Cayman Islands Travel Guide

About 99% of all visitors to Cayman Brac come for one reason and one reason only; the excellent scuba diving. The Cayman Islands are well known for the murky off-shore banking and for the wonderful coral reefs. Cayman Brac has no shady bank offices, but it has coral reefs to suit most people.   For the unlucky non-diving partner, Cayman Brac in all honesty does not have a whole lot to offer by way of sights. There is a small hill called “The Bluff” with a few birds and there is a small “swamp”. Instead, non-diving partners will most probably end up in one of the spas that now seem to be a standard outfit in all hotels on the island.   However, for the hard-core diver I would recommend the even smaller sister island Little Cayman, even further away from Grand Cayman. There is even less to do on Little Cayman, but the diving is also a whole lot better. The dive centres on Cayman Brac have tried to spice up the diving by adding artificial reefs (wrecks).   The first bigger one was a Soviet-built warship bought from Cuba. The sinking included a member of the Costeau-family staying onboard while the ship sank. Unfortunately, the ship did not end up exactly where planned. In addition, the ship was built from aluminium and the combination salt water, sand and aluminium caused galvanization. The ship was later broken in a storm.   

We stay at Cobalt Coast Resort for the diving. The resort is BEAUTIFUL and you will find no better host than owner Ari. We've stayed at CCR for at least three visits and on these visits, Ari has taken us to the medical clinic when our son Ben got an ear infection, driven us past Hell, bought pool toys for our son, bought a kite for our son, and taken our extended family into town to visit the turtle farm. Rooms have AC and TV (important when traveling with the youngsters!). Good reliable internet connection. Resort has a pool, iron-shore (dead coral) beach, long pier, small sandy area for sun-bathing. Summer has a great introduce-kids-to-water program. Resort also has a dog (Mojo) and cat (Ginger) and a bazillion hermit crabs to pick up and chase. Easy resort to get to (hop from Houston is about 2 hours). Plenty of diving: 2 boat dives each morning to beautiful finger reefs. Shore diving available but there is a long swim out to get past the iron shore. Resort is a little out of the way, but about a 7 to 10 minute drive away from 7-mile beach so rent a car if you want to do more than dive. Menu is limited: it has seven items on it but that's it. It doesn't rotate. Chef is willing to customize (we were able to easily get food Ben would eat). US dollar is accepted tho exchange rate is set so that the Cayman dollar is worth a quarter more than a US dollar so it's expensive. Everyone speaks English.

Hiring a Cab/Shuttle in Grand Cayman.

Drivers will negotiate the fair, if you have a large group then negotiate.  We got fare from $4/person to $3/person for party of 8 both ways - saved $16 US.

If they offer to give you lower fare on the way back, don't take it unless you are certain to get that same driver again.  Typically cruise ship passengers go to the same locations and when its time to head back to ship, there will be an over abundance of cabs/shuttles and they take the first people they get.  They won't wait around for you. 

We did hook up with our same shuttle driver and she tried to renig on the deal we made.  We told her to pound sand we'd take another cab just on principle, she then honored our original deal.