counted on to watch junior archers closely. Good tennis: I was impressed (read: slaughtered). Aerobics and sailing and snorkeling. Windsurfing instruction. Billions of lounge chairs. Brightly colored birds flitting through the dining pavilion.

You also have divorce camaraderie: by no means are you the only single parent at the resort. You have a French feel that devolves from the fact that half the clientele is; not only in the way the old rake flicks his cigarette ash with the tip of his pinky finger, but in the languorous nonchalance with which his wife yanks off her bathing top. (Good, incidentally, for the children to witness this Gallic aplomb: an antidote to the dirty Puritanism they get in American school hallways.) And at five every day you have not disco but Dvorak played on beach speakers, producing dreamy looks as the sun goes down in a hail of butterflies. Could it be we've grown not only up but content?

But mostly you have kids, and a more delightful bunch never graced a holiday spot. The American ones speak French, the French ones speak English, they all hold their forks with their left hands, say sir when you ask the time (each wears a watch because none of their parents do). Kids who bond with each other so nicely that Club Med could well prove the alternative to custody kidnapping in the 90's: just expose your kids to this environment for a week and their hearts will be yours all year.

A final point. You are allowed to come even if childless; you'll still have a great time. Norma Jean did. That, uh, was you over by the bocce balls, wasn't it, dear?