A Grand Cayman time
After living in the pacific northwest for more than twenty years we’ve learned that getting away from the rainy drizzly grey-all-the-time Seattle winters for a spell gets us through the rest of the grey. Having spent a month last year working remotely in Hawaii, which worked really well for the timezone difference of two hours, we decided to try another cardinal direction for a bit of variety. The Caribbean has a lot of islands to choose from and several are even almost guaranteed to have fast internet for various business interests, gambling, banking, etc… Grand Cayman, with its banking status, is one of those islands. We booked a month stay via AirBnB far enough out of the main town of Georgetown as to be isolated, but the island wasn’t so big that a short drive could get you to the grocery stores, activities and restaurants. It ended up being a near perfect location for us.
Grand Cayman boasts one of the more beautiful sandy beaches in the Caribbean, called 7 mile beach. An impressive sight from above as we flew over into Georgetown, the main city on the island. They also have no inhibitions on trading with Cuba so one can easily find the more alluring exports from that island nation. Notably; cigars and rum. Denise made short work of finding out from the locals what kind of rum was best used to make mojitos. And later on I enjoyed a few of the cigars made locally at the “Cayman Cigar Company”. Outside of my working making good use of the internet which was markedly faster than what we have at home, we drove around the island to enjoy some activities and meals. A night sail with Red Sail Sports was a highlight, the restaurants though were mostly unremarkable.
It is said that Grand Cayman has some of the best diving in the Caribbean, if not the world. From our small sample size of experience there, we can’t disagree. It has a wall all around the island that, so we are told, drops to about 7000 feet below the surface providing a constant inflow of nutrients attracting the whole food chain to the surface. The visibility was tremendous as well. We took a refresher and all our dives with Tortuga Divers out of the Morritt’s resort, and they were simply a great crew. We had awesome sightings of sharks, turtles, queen and french angelfish, and many other species. Denise took a fish identification class on two of my working days and was taught by a marine biologist who really knew his business, flying through the entire book in two sessions. Exhausting I would have thought, but Denise ate it up and came out of the class armed with both great local knowledge but also a writing slate she now takes diving with her each time to jot down what critters she saw.
We discovered, late, that The Caymans are the second most expensive country to live in the world, behind only Monaco. It was very expensive there, and not just certain things, but everything. Lemons, fish, housing, fuel, there was nothing was had for a bargain, we had even gone into a second-hand store for some simple housing supplies and they wanted either an arm or a leg for a spatula, the only consolation was that we got to choose which.
We’d read that there was a very good set of restaurants here. But we didn’t find them, or rather couldn’t afford them. We had a few favorite local restaurants that we visited from time to time, but nothing was noteworthy enough to call out here.
Georgetown was an interesting town, it had a daily farmer’s market that was fun to poke around in. It was full of tourists on most days hosting as many as seven cruise ships on any given day, but Sunday there was a reprieve where the ships were not in town and it turned out that it was the best day to explore Georgetown and the seven mile beach. It was essentially just a typical feeling tourist town with shopping for beach activities as well as the higher end shops of jewelry and things like this. But it also had a different feel to it, it was relatively clean for one, if not particularly old. White and tropical looking with covered boardwalks in places.
We left Grand Cayman of two minds. It would be a difficult recommendation for people who do not dive because of the lack of activities and the expense. There are just too many other islands to choose from with more to do and are more reasonably priced. But if you are a diver, then it almost needs to be on your bucket list, and specifically diving out of the east end of the island is where you want to be.
Categories: Travel