i keep a diary

August 21, 2006

Cayman Islands Vacation: Part One

In the midst of a particularly annoying day at work in mid-August, it dawned on me that I was long overdue for a vacation. I instant messaged Meredith and asked her if she wanted to take a trip. She told me that she was going to be starting her grad school program in early September so if we were going to go away, it had to be soon. We decided right then and there that we'd settle on a location and book the trip before the end of the day.

After a marathon IM session back and forth, we decided to go to Grand Cayman for a week! I bought tickets and booked a week at a remote diving resort with a beach!

Monday, August 21st

meredith
About a week later, it was time to go on vacation! Our flight was at 7am, which meant we had to leave for the airport around 3:30am - so we didn't go to bed. Here's Meredith doing some middle-of-the-night last minute dishes!
meredith
Fatty agreed to be a great friend and feed our pet fish while we were away so Meredith left a lil' love note for him on the door.
note
meredith
4:30am! At JFK waiting to check-in to our flight.
airport ˆ book ˆ meredith
me
Boo, waiting.
airport ˆ me
meredith
In the lounge waiting to board. Meredith decided to cinch her little face away and take a nap.
asleep ˆ hoodie ˆ meredith
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Nap time resumed about 45 seconds after we'd boarded the plane.
airplane ˆ asleep ˆ hoodie ˆ us ˆ meredith
me
I stayed awake for the first leg of the journey, but crashed out on the airport floor during our layover in Atlanta.
airport ˆ asleep ˆ me
me, meredith
Two hours later and we're back on the runway, rested-up and ready to fly to Grand Cayman!
airplane ˆ us ˆ me ˆ meredith
Our flight wasn't serving lunch so we bought some food in the airport and brought it along. Pizza and (happy face! ha!) salad.
airplane ˆ pizza
A couple of hours later and we'd arrived! Here are a bunch of cruise ships docked in the bay.
airplane ˆ boat ˆ wing
Coming in over George Town (the capital).
airplane ˆ boat ˆ wing
Touchdown!
airplane ˆ wing
me, meredith
Yay! Vacation starts!
airplane ˆ us ˆ me ˆ meredith
For the geographically challenged, the Cayman Islands are three teeny, tiny islands located about 350 miles off the tip of Florida. They're south of Cuba and west of Jamaica.
grand cayman ˆ map
It was overcast and drizzling a bit, but we didn't care. It felt great to be away somewhere! By the way, Check out the logo for the Cayman Islands' only airline!
airplane ˆ grand cayman
It's a pirate turtle with a peg leg! Awwwww! According to the internets, in 1503 Christopher Columbus was the first European to come across the Caymans and he named them Las Tortugas (the turtles) after all the sea turtles in the water around the islands. And later on in the 1800s, the islands became a popular hideout for pirates. So you know, someone there got creative, combined the two things the island is most well-known for, and VOILA! You've got yourself an airplane with a giant, peg-legged pirate turtle!
airplane ˆ grand cayman ˆ turtle
me
After making it through customs, we picked up the rental car we'd reserved and headed out to Compass Point, the diving resort that we'd booked a week at.

