blog stew: Day 2 - Wednesday, December 4th, 2013

Woke up at 6am to see sunrise. Wrong side of the island for a great one, pretty gosh darned beautiful anyway. We had breakfast at the hotel. Fresh fruit, french toast made with Cayman raisin bread and sausage that may have been chicken and possibly even wrapped in chicken skin. Interesting. Tasted god. Fruit was a little underwhelming for a tropical island, but otherwise pretty good.

Rachel sat on the beach and read a book and I decided to walk along the beach a bit. The beach is sand mixed with crushed shells toward the back, and coral near the water. It is nearly impossible to walk on the coral without shoes or sandals, but definitely lovely and unique. There are a lot of little lizards and hermit crabs. The crabs are awesome. Some are smaller than a shirt button, and you could easily step on several without noticing if you weren't careful. I took a little trail through some trees off the beach, saw some chickens nesting, as well as beautiful plants and flowers everywhere.

Up the shore was quite a bit of trash. Plastic bottles mostly, but I saw a chair and a bit further, a dresser. I took a left at the dresser and found a cemetery. All the graves were white concrete, somewhat above ground. They were decorated with flowers, some real, most fake, and most were decorated with conch shells.

I went back towards the hotel and Rachel and I decided to go into Georgetown to talk to a travel place about possibly going to Cuba. We are staying on the west end of the island. Grand Cayman is U-shaped and we are on the top left of the U, Georgetown is bottom left. We took a van to town. It is tourist season, so between 3-8 cruise ships anchor to GCI (Grand Cayman Island) from about 8am-5pm, depending...

So generally, we are thinking of staying away from this area when there are ships in. Cayman is kind of expensive, they are a British island. Their money here is higher than the U.S. Dollar, about $1.20 U.S. to $1.00 Cayman Dollar.

We spoke to the travel agency and the Cuba expert wasn't in, so we got some information and walked around downtown for a bit. I needed some sunglasses and found some decent aviators and a burlap fedora hat to wear. Rachel got some black coral earrings, the local stone. Caymanite and tanzanite are also local favorites and very beautiful. I saw a sign for a Cuban cigar place and we decided to get a couple Cubans to celebrate or upcoming scuba certification. One was Cohiba, the other was Montecristo, the #1 and #2 most popular brands from Cuba. We met our driver back at the Burger King. American fast food is all over in this area and it is definitely being commercialized. As our driver told us on the way back, very commercial now, less unique, crime and drugs are on the rise. Per capita crime rate is on par with the U.S.

I forgot to write yesterday, so I had her stop and bought a notebook at a grocery store before we went back. Once back at the hotel, we got ready got our scuba gear, checked in at the dive shop and got ready to dive. We met Allen, Allen, and Liz, a mother/father/son from Atlanta, with Allen Jr. currently living and running a bar in Charleston, South Carolina. We put on our BC(buoyancy control) vest, attached the air tanks, tested our regulators, added weight, walked down the dock and put on our masks, snorkels, fins and got into the crystal clear, blue-green water. We swam out to a buoy, descended abut 10 feet and started off as a group, paying close attention to our buoyancy on this particular dive. The coral and sea life are amazing. Indescribable. Long skinny fish, barracuda, scores of smaller tropical looking fishes. We saw a sea turtle! First dive, pretty sweet. We swam for about 50 minutes and went down to a depth of about 40 feet. We returned to the dock, changed out our air tanks and went back for a second dive after a short break.

For our second dive, we practiced some skills. We had to go from snorkel to regulator to snorkel with our heads underwater the whole time. Then we descended. At the bottom, we had to partially fill our masks, clear it, then fully fill our masks with water and clear it. After that we had to remove our regulators from our mouths, retrieved them, purged it clean, then continued on. We dove for another 45 minutes after that, saw another sea turtle and a sting ray. It is so beautiful. So glad we decided to do this!

We got back, went over our dive sheets, packed up the gear and had a drink. I had a Cayman lemonade. Mmmm... Drew, our dive instructor was at the bar as well and we bought him a drink and talked for awhile with him and Colin, the bartender. Drew is from Wales and is worried he'll have to leave because his wife lost her job and may have to leave the island, based on visa restrictions. So Drew may have to leave as well, as it is too expensive to live there alone, and he probably wouldn't want to anyway.

He is a good guy, I hope it all works out for him. Colin is from Ireland and told us all about Grand Cayman Island during dinner and afterwards as we met some of our neighbors and we ate our dinner at the bar this time. I had conch ceviche and red snapper. Rachel had chicken soup and red snapper. Much better. Rachel's fish was still a little overcooked and the veggies that they came with were probably neither local nor fresh, which is odd to me. The ceviche was awesome and my fish was pretty right on. We shared some mango sorbet(good) and chocolate mousse(good) for dessert.

We hung out with Colin and Allen Jr. for awhile and we're now going to bed after watching a SNL Christmas special.

Diving takes it out of you. Very tired, and I want to get up early and see the sunrise again. I'm late and it's already 11:37pm here. Goodnight.