Our 3rd port of call was George Town, Grand Cayman.
The Cayman Islands, unlike Labadee and MoBay is very developed. In no small measure, this is due to the large amounts of money flowing in from the “Super Rich” who have set up trust funds or brought in obscene amounts of monies due to the fact the Cayman Islands is a tax haven.
It is clear that people here are much more affluent than many of their other Caribbean neighbours, and that the standard of living is extremely high.
The shopping in Cayman Islands is good, particularly for jewelry. The Wife got herself a pair of nice pearl earrings from one of the duty-free shops. We also got quite a number of other gifts and presents here.
The Island is also very cosmopolitan. You will find people of many nationalities living there.
The store manager from the duty-free store who served the Wife is from England. The sales assistant from the same store who sold the pearl earrings to the Wife is from Equador. The souvenir shop owner from whom we bought matching t-shirts, a lovely CD, magnets, and some presents hails all the way from The Philippines. There was a Chinese working in the ice-cream parlour where we had a scoop of papaya ice-cream… and the list goes on.
So… our visit of the Cayman Islands was all very nice up to this point.
Then came the first disappointment of our trip – the land tour, an Atlantis Submarine ride.
We booked ourselves on that tour as we thought it would be cool to board a submarine, and as neither the Wife nor I are divers, we thought we would do the next best thing to check out the marine life, which is to see it through a glass window from the submarine. And after hearing all our diver friends rave about the beautiful marine life, the colourful schools of fishes and reefs of corals, it was inevitable that our expectations were sky-high, only to be sorely disappointed.
The submarine was fairly small and squeezy, which would have been fine had the sights been breath-taking. But then the underwater sights were even much more disappointing. Everything looked to be blue and grey. We did not see any explosion of colours, and the fishes that we saw were also nothing to scream about.
The Cayman Islands, unlike Labadee and MoBay is very developed. In no small measure, this is due to the large amounts of money flowing in from the “Super Rich” who have set up trust funds or brought in obscene amounts of monies due to the fact the Cayman Islands is a tax haven.
It is clear that people here are much more affluent than many of their other Caribbean neighbours, and that the standard of living is extremely high.
The shopping in Cayman Islands is good, particularly for jewelry. The Wife got herself a pair of nice pearl earrings from one of the duty-free shops. We also got quite a number of other gifts and presents here.
The Island is also very cosmopolitan. You will find people of many nationalities living there.
The store manager from the duty-free store who served the Wife is from England. The sales assistant from the same store who sold the pearl earrings to the Wife is from Equador. The souvenir shop owner from whom we bought matching t-shirts, a lovely CD, magnets, and some presents hails all the way from The Philippines. There was a Chinese working in the ice-cream parlour where we had a scoop of papaya ice-cream… and the list goes on.
So… our visit of the Cayman Islands was all very nice up to this point.
Then came the first disappointment of our trip – the land tour, an Atlantis Submarine ride.
We booked ourselves on that tour as we thought it would be cool to board a submarine, and as neither the Wife nor I are divers, we thought we would do the next best thing to check out the marine life, which is to see it through a glass window from the submarine. And after hearing all our diver friends rave about the beautiful marine life, the colourful schools of fishes and reefs of corals, it was inevitable that our expectations were sky-high, only to be sorely disappointed.
The submarine was fairly small and squeezy, which would have been fine had the sights been breath-taking. But then the underwater sights were even much more disappointing. Everything looked to be blue and grey. We did not see any explosion of colours, and the fishes that we saw were also nothing to scream about.
We found out later that the reason everything looked blue and grey is because there was an absence of white light underwater.
And so, the submarine tour trudged on for 45 mins, which almost bored us to tears.
The disappointing tour cost us an arm and a leg, and we did not even enjoy it, save for the fact that we can now say that we had been onboard a submarine.
Hopefully this will be the exception rather than the rule for the rest of our trip.
- WWCS
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