I'd found Compass Point while I was on TripAdvisor.com trying to figure out where we were going to stay. All of the reviews about Compass Point said it was a beautiful, remote resort with amazing accommodations and an awesome diving staff. The reviews for the place were so over-the-top positive, and their prices which included accommodations PLUS two SCUBA dives per day were so reasonable, that it sounded almost too good to be true (which had us a little worried).
rental car ˆ me
British Territory = Drive on the left!
rental car
Even though Grand Cayman is the largest of the Cayman Islands, it's still pretty tiny. (It's around 200 sq. km. which is about 2.5 times the size of the island of Manhattan). The airport is the green "x" on the map and Compass Point is the red "x" which turned out to mean that it really was far away from the touristy hotels and was out in the middle of nowhere! It was only about 20 or 25 miles away, but because the only road was really twisty and windy, it took us about 40 minutes to drive out there!
map
meredith
Right when we pulled in the resort's parking lot, our concerns were put at ease. It was clearly a nice place. But even that didn't prepare us for how insanely awesome our accommodations were! We checked in, got our keys and when we opened the place we just kept saying "Whoa!" over and over again. The place was enormous! Here's Meredith a photo of Meredith in the living room that I took in the kitchen near the entrance.
condo ˆ meredith
Reverse view of the kitchen.
condo
Since August is pretty much the down-season and they had a lot of vacancy, they ended up giving us a double unit that had a full kitchen, living room (with a sleeper bed), 2 bedrooms and two full bathrooms! All of this right on the water with a balcony overlooking the ocean!
map
meredith
We ran through the place jumping up and down and yelling like loons while I snapped photos. Bedroom 1!
bed ˆ condo ˆ meredith
me
Bedroom 2!
bed ˆ coy ˆ me
meredith
There was a TV in the living room...
tv ˆ meredith
meredith
...a second tv in one bedroom (which Mer thought deserved a booby flash)...
boobs ˆ tv ˆ meredith
meredith
...and a third TV in the second bedroom. A realization that caused Mer to bust both boobies out! (The best part is, we didn't even end up turning any of them on. We were just excited by how extravagant the place was.)
boobs ˆ excited ˆ tv ˆ meredith
meredith
Bathroom #1!
bathroom ˆ meredith
meredith
Bathroom #2!
bathroom ˆ meredith
There were even fresh flowers on the toilets!
flower ˆ toilet
meredith
And check out the amazing view we had of the totally private (and deserted!) beach! Here's the view facing west!
balcony ˆ beach ˆ meredith
meredith
Facing east!
balcony ˆ beach ˆ meredith
Worked up an appetite getting unpacked and settled in and decided to hop in the car and find a place to eat!
rental car
meredith
We ended up settling on a little Italian place we found a couple of miles down the road and the food was great. We ate, drank and used a bunch of touristy brochures to make a list of things we wanted to check out on vacation! Worn out from a long day of traveling, and being out in the middle of nowhere with no kind of nightlife at all, we decided to call it an early night!
food ˆ meredith

Tuesday, August 22nd

me
We got up bright and early the next morning, had some Italian leftovers for breakfast, and set out to do some sightseeing!
rental car ˆ me
meredith
Grand Cayman is famous for being one of the few places in the world that has blue iguanas - and our first stop was a huge wildlife preserve where you could (if you're lucky) see them. Here's Mer out front with a huge blue iguana.
lizard ˆ meredith
We spotted this little guy right as we set out on the trail that goes around the preserve! He was cute, but certainly not blue!
lizard
There were hundreds of plants and trees and each species had a little red placard stuck in the ground with some details about it. I was in the midst of touching a very strange looking plant when Meredith gasped and pointed to the fine print on the nearby placard. "WILL CAUSE PAINFUL BLISTERS IF TOUCHED!" Gee, you probably could've put that info at the top of the goddamned sign!
sign
me
Here's me moments later getting ready to watch my fingers explode in blisters. (I actually ran back to the entrance, found a bathroom, washed my hands thoroughly and managed to avoid any type of irritation. Well, physical irritation at least.)
sunglasses ˆ me
Frog!
toad
Log!
lizard
meredith
Pretty lady!
meredith
A bird eating a berry!
bird
You can't see it in that first photo, but the back of his head was crested in bright red feathers!
bird
A mile or so later, we ran into a tree that had this sign on it. Gee, a sign like that would've come in handy earlier on!
sign ˆ tree
meredith
Meredith and a giant bush. (hehe).
meredith
We were all the way in the back of the preserve and I was taking some pictures of the overgrown coral reefs that used to be underwater when Meredith gasped again!
I turned to where she was pointing and saw that there was a blue iguana standing right in the middle of the path! Meredith and I immediately got all "Mission: Impossible" and decided to sneak up on the iguana and see how close we could get! The answer?
lizard
THIS CLOSE! This photo was taken with a 24mm lens with no zoom! If you're not a photography person you probably don't know what that means. So to put it another way...
lizard
...I was THIS close! Hahaha. That little fucker totally didn't seem to mind us at all. He just walked back and forth around the path...
lizard
...licking him some blades of grass.
lizard
me
He wandered around on the path with us for like five full minutes while we checked him out and snapped tons of pics.
camera ˆ lizard ˆ me
meredith
Meredith and the iguana.
lizard ˆ meredith
The after he'd gotten his fill of water (and his fill of us) he leisurely made his way back into the jungle.
lizard
Hey, Bastard Strawberry! Ha!
sign
meredith
On the way out the reserve, we can across another blue iguana sunning himself on a patch of grass right next to bench. He didn't seem to mind us either and let us get close and take some photos.
lizard ˆ meredith
meredith
After we were done at the reserve, we headed back to the resort! Meredith hopped on the internet to do some emailing, and I headed out to the boat for a two-tank afternoon dive!
computer ˆ meredith

