Water World

How embarrassing: I, the world traveller, the modern-day Phileas Fogg who has travelled to over 60 different countries in just 10 years, had to look at an atlas to find out where the Turks and Caicos are. (Hey, at least I knew that the Turks and Caicos is a group of islands somewhere in the Caribbean.) After looking at the map it gets better—the Turks are located at the end of the Bahamas, near Cuba and Haiti. Yippee! I’ll get my shorts and dump the coat.

The Turks and Caicos is comprised of 40 tiny islands with only eight of them inhabited. Personally, I would prefer the deserted islands, but I’m not here to lay around on miles and miles of perfectly white sandy beaches and swim in glass-clear blue seas. No, I’m here to work. My main destinations are the premier dive site on Provo, the stunning trek along the coastal paths of Middle Caicos and humpback whale watching on Grand Turk. Come to think of it, maybe I am here to walk on sandy beaches and swim in the sea.

With only 20,000 islanders, the Turks and Caicos feel like the backwater of the Caribbean. In the past 10 years the population has doubled, thanks to the rate at which large hotels and condos are going up, even in ‘National Park Land’. Anyone can purchase land here and money talks. In another decade I dread to think what it will be like. I fear that overdevelopment will destroy the delicate marine environment that, ironically, is the main tourist attraction.

I do love scuba diving, if only I could bypass the macho, rubber-wearing, hairy (yes, hairy) blokes all puffing their chests like peacocks and trying so hard to look cool. But, it’s a small price to pay for a perfect dive in crystal-clear turquoise water. I had forgotten how brilliant it is to float around in an underwater fantasy world, slowly drifting, gently swooping in the midst of so many weird and wonderful specimens of marine life. One fish had so many shades of luminous blues and yellows it was almost unnatural. I wish I had brought my sunglasses it was so bright.

There were hundreds of them in different shapes and sizes, all wearing their Sunday best for me. The colours were so ridiculous it felt like a group of school kids had run amok with poster paint, spilling it out over the corals that were swaying backwards and forwards on the sea bed.

Swimming among these fish becomes like a game of I Spy: tiger sting rays so close you could touch them, large reef sharks that make you suck your oxygen a bit harder (I used half a tank in one breath), three-foot barracudas as thick as my leg with teeth bared and beady eyes.

And then, just to cap it all off, the dive master motions us to be still and listen. There it was, drifting through the ocean depths—the sound of the whale song. Three miles away, two whales were speaking to each other but the sound was so clear they could have been three feet away. What an incredibly beautiful and eerie sound—and what a privilege to hear it.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Wright of Way. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.