After a day at sea-ocean, the first stop of our cruise was Grand Cayman.
This is a group of the Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory in the West Indies, in the Caribbean. The official name is the Cayman Islands.
The capital, George town, is located on Grand Cayman.
The area of this territory is 264 km². The property includes the islands of Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac. Population - 62 348 people. (2018), mulattos, white and black.
Over 4/5 of the population lives on Grand Cayman.
It was to this large island that we sailed on the second day of our trip (or the third day of the cruise, whoever keeps the report).
On this day, for the first time, we learned that liners do not always and everywhere moor to the shore.
This, it turns out, is also indicated in our on-board weekly booklets.
From the shore there will be access to land, or there will be a transfer to the shore.
As I said, we learn many little things during our travels, from our own experience.
Passing for breakfast, we saw an empty morning deck. And also the fact that the weather that day in the morning was rainy.
We decided not to be upset about the rain and went to enjoy breakfast.
From the window of the breakfast restaurant, we could see the shore we were soon to land on, and quite a blue sky, with clouds but no rain.
I didn’t really want to eat in the morning, my husband and I are coffee lovers, usually at first two or three hours in the morning for 2-3 cups of coffee, and only then we have breakfast.
But here is a special case, you need to have breakfast, as we had a 4-5 hour day tour of the city of George town ahead of us.
That's why you don't see much on our breakfast plates. But there was another half: coffee and sweets, which I no longer photographed.
In this photo, I wanted to capture exactly the shore to which we will soon sail on a boat.
And here are our boats for transfer to the shore.
I was a little worried, on our first cruise we immediately went ashore to Nassau, and then we stopped about 1.5-2 km from the coast, and we had to sail ashore on such fast boats, and in the evening, of course, on somehow they had to swim back.
But everything turned out to be simple and fast.
At the exit from the liner to board the boats, there was a customs service with tablets that simply scanned our cruise card and released everyone to board the boat.
On our cruise to the Bahamas, we also showed our passports ashore.
And now you don’t need passports, only a cruise card, in which all the passenger’s data is already flashed, and scanning from a tablet takes literally 1-2 seconds.
The queue goes fast.
The boats are also large, two decks, roomy, there are 2 boats at once, only the loaded boats leave, the next ones immediately come up.
One boat is loaded for 10 minutes.
I mean, everything was well organized.
And hello Grand Cayman and George town!
George Town - the capital of the Cayman Islands, a British possession in the Caribbean and a port, is located on the island of Grand Cayman.
The city is the financial center of the Cayman Islands, it houses the offices of about 600 banking organizations.
There is also a cruise ship service center, a dock for cargo ships and several shopping centers. The city operates Owen Roberts International Airport.
Area - 29 km².
Population - 27,704 (2010).
Density - 955.31 people / km²
The official language is English.
With the tour, which we bought in advance on a separate website, not on the liner and not in the cruise company, everything was also very organized.
Even on the liner itself, everyone who had bought excursions was gathered in a large hall, distributed, who was going on which excursion, and stuck the name of the excursion.
And, when going ashore, we were already met by different guides, also distributing by the names of excursions.
We chose, as we always do with any new place, a sightseeing tour of the city.
It was still raining in the city. We were put on the bus, everything is also organized and without fuss.
And we went to the first place of our visit, to the rum farm.
It was not very convenient to shoot from the window of a moving bus, I did not see anything interesting in the surrounding landscape.
The town is clean, the administrative center is also neat.
We rode around the city for about 30-40 minutes, the guide told about the city itself various standard information, when, who, why and why.
And then we were taken to a local tourist attraction, a rum factory.
Of course, this is a pirate region in the past, islands where pirates of the Caribbean once found shelter, how could there not be a factory for the production of this wonderful drink on the island. 😊😜😁
This is TORTUGA RUM. Fairly well-known to rum lovers.
It is with a visit to the factory that I will begin my next story.
To be continued....
All photos are from the author's archive.
Read the beginning of the cruise here:
Western Caribbean Cruise 2018.
Cruise ship "Carnival Magic".
Wedding anniversary on a cruise ship.
Cruising in the Western Caribbean. Day 1.