If the words Seaview, kidneys, and water bugs don’t seem like they should be in the same sentence, start here.
If they make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, you’re right were we were at this point. We spent 15 minutes in our parked rental car processing what we had just learned. The prospect of a finite number of seats off the island definitely increased the stakes of our deliberations. Could we even leave the island if we wanted to? But no good decisions are made on an empty stomach. Even through it was barely 10am, our bodies had grown used to consuming a thousand calories by this point every day during the prior week.
Seaview Cafe was barely 5 minutes away, and a sign on the door said that they didn’t open until 11. But just like the hotel, one of the staffers prepping the kitchen saw us outside and put us on speakerphone with his manager. That was clearly the norm around here. We didn’t really have any questions for her (unless she happened to moonlight as an entomologist), but we used the opportunity to ask about dinner. The restaurant at our hotel closed at 3 pm. Prior to learning that 10 minutes earlier, we had been banking on it for dinner. So if we stayed, we’d need to figure out a plan. As it turned out, Seaview wasn’t technically open for dinner, but accepted take out orders if you got them in before 2 pm. Our hotel did the same thing, so we figured we’d just take our chances with that.
Again sitting in a parked car with nowhere to go, we took stock of where things stood. Our hotel might be infested with nocturnal parasites, nothing on this island seems to be open, we’re not entirely sure if we’ll be having dinner tonight, and we were going to be out a ton of money regardless.
But the first glimmer of hope came when Jill took a quick walk to the back side of Seaview. “This place has a beautiful sea view. I don’t know what that guy was talking about. He might just be a grump.” And suddenly we all realized that the average person who could afford to bring a big group of people to Middle Caicos might have a different definition of infestation than we did. To him, maybe seeing 2-3 roaches is an infestation. To us, that’s just called somewhere you live during your 20s. A true infestation means that you don’t know if you’re grabbing your toothbrush or a cockroach when you reach into your toiletry bag. All of us were more than willing to chalk that up as the cost of staying in what was otherwise paradise.
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| Photo: Jill Knuth |
By that point, the clouds that had rolled in that morning were starting to part. Also literally. So we decided to proceed with our hike. At least we’d get some more nice views out of the trip.
We had brought enough food with us to cobble together a decent-enough lunch. That would leave us enough time to make it to the hike and then back to the dock by 2 pm, when the midday ferry would arrive. We wanted to ask the the crew if they even had any seats on the late shuttle before we started making any concrete evacuation plans.
The only problem was the road. A few miles past Seaview, it went from “Not bad for a remote hurricane-prone island” to “Yeah, this feels about right for a remote hurricane-prone island.” We were kicking ourselves for not reserving a Jeep, and were starting to push our rental car beyond its rather modest limitations.
Speaking of our rental car, this was the control panel.
Unreadable in any language, it seemed to be displaying our route overlayed on top of some distant Asian city. There are no freeways on Middle Caicos. Even the road was becoming less so by the minute. The touch panel didn’t work, and we couldn’t adjust any of the settings. Which made it all the more disconcerting when the car quite literally started speaking to us in Japanese. It could have been something as innocuous as, “Please keep your seatbelts fastened.” Or it could just as easily have been saying, “The small gerbil powering this automobile is about to die an awful death, please turn around immediately.” We erred on the side of not killing the gerbil.
Getting progressively more frustrated with the day, we decided to work our way back to the docks. There was a restaurant that I had noticed nearby that we could hang out at until the ferry pulled in. But after the 45 minute drive back across the island to the restaurant, we saw an empty parking lot out front and knew what we would find even before we tried to open the door: It was closed.
We had heard so many wonderful things about North and Middle Caicos, and were absolutely floored by the bust of a day we were having. What were we missing? But there was only so much disaffection that can happen in such a beautiful setting, and we couldn’t help but laugh about the situation we had found ourselves in. And no, you don’t need to feel even remotely bad for us. A rough day on this island is still an eight and a half. We were fully aware of that, even at the time.
We knew that our empty bellies weren’t helping our outlook, and we still had the food we brought with us. So we decided to pull off the road eat it on one of the beaches that we kept driving past (and past and past). Our first attempt brought us past a neighborhood that clearly wasn’t for tourists.
An abandoned development project cast its half-constructed pall over a neighborhood that didn’t seem particularly bad, but would have been an extremely conspicuous place to eat our Brie and Dijon. We already felt ridiculous enough.
Hungrier and hungrier, we drove on. Our next attempt at a lunch site quickly devolved into a pot holed dirt trail that was heavy on the dirt, light on the trail. We nearly got stuck turning the car around, and a loud “CRACK” as our car’s frame collided with the large rock in the middle of the trail nearly ended the trip (or at least the driving portion of it).
As the ringing in our ears subsided, Dean broke the silence with “Well, who is ready to just call this?” After our implied consent, he continued, “We can just take the 2 pm ferry back to Provo and sleep at the Lighthouse. We’re out that money either way.”
No arguments from the passenger compartment. Middle Caicos just wasn’t for us.
But as we were driving back to the dock, we passed by the only remaining restaurant we had seen on the island. Princess Take-Away. A small, dusty beach shack with signage that might as well have said, “Make sure you have extra toilet paper tonight.”
I wasn’t optimistic. It takes quite a bit to get me to think twice about eating somewhere while traveling, and I was thinking at least three times about this place. But I figured fried fish and plantains can only harbor so much E. coli. What did I have to lose?
Josephine, the proprietor and presumed Princess, invited us into her restaurant (which appeared to be an extension of her home), and let us know the lunch options that day: Fried fish, fried chicken, fried plantains, and fried potatoes. When it comes to potentially questionable restaurants, I’ve found that with very few exceptions, the ones with the simplest menus often turn out the best. So I was growing more optimistic by the minute. And it turned out to be justified.
Not only was the matronly Josephine quite hospitable, her cooking was excellent. It wasily one of the best meals we’d had in Turks and Caicos, but that was only half of it. The real highlight was Nat, another North Caicos local who pulled up in his pickup just after we arrived. Based on the fishing poles hanging out the back of his truck bed and the cooler he brought into the restaurant, Josephine had almost certainly called him over shortly after we placed our order. In fact, when we asked her what type of fish we were eating, Josephine told us in her think accent, “Ask him (pointing to Nat). He’s the one who caught it!” Nat proudly told us that it was Mahi Mahi. This day might just be turning around after all.
The initially soft spoken Nat quickly opened up with us after he and Dean bonded over the barracuda that was hanging off the back of his truck. And opened up was