Are You Ready To Explore Cayman Brac?
What have the Caymans ever done for us? All right, there’s the snorkelling, the diving, the sunshine, the tropical beaches… And for some holidaymakers, that’s enough. But if you have a restless streak, if you want adventure and a few surprises, aren’t the Cayman Islands, dare we say it, a bit boring?
Yes, but not if you throw the out lying island of Cayman Brac into the mix. What makes Brac different to the other Caymans is something called the Bluff. It’s a 150ft-high lump of rock, a mile wide and 10 miles long. Slap-bang in the middle of the island. And it’s wild and covered in jungle. The sort of thing to make you get off the sunlounger and go exploring.
Thirty million years ago, this vast limestone karst outcrop was the island. If you look at its base, you’ll find a continuous deep notch where the waves used to eat into it. Water and wind also carved out strange fissures and caves. The recession of the seas a few millenniums ago left the Bluff surrounded by flattened-out skirts of land.
But when you drive or walk around the island, you almost always find yourself looking up at the mountainous walls of that “old island”, decorated on top with overspilling greenery. It’s very Conan Doyle’s Lost World — although the pterodactyl silhouettes that you see wheeling over it are actually provided by their modern-day lookalikes, 7ft-wingspan frigatebirds.
Bluff in Gaelic is Brac — a namedonated by Scottish fishermen who settled here in the mid-19th century. Brackers are a rough, tough mix of Scots, Welsh, Jamaicans, Americans and Asians… The island has always attracted adventurers.
And if you’re adventurous enough to explore the Bluff, the local tourist office will give you an expert nature guide for the day — free of charge.
My guide was Wallace Platts, a far-from-retiring Canadian retiree with a passion for the Brac and its natural history; together we did several forays into the Bluff. In its central area, we walked the Bight Road. This ancient up-and-over, cross-island path took us into the green heart of the island; it also forms the western boundary of a 180-acre nature reserve. It’s called the Parrot Reserve — sole nesting place for the rare Cayman Brac parrot (only 400 left) — but it’s also home to a jungleful of plants, birds and insects, and the occasional hefty-looking iguana.
Not only is the karst sharp and tricky underfoot, sometimes the ground opens up into sinkholes, some 30ft deep.
So you have to watch your feet, even though you’re tempted simply to gawp at the surrounding array of cacti, duppy bushes, cabbage trees, agaves, wild sapodilla and red birch trees.
Red birch roots squirm all over the rocky surface like giant crimson snakes in search of a hiding place, another hazard for unwary feet.
As we walked, curly-tailed lizards, clouds of dragonflies, moths and pretty zenaida doves accompanied us.
And there were always surprising flashes of colour: the darting yellow of a vireo on the wing, the sensuous blue of butterfly-pea flowers, and the orange throat-balloon display of an anole lizard — blatantly advertising for sex.
Most exciting of all was a sighting of the red, blue and green of one of those elusive Cayman Brac parrots.
While the parrots are hard to spot, the Brac’s brown boobies are not. They nest on the cliffs that constitute the far-eastern end of the Bluff. Down through a valley of silver thatch palms, past a little lighthouse, you follow a clifftop path, decorated with jasmine, wild fig and juniper, until you come to their nesting sites. Whether it’s because they’re trusting or just plain boobies, they don’t seem to mind humans, although if you get too near, they pick up sticks and lay down a “fence” that says keep out. The fluffy white youngsters (like the four-month-old that a mother booby allowed me to see up close) are unbelievably cute. But it’s not easy being a booby, because those ever-present frigatebirds can’t be bothered to go fishing — they simply mug the boobies and take their catch instead.
At the far west of the island, the Bluff comes more down to earth. But it still has some rugged surprises left. The West End Community Park is a delightful little public garden. It looks peaceful enough, but don’t be fooled. It’s also the start of a secret walk into the wild, known as Rabe’s Trail. The park itself offers a soft stroll through welcoming, shady trees, but Rabe (the park keeper) has added something of his own: a path through the surrounding bush, marked only by little coloured ties, that will take you on a serpentine jungle walk and eventually lead you to Turtle Crawl. The crawl (a corruption of “corral”) is a vast sunken water-filled cave or sinkhole where captive turtles (once a big-time export from the Brac) used to be stored.
You might think that a tourist indus try that consists of little more than offering you a free guide is not much of a tourist industry; but long may it stay that way. While much of the Bluff is protected, some of its green summit is being snapped up for building homes. For the time being, though, the Bluff remains the repository of the mystery and the soul of Cayman Brac.
“In the old days,” Wallace said, “they used to say don’t go alone on the Bluff — you could die up there. That’s kind of neat. It’s good to have something you’re in awe of — and that you respect.”
Awe and a touch of fear — not the usual ingredients of a Cayman Islands holiday (they would be snorkelling and rum), but then there’s very little that’s usual about the Bluff. And if you survive up there, you could always celebrate by flippering over the reef, then perching a while at the bar.
Via Sunday Times Travel