Splashing Around the Caribbean in the Turks and Caicos

Blue angelfish flash over the reef like neon lightning. Rock iguanas shimmy for shade under Silver Top Palms. Pet conchs Sally and Jerry uncurl out of their shells at the sound of their keeper’s voice.

It’s a bit of wild kingdom on the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Flung like a meteor tail from the Bahamian archipelago into the Atlantic, this nation of 40 isles in the British West Indies still exudes an aura of the old Caribbean.

True, construction cranes have taken over the most-visited island, Providenciales, and tourism has displaced the traditional conch-and-lobster economy, but TCI still has an authentic feel about its locals, called Belongers, and its animals.

While much of the world’s reef system is warming and bleaching to white, TCI has protected the purple and ochre corals and rainbows of fish that make it one of the world’s Top Five dive spots. Even snorkelers can get in on the action, following underwater sign-posted trails at Grace Bay, Smith’s Reef and Bight Reef.

Wide with pearlescent sand, 12-mile Grace Bay on the North Shore is Provo’s crown jewel. Some travelers are content to spend every moment on the beach, but there’s much more to see and do on Provo and her neighboring cays, and the animals are waiting for you.

The first, funky stop is Conch World, where as many as a million and a half conch begin life each year. In what sounds like a script from “Gilligan’s Island,” marine biologist Chuck Hesse and his wife left Mystic, Conn., and were sailing through Provo’s narrow Leeward Going Through channel when they wrecked in 1974.

A conch scholar, Hesse decided there were worse places to plant anchor, and in 1984 started the world’s only conch farm.

This operation has indoor incubators for the eggs and juveniles, and outdoor pools and ocean pens for the growing conch. By age 4, when their graceful pink-lip shell begins to flare out, they’re ready to harvest for local restaurants and the Miami market. By agreement with the government, a half million are put back into TCI waters each year.

Two, however, are chosen to live out their lives as “pets,” and Sally and Jerry dutifully come of out their shells when guide Danver Fortune picks each up.

“Are these the same Sally and Jerry I saw 10 years ago?” a traveler asks.

“Five years ago, maybe,” Fortune says, “but not 10. But it’s still Sally and Jerry—it’s like Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.”

Even better is to dive off the side of a boat and snatch your own conch from the sandy bottom. At Pine Cay, Captain Shaun Deane of Caicos Dream Tours cuts the engine and hands everyone masks and fins. Free-dive down just a few feet and help nab lunch—you can bring any conch older than 4, with that tell-tale flare to pink shell, up to the surface.

As the boat cozies up to the shelling beach at Fort George, First Mate Ashley Handfield hops onto the sand to clean the catch. Tapping a wedge into the shell to loosen the conch, he pulls out the tenacious mollusk, trims it and tosses bits into the air for squawking gulls to catch and into the sea for crabs to snap up. With the shell for a souvenir and the conch diced into Capt. Deane’s secret-recipe ceviche, there’s not a bit of conch wasted.

As recently as 20 years ago, conch and lobster exports to the U.S. fueled the TCI economy. It’s still the basis of business at da Conch Shack and RumBar on the North Shore beach at Blue Hills, the original name for Provo.

Grab a picnic table beneath the palms, fronds flapping in the trade winds, and settle in with Alicia’s Infamous Rum Punch. Sniff sizzling conch fritters and steaming grouper on the salt air. Coupled with a Turk’s Head beer chaser, this is the taste of TCI. And, as the menu promises, that “Fuzzy, Happy Feeling” is free.

The stout Turk’s head cactus, that seems to wear a red fez when it blooms, gave the islands half their name. The Lucayan Indian word for “string of islands” supplied the rest.

These low-flying limestone islands, eight of the 40 inhabited by just 35,000 people, have been claimed by the France, Spain, Britain and such infamous pirates as Anne Bonny and her lover, Calico Jack Rackham.

Some TCI islanders are adamant that Columbus’ first football in the New World was on their capital island, Grand Turk, rather than on the Bahamas’ San Salvador, and the argument has raged since 1492.

Then, no one was on the island to verify things: the Lucayans from Haiti had lived on Grand Turk from about AD 705 to 1170 and were gone before Columbus. In the 1600s, Bermudians settled Grand Turk, Salt Cay and South Caicos, bringing slaves to rake the vast salt pans. They deforested the islands to speed up evaporation.

Today, this British Crown Colony is a cinch for North Americans: Less than a 90-minute flight from Miami, with English the language and the greenback the currency. Even American-made appliances work without adaptors.

These low islands themselves seem remarkably hurricane-proof, sheltering behind the Dominican Republic and Haiti as that island takes the brunt of storms.

But rains do blow through, fast and fierce, dimpling the sea and leaving rainbow fragments over the sand of Fort George Beach. A sea gull wheels within its arc, clamoring for conch and pointing the way home to harbor.

Globespin was last updated in February 2009, and all information was accurate at that time.