After our close encounter with the barracuda, Dean spent the evening wondering how he might be able to catch one.
Out of friendship, I supported Dean's preparations. But I couldn't stop asking, “What are you going to do after you catch one?” Dean was convinced that he’d figure it out once he got there. Dean, maybe. Me, absolutely not. So it was an easy decision when he asked me if I wanted to get up early the next day and go fish for one. But to be honest, he had already lost me at, “Do you want to get up early?”
So Aimee and I slept way in the next day while Dean went down to the water. By the time we eventually woke up, Dean and Jill had already been up for hours. So we had a quick breakfast and packed up the car for a day trip to the other side of the island.
We spent what was left of the morning snorkeling Smith’s reef, more than worthy of its international reputation. The Turks and Caicos islands are surrounded by one of the largest barrier reefs in the world, and the country does an admirable job protecting them.
Lunch was at another charming little beach shack, similar to the one we had dinner at the first night.
But this one had an important difference. It was owned by a “Belonger.”
Like most Caribbean nations, Turks and Caicos has a complicated and often brutal history. Some scholars think that these islands are where Christopher Columbus first landed in 1492. Either way, Spanish sailors definitely landed here shortly after. Exploitation and outright slavery soon followed. Between the labor conditions and newly introduced infectious diseases, the local population was completely decimated over the next decade. There wasn't a single indigenous survivor by 1513. The islands remained uninhabited for a hundred years until the British colonialists brought African slaves with them in the 1700s. Not quite a century later, Britain abolished slavery in this part of the world. The colonialists quickly bailed on their plantations when the true difficulty of farming these islands became apparent. The former slaves were granted ownership of the land they used to work on, and their descendants became known as Belongers. The country remained a British territory over the next two centuries, so the current population includes transplants from all over the Commonwealth (primarily Canadians). But the only people who can vote in local and national elections are Belongers.
The dual classes of citizenship structure creates a minor but persistent tension in business operations. It’s hard to separate foreign ownership of businesses from the exploitative history, and the Belongers are reasonably skeptical when outsiders buy up a lot of land or try to push out Belongers from important industries.
We later found out that the restaurant we went to during our first night on the island was built by a millionaire Canadian attorney. He built it as a vanity project near his vacation home, and has an eight paragraph, comically obtuse autobiography on the restaurant's website. He lives in a clearly haunted mansion that we can see from The Lighthouse, and doesn’t seem to be particularly beloved by the local community. He's known for two things around here: paddle boarding to his restaurant for cocktails every night, and yelling at people who encroach too close to "his" section of the public beach in front of his house.
The complete inverse of this expat caricature was Omar, who ran the equally charming (and less costly) beach shack that we had lunch at today. We watched him bus tables, serve food, and rub elbows with the steady stream of Belongers, Canadian second-homers, and tourists patronizing his restaurant. When he made his way over to our table, I casually mentioned how nice it is to see a place like this run by someone who isn’t a millionaire Canadian.
His business owner perma-smile immediately melted away, and he leaned in close with a look of true appreciation. “Thank you for saying that. I tell you what, man. I’m here every day working my ass off, trying to make this community a better place. I’m not just rolling up every night to sip on some rum.” And then he paused, reset his wide natural grin, asked us where we were visiting from, and went back about his routine. As he was walking off to the next table, I could almost see the twinkle in his eye.
The ulterior motive of our trip to that side of the island was to buy some fish at a local market right next to Omar’s. But the boats weren’t due to come in for another couple of hours, so we killed some time at yet another world-class beach, and then wen’t back to Omar’s happy hour and some of his signature rum toffee cake.
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| Photo by Jill Knuth |
We spent the next few minutes taking some more snapshots of the impossibly-perfect view from Omar's patio.
But within minutes, the ominous-looking clouds you can see forming in the background became quite a bit more ominous. A light pitter-patter on the tin roof at Omar’s quickly became horizontal rainfall and palm trees bent to nearly 90 degrees. Oh yeah. It’s hurricane season.
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| Photo by Jill Knuth |
We waited out the worst of the storm under the partial coverage of Omar’s patio. But it was better than being on the road. We ended up giving up on the fish, since the boats were still an hour away (at best, given the storm). So we made our way back to the Lighthouse and cooked up something else for dinner. Dessert was a box of Oreos that everyone had given Dean a hard time about when we were packing. We quickly changed our tune while munching on them from the top of the Lighthouse. Another perfect day in paradise.
