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DAY ONE
“BWOK!”
“BWOK!”
“BWOK-BWOK-BWOK!”
The back seat of the car erupts in a riot of barnyard noises with every scraggly gaggle of chickens we pass. The boys, innocents of 5 and 3, are so excited to see actual real live chickens here on the quiet side of Grand Cayman you’d think they were watching leopards attack baboons in Zambia. It’s a symptom of the suburban captivity in which they are being raised and, therefore, nobody’s fault but my own, but the incessant bwok-bwok-bwoking is driving me nuts.
These kids clearly need a change of scenery, and that is just why we’ve brought them here. The Cayman Islands are chock-full of critters and family-friendly ways to encounter them, and mercifully, the turtles, iguanas, rays and fishies – not to mention the corals and the conchs – hold out scant opportunity for shrill, high-decibel mimicry.
We arrive at the Reef Resort, out on the remote east end of the island, and check into a one-bedroom suite with doors that open directly onto the sand. A rum punch soothes my jagged travel edge while the little rascals run out on the beach and start having fun. Big brother Beau tries out his new camera by taking a picture of little brother Louie grabbing his gear with the macho gusto of a hip-hop gangsta. There’s one for the kindergarten “what I did last summer” report.
DAY TWO
Snorkeling in the shallow water right out in front of the room, I find twin lobsters hiding under a shelf in three feet of water and show them to the boys, who are wearing the swim goggles they use in our backyard pool. Another 10 feet in, I find a big old queen conch. This is even better than real live chickens. “We’re seeing all the life now!” says Beau.
Down the beach at the resort’s pier, a staffer is tossing bread crumbs into the water to attract fish and, in turn, people. Before long, my whole family is in the water, surrounded by swarming, silvery chubs. “I touched one, Mommy!” shouts 3-year-old Louie, spitting out the watery words like Daffy Duck.
This prompts me to indulge myself in a sentimental moment: Four years ago I concluded an article about diving in the Cayman Islands by wishing in print that I could share the undersea wonder with my boys, the younger of whom was at the time doing all of his swimming in amniotic fluid. And now here he is and here we are – a prayer answered.
But in accordance with the laws of the universe, it’s not long before the feel-good spell is broken. At Rum Point, a great beach-bar compound where we eat lunch, I hear about a barracuda that parks itself in a certain spot under the pier. With Louie’s arms wrapped around my shoulders, I wade in to get a look. The ’cuda, a good 4-footer, turns out to be as curious as we are, promptly exiting his spot and swimming toward us with ambiguous intent, toothy and territorial. Paternal instinct tells me to gather my brood and run away as fast as possible, which isn’t very fast at all in 3½-foot-deep water. We flail and freak out. When we reach shore, the 5-year-old is nearly hysterical because something in the water has stung him on the legs and he thinks the pain is permanent. We have encountered Mother Nature, and she has kicked our butts.
Mix up a Mudslide from Rum Point's Wreck Bar...
DAY THREE
Thinking that before somebody gets hurt it might be wise to enlist some professional guidance, I sign the boys up for a half-day Ambassadors of the Environment program, offered by the Ritz-Carlton and designed in consultation with Jean-Michel Cousteau himself. Thinking we all might have something to learn, I tag along for what’s basically a kindergarten field trip.
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At a shorefront park in George Town, the capital of Grand Cayman, a guide explains that the Cayman islands are plateaus, the tips of undersea mountains, and all of the terrain is fossilized coral called ironshore. The kiddies (and one grotesquely oversize hanger-on) gather around the edge of a small tidal pool to meet little thingies hiding there from open-water predators. Lifting a rock, a guide finds a brittle sea star and places it gently in tiny palms to let the kids feel its Velcro-like tentacles. Then she finds a white sea urchin. “Like the sea star, the urchin is an echinoderm, which means it has spiny skin,” she says. I don’t recall my kindergarten teacher using words like echinoderm.
Back at the Ambassadors of the Environment headquarters, I spy on a bunch of older campers as they crop and enhance the colorful fish pictures they’d taken on a nearby reef that morning. I am stricken with jealousy – not on behalf of my sons but for myself: How do I get to be an ambassador of the environment?
DAY FOUR
“We’re going to take you underwater in a steel tube,” announces the Atlantis Submarine host as we find our seats by circular windows that recall those in front-loading washing machines. Three days after their first peek underwater, the Herndon brothers are going 100 feet under the surface in an actual sub. At this rate, they’ll be working on their Ph.D.s in marine biology by late next week.
Watch videos from aboard the Atlantis submarine...
This is my first descent in a steel tube too, but at least scuba diving has made me comfortable with the idea of submersion. The wife, not so much. Trace elements of the claustrophobia that has always prevented her from diving dissipate, however, in direct proportion to the quantity of fish there are to distract her. At 80 feet, the sub cruises down a coralline gully, surrounded by a shimmering blizzard of blue Creole wrasse; psychedelic-looking parrotfish, elegant French angelfish and even good-size grouper come in and out of view through the windows. The Atlantis XI slips along a sand chute at 100 feet and then pops out over the edge of a wall that drops to 2,000, and suddenly we’re suspended in groundless blue space. “Is this what it’s like when you dive?” says my wife, Valerie. “It’s beautiful!”
