Where to Next?: January 10 – Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands

Weather – 27º, more like 22º and very overcast when we started out at 8:30 this morning, by 10:30 there wasn’t a cloud to be found

Steps – 7,996

Grande Cayman is another repeat stop for us, we were here last Sunday.

Just like last visit, we tendered to shore. We were closer than last time and there was only one other ship in with us, different from 4 in with us last time. We didn’t

blue iguana

notice a difference at all.

very close

Today was all about animals. The tour we selected was titled “Flora and Fauna” - it was mostly Fauna. Our first stop was visiting Grande Cayman’s blue iguanas in a preserve. The blue iguana is an endangered species endemic to Grande Cayman, apparently there were fewer than 13 left in 2003. Calling these ‘blue’ is a bit of false advertising. These definitely aren’t the typical green iguanas we’ve see a lot of but are kind of a dull blueish. The blue iguana is the biggest native animal on Grande Cayman, I’d say the biggest one we saw today was 3 feet long.

like a tunnel of hanging flowers!

There were also a few gardens at the preserve, but we didn’t have nearly
enough time to visit them well. We sprinted through the preserve and really only visited the ‘colour’ garden (garden with flowers) to find the loo. I’m glad we needed ‘to go’ because we saw some amazing plants. We also encountered some random iguanas.

We also saw a agouti or Cayman rabbit dart across our path at the Iguana preserve. It was too fast to get my own pic of, but I found one online.

enroute to see some stingrays

A visit to ‘Stingray City’ was our second and last
stop today. I’m not usually up for animal encounters and prefer to see animals by chance. Before we decided to go on this excursion, I looked into it and while humans definitely attract the rays to the area, they aren’t in captivity. The stingrays at Stingray City are technically wild but have become somewhat domesticated by to human feeding.

meeting a ray

Apparently, decades ago, fishing boats cleaned their fish in the calm waters of a shallow sandbar. The fish guts eventually attracted the stingrays and it’s now a tourist attraction. About 20 of us boarded a small boat for a 30 min ride to the sand bar. We got into the chest deep (sometimes only waist deep) water with a guide and waited for the rays.

It didn’t take long for there to be 7 or 8 of them swimming around us. The guide explained a bit about the rays and then we got to touching them, having them lean on us and basically letting them swim around us. A photographer took about 10 shots of us (some very cheesy) for the low, low price of $60 USD!

port beers

I’m still a bit conflicted about this experience and prefer to let animals just be and see what I can see. It was a very cool experience that definitely could have been longer.

"Playbook"

A rum punch was served on the ride back to the van. Then a 7USD local beer at the port and we were back onboard by 1:30. We set sail early today to make it to Cozumel for tomorrow.

We knew we’d want to shower when we got back to the ship, and we’d be ready for lunch. The plan was to order right away and then use the waiting time to

sunset blogging

shower. By the time I got out of the shower the food was already there!
Definitely one of the fastest room service deliveries EVER! A couple of sandwiches and a salad really hit the spot!

evening cocktail

The show tonight was called “Playlist” basically random songs (possibly requested) that the singers and band performed. It was great, upbeat “modern’ songs’

Definitely couldn’t have made it to Casa Nova today – no time.