<i>Dive #1</i>

I was soooooooo excited to go diving in the Caymans. It's pretty much consistently listed as one of the best diving spots in the world. Not only does it have amazing coral and marine life, it's renowned for regularly having 150+ foot visibility! (Which is totally unheard of!) Check out how clear the water is! These pics don't even do justice to how much amazing it was in person! The deeper you go, the less visibility you have (because there's less light). But even at 50 feet you can still totally see the diver in the upper right-hand corner, who's at least thirty feet away!
best ˆ scuba
I batch processed all of the underwater pictures in Photoshop to try to bring some of the true colors out. As light travels down through the water, the colors that have the least-dense waveform get filtered out. Violet, indigo and blue have the most-dense waveforms, which mean that they can penetrate really deep into the water.

Red has the least-dense waveform, which is why you'll hardly see any red in any of these pics - even the ones taken in relatively shallow water!
scuba
The reefs were amazing. They were huge and interconnected with all sorts of great tunnels (called "swim-throughs") that you could, uh, swim through! Here are the two divers ahead of me entering a swim-through.
scuba ˆ swimthrough
I hate to keep repeating myself, but these photos really don't even begin to convey what it looks like down there (because cameras are less sensitive to colors that your eyes). See how in the photo above, all of the coral is a drag, olive green? Well, here's a close up of the rocks taken with a flash that does a better job at showing what everything looks like while you're diving. Crazy, right?
scuba
Exiting a swim-through.
scuba ˆ swimthrough
Circling a mountain of coral.
scuba
Check that visibility! You could see in all directions for what felt like miles! It was a transcendent experience.
scuba
The reef we were swimming along was relatively shallow, but at one point, we reached the edge of the reef and there's a cliff that drops 6,000 feet straight down! Here's the diver in front of me floating over the cliff's edge looking out into the oblivion that divers call "The Big Blue." Fucking insane.
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Right around the edge of the cliff, we hit our max depth and started to slowly make our ascent back to the boat. Here's some pretty coral on the way back.
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Feeeesh!
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Feeeeshes!
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Back in the sandy shallows I snapped a few photos while doing my safety stop. (A safety stop is when you stay at a certain depth for a few minutes in order to aspirate some of the nitrogen in your bloodstream).
scuba
Yellow feeesh!
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Here's the view of the boat as I came up at the end of my dive!
boat ˆ scuba

