Greg’s weblog

We arrived on Grand Cayman at some ungodly hour (7:30 actually) Turns out that not many people wanted to go ashore first thing in the morning…So, 7:30 AM in a strange city with no local currency, we set off to find a payphone. We managed to find a bank of payphones nearby, but that still didn’t solve the lack of local coinage problem. For that, we turned to a local cheque cashing place, where we managed to trade a US dollar for 4 Cayman Islands quarters – a full CI$0.20 more than it was worth. Anyway, armed with a few quarters, we went back to the payphones (did I mention it was a bank of payphones? See that’s funny cause Grand Cayman has about a billion banks with offices on it.) We called my friend Jon up, and he came and picked us up to tour us around the island.

We went straight to Hell. Unfortunately, the guy who runs the gift shop was on holiday in the US, so we missed out on some local colour (Note the familiar u in colour – Gotta love former British colonies.) Anyway, after taking a few pictures of the “brimstone” and browsing the gift shop, we got back on the road (cause apparently there is only one road on the island…) From hell, we went to the Turtle Farms, which was really interesting, just not for very long. We did take about a billion (ok 50) pictures of turtles, and some of them were even good. From there, we were going to go to Rum Point, but on the way there, we decided to go to the Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Gardens instead.

We walked a path that was about a mile long, snapping photos along the way – we saw all kinds of cool looking plants, and even a couple of rare Blue Rock Iguanas. Pretty big lizards, very cool. One of the more interesting parts of the walk was all the trees that had signs on them telling you not to touch them. Apparently just touching these trees will cause you to break out in painful blisters. Extremely toxic and stuff. The botanic park was really neat, and well worth the couple of hours that it took to go there, tour it and come back. After that, we had lunch at the Hard Rock cafe, where we were “served” by a waiter from Regina. Lots of good food, though apparently when that particular waiter says “I’ll be right back” you can’t believe him – on three separate occasions he said that, and each time it seemed like he’d gone for coffee before we saw him again. After that, we bought some Tshirts, which took the rest of our american dollars, so we went to look for a bank to get more. Like I said before, there are about a billion banks on Grand Cayman, but most of them don’t have retail branches. Of the ones we saw, most of them were Canadian banks – Scotia, Royal, CIBC. We went to the Bank of Butterfield to get US dollars, the bank machine said that it gave US of CI dollars, but not how to get the US dollars. Anyway, we ended up taking out Cayman Island dollars by accident. Luckily Jon came to the rescue, and took out US dollars and bought our CI Dollars.

All in all, a great day. It was great to see Jon again, it had been too long.

After that, we got back on the ship, and had Formal Night part II. We got our picture taken in front of a cheesy backdrop (the staircase from Titanic.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2002 at 7:33 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.