DAY FIVE
“Don’t feel bad if you eat turtle meat,” says Bendel “Benny” Ebanks, our guide to the Cayman Turtle Farm. “After all, it’s our national dish.” Actually, I had eaten braised turtle in creamy coffee sauce the night before at a restaurant called the Cracked Conch and didn’t feel bad about it at all, even though one look at the boys’ bathtub would tell you we’re one turtle-friendly family. That’s because I knew going in about the conservation bona fides of the Turtle Farm, which was established in part to provide commercial turtle meat and also to replenish the wild population. Ebanks, a proud Caymanian (who shares his surname with about half of the island), reports that the farm has released some 31,000 turtles, and individuals from there have been found around the Caribbean rim in places as far-flung as Belize and Venezuela. These days, there are about 7,000 turtles here in open touch tanks, separated by age. Ebanks hands the boys specimens the size of dinner plates, and the turtles start flapping their flippers as if they’re trying to fly away. Ebanks tells the boys to stroke the turtles’ necks, a magic touch that calms them down instantly, reducing the chances that one of them will fly free toward the concrete.
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Stingrays, it turns out, like to be stroked too. At least at Stingray City they do, having been habituated to it by a few decades of feeding on a sandbank in Cayman’s North Sound. Back at Rum Point, I had spoken to a veteran glass-bottom-boat guide named Capt. Jimmy Ebanks (Benny knew of him but didn’t know him) and sounded him out about the stingray encounter to make sure it was safe for what he referred to as “de children.”
Watch videos from Stingray City...
“Stingrays are no bother to ya, mon,” Capt. Jimmy had said. “They come up and nudge against you like little kittens and give you a sweet tickle and ask you quiet, ‘Do you have anything for me to eat?’”
“But what about the Crocodile Hunter?” I’d asked.
“Steve Irwin went a little too far with his … hobby,” he’d said.
Armed with that vote of confidence – and the knowledge that Stingray City is one of the Caribbean’s most popular attractions – I bring the boys down the ladder of the catamaran into four feet of water swarming with a couple dozen rays.
“I want to touch one!” shouts the 3-year-old, and instantly, his wish is granted as one slips by and grazes his legs.
“It’s OK to pet them,” says one of the wranglers before opening his arms wide to collect a willing ray in his embrace. He steadies it for us, and we have a family hug around the animal and feel it, viscous and silky smooth. “It’s like a wet portobello mushroom,” says the guide aptly, and I wonder who came up with that one.
This goes on for about 45 minutes, with families posing for pictures with stingrays that have what it takes to kill them – you can see the barb on the rays’ tails when they lift out of the water – but instead choose to play along with the touchy-feely human beings. When you look into their eyes, it’s easy to imagine that you’re communicating, even if it’s to express nothing more or less to each other than, “I trust you.”
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DAY SIX
A 90-mile flight brings us to Little Cayman, population 115. Our timetable regularity of scheduled attractions fades into a come-what-may small-island reverie. The experience is so timeless it feels nostalgic even as we experience it.
We have a long, lazy lunch at a weather-beaten picnic table in the shade of sea grapes and almond trees, feet in the sand, mere steps from the ocean. A hermit crab race breaks out only to be interrupted by the arrival of an iguana returning to drink from a doggie bowl that’s been set out just for that purpose. We take a drive around the 10- by 1-mile isle, speed limit 25, where iguanas have the right of way. In an hour and a half of nosing around, stopping at lookout points and taking a walk on the beach at Point of Sand, we encounter not one soul, unless you count the land crabs that scuttle from the side of the road into the mangroves and marshes of the interior. “This is a great safari, Daddy!” says back-seat Beau, whose bwok-bwoking days seem long past.
On East End – the remotest part of a remote place – the land dries out and becomes a scrub forest of silver thatch palms, agaves, cactuses and ferns. A sign informs us that the karst sinkhole terrain is 20 to 30 million years old, and it wouldn’t have been all that surprising to see a herd of dinosaurs emerge from the brush. (Now that would have been a critter sighting.)
DAY SEVEN
Peter Hillenbrand is a jolly guy who loves small-island life and runs a great little diving and fishing lodge called the Southern Cross Club. The boys tag along with him at his most avuncular, collecting conch for tonight’s ceviche, hooking up a bonefish on the flats and snagging a couple of snappers from the pier, feeding bananas to the iguanas, flying a kite on a deserted island just offshore and, finally, visiting Pirates Point.
Island lore has it that this was one of the last Caribbean havens for the likes of Blackbeard and Henry Morgan, and of course, the little buccaneers want to know if there be treasure buried hereabout. We don’t dig, but we spend the sunset hour snorkeling and beachcombing, gathering coral rubble and busted-up shells and damaged sea fans and desiccated sponges.
We’ve found treasure indeed.
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