<i>Dive #2</i>

About an hour later, we were back under for our second dive. (Just like with a "safety stop" you have to rest between dives to give your body some time to aspirate extra nitrogen that's accumulated in your blood stream. If you have too much nitrogen in your blood and ascend quickly, you'll get decompression sickness - aka: "the bends"). The water visibility at the second dive spot was just as incredible as the first!
scuba
It was like diving in an aquarium!
scuba
Any time you do multiple dives in a day, your first dive is always the deepest. Since this was our second dive in a short period of time, we stayed relatively shallow. (The deeper you go, the more nitrogen your body absorbs with each breath).
scuba
I went for a leisure swim around the reef and snapped a bunch of photos.
scuba
Puffer fish! I swam with this guy for a while. He didn't seem to mind me so I used the flash on my camera (which helped bring out some of the reds and oranges that weren't showing up on the camera using available light).
pufferfish ˆ scuba
We rounded the corner of a reef we were following, and we entered a pocket that was formed by the intersection of three huge underwater mountains and there was...
scuba
...a school of these huge, silver-scaled fish just hanging out in there.
scuba
We just floated in there in awe letting them swim around us. I managed to snap this pic that I think does a good job showing off just how silvery and reflective they were. It was breathtaking.
best ˆ scuba
Another school of yellow-tailed fish that I followed around during my safety stop.
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Heading back to the boat!
boat ˆ scuba
meredith
Later that night, Meredith and I decided to drive all the way across the island to the touristy part to see if we could find any fun night life going on. (We didn't). We did, however, find several giant cartoon statues to take photos with. Including this giant frog...
frog ˆ meredith
...and Big Black Dick! (Who Meredith wisely choose not to embrace because she knew the comment I'd be making here several years later!)
statue
me
On the drive back home, we noticed THOUSANDS of smooshed carcasses all over the road - which we eventually identified as crabs! Some of them were FUCKING HUGE and you had to swerve to avoid them because they were definitely big enough and sharp enough to potentially pop your tire! I finally pulled over to get a closer look at one of them!
rental car ˆ me
When I stepped out of the car with my camera, the little fucker actually held out his pincers towards me and started clicking them in a threatening manner! It was insane! I tried to get closer and he scurried off the road into the shoulder where I snapped his picture. Little asshole!
crab
In the parking lot back at the resort, we spied this tiny little guy crab-walking away from us.
crab
And then up on the second floor of our building, we found this guy clinging to the FUCKING WALL!??? Who the hell knew crabs could climb walls? Scar-y!
crab

Wednesday, August 23rd

I got up bright and early on Wednesday morning and headed out on the boat for a three-dive trip! The first (and deepest) dive of the day was at a dive spot called "Babylon." Here's our divemaster walking us through a map of the site.
boat ˆ map

<i>Dive #3</i>

After our initial descent, we had our first visit from a turtle!
scuba ˆ turtle
He seemed pretty curious about us. He swam a few circles around us (coming within touching-distance plenty of times)...
scuba ˆ turtle
...and then slowly swam away.
scuba ˆ turtle
Max depth. Here's one of the guys I was diving with down around 100' hanging ten as he drifts out over the cliff's edge into The Big Blue.
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Coral.
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More coral.
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Circling around a mountain of coral (Big Blue on the left).
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When you're down deep and you look up, the sun, which seems worlds away, shines down through the coral and it's unlike anything else in the world.
scuba
Moments like this are probably the closest a human can come to feeling like they've traveled to a totally alien world.
best ˆ scuba
More coral.
scuba
Swimming down in a crevice separating two huge underwater mountains.
scuba ˆ swimthrough
Looking up from between the two mountains at a depth of 110'!
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Tube coral and branch coral.
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Closeup of some living coral.
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Back in the shallows killing time on my safety stop.
scuba
For our second dive, we headed over to Stingray City. Stingray City is a sandbar on the northwest side of the island where the stingrays have become used to people and you can feed them right out of your hand! Here's a quick history of how this came to be that I took from this site:

Years ago before banking and tourism was big in Grand Cayman the main industry was fishing. The fishermen would work the seas all day and return to the protection of the of the reef in the north sound to clean their catch. After years of throwing the entrails overboard, the Stingrays began gathering in the area on the shallow sand bars. The stingrays would feast on the free meal. Soon the stingrays began to associate the sound of a fishing boats with food. In the late 1970s, divers starting feeding squid to the stingrays, which is one of their favorite dishes. Before long, dozens of rays would show up each day to be fed, attracted by the boat engines and the memory of an easy meal.


