Thing to Do #36: Visit Every Country-Cayman Islands

To celebrate purchasing our plane tickets to New Zealand this week, here’s a post about international travel.

In October 2007, Alex and I took a 7-day cruise on to Grand Cayman, Cozumel, Belize City, and Roatan Island, Honduras.  Of all the places we went, Grand Cayman was my least favorite and this is why.

We were only in Grand Cayman for seven hours and while I realize this is not much time to create an opinon of a whole country, I don’t think I’d want to give it another try.  Perhaps other parts of the island (or the other islands) are beautiful, but what I saw was an incredibly Americanized area, complete with KFC, Burger King, and Pizza Hut.  I even found Mountain Dew to drink (which is usually impossible outside of the South, much less outside of the US!).  It looked like we were in Myrtle Beach during Spring Break.  Its terribly expensive due to the HUGE banking industry and, obviously, the tourism industry. 

The other reasons I didn’t enjoy my time (although this is not Grand Cayman’s fault) was that the excursion we took was boring.  We decided to go on a pseudo-Submarine tour (mostly a glass bottomed boat with most of the passengers below the water, but the boat would still be above the water).   During our little trip, we saw very little other than the plain sea bottom.  We passed by one ship wreck, and when one of our tour guides went scuba diving, she attracted a fair amount of fish by feeding them.  Halfway through the tour, the AC went out, causing the small space down below to get hot quickly.  The whole trip lasted maybe 30 minutes and overall we were disappointed by our little tour, especially as it had been rather expensive.

I also didn’t enjoy the beach.  We had been told about a beach called Seven Mile Beach and asked the taxi driver to take us there.  She suggested another beach, which was closer and public, therefore free (we had been told Seven Mile Beach was $20 to access – we later discovered Seven Mile Beach was public and we could have accessed it just the same).  We arrived at the taxi driver’s suggested beach, which was crowded, and although it was free, we paid for lounge chairs.  I had gotten burned the day before, so I didn’t want to stay out long.  I am used to enjoying the solitude of the beaches of North Carolina and was soon annoyed by the many people and children around, yelling, running, kicking up sand, etc.  We showered off and went in search of lunch.

We hailed a taxi driver back to where we had arrived in port as we had noticed there were a collection of restaurants there.  This is where Alex discovered Margaritaville, which he later visited in Cozumel with a very interesting ending…but that’s for later.  We ate lunch, had a couple of drinks, and returned to the ship.  It was not a great way to start the trip, but it proved to be the only dull Port of Call during our cruise.

Anyone been to the Cayman Islands and have something positive to say about it?  Anyone been and agree with me?