Here's a pic of a bunch of people standing on the sandbar in the middle of the bay and feeding the stingrays!
boat ˆ stingray
Instead of standing on the sandbar, we were going to jump off the boat about 50ft away from the sandbar, sink to the bottom (only about 15' down) and wait from some stingrays to get a whiff of the squid we holding and come over. Here's our divemaster using a stuffed stingray to explain the stingray's anatomy and demonstrate how you feed them. were going to be putting on scuba gear and sitting on the ocean floor at a depth
boat ˆ stingray

Dive 4

The rays showed up only a few minutes after we'd arrived on the bottom! Seeing them glide in together is one of the most memorable things I've ever seen. They're graceful and beautiful, but at the same time they're really alien and evil-looking and they have a stinger under their tail that can kill a person!
scuba ˆ stingray
But at the same time, they were clearly playful and interested in being fed - so I was able to swallow my fear and relax. (This was dive was on August 23rd. Just eleven days later Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray in a freak accident!)
scuba ˆ stingray
Muppet of the sea!
scuba ˆ stingray
The stingray's eyes are on top and it's mouth is all the way underneath. See his happy lil' muppet mouth peeking out? It totally looks like he's smiling!
scuba ˆ stingray
Here's a closer view! On the boat, our divemaster explained to us that stingrays don't have teeth - instead they have two cartilaginous "grind plates" that they use to chew their food. When they smell something good, they can generate a ton of suction and they use it to suck the food up into their mouth!
scuba ˆ stingray
In order to feed a stingray, you put a little piece of squid in your hand and make a fist around it. When the stingray gets close to your fist....
scuba ˆ stingray
...you can stick out a finger or thumb and put it on their nose and lead them around. It's really funny. You can go around and and around and the stingray will stick right with your hand because it knows you've got some squid in there. Then, when you're ready, you open your hand as quick as you can and hold your hand flat so that when the stingray turns on the super-suction, your fingers don't get sucked up along with the squid!
scuba ˆ stingray
Which is exactly what happened to me! Our divemaster had warned us that the suction was so strong that if we accidentally got our fingers sucked into the mouth, that we wouldn't be able to get them out! He then explained that if this should happen, you should just relax and that after a few seconds, the stingray would realize our fingers were non-edible and would stop the suction and then you can get your fingers out.

This is exactly what happened to me! Except that when my finger got sucked in, I felt his grindplates grind on my finger, thought "HOLY FUCK! This one's got TEETH!" and then panicked and ripped my hand out of it's mouth as hard as I could! The cut you see on my hand is from where the suction pulled the skin right off my finger! Crazy, right?
blood ˆ scuba ˆ stingray
It was a little scary, but I realized that it was totally my mistake and that the little guy hadn't meant to get a chunk of manflesh. He even came back over to say hi...
scuba ˆ stingray
...and I pet his weird, squishy, muppety body. Nice, Stingray!
scuba ˆ stingray
When our squid was all gone, homeboy even waved goodbye before swimming off!
scuba ˆ stingray

<i>Dive #5</i>

We headed all the way back over to the south east side of the island and at 4pm we made our 3rd and final dive of the day. Going down!
scuba
More swim-throughs.
scuba ˆ swimthrough
More big silvery fish.
scuba
More beautiful rocks (I took this one with a flash inside a swim-through tunnel).
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Angelfish.
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me
Me!
scuba ˆ me
Down around a depth of 40 feet, the blood on my stingray wound looked black because red lightwaves aren't able to travel that far through the water!
blood ˆ scuba
Entrance to a huge swim-through tunnel!
scuba ˆ swimthrough
Pufferfish again!
pufferfish ˆ scuba
And on the walk home that night I almost got nipped by this crabby fucker! Damn near lost a toe! (Part Two coming soon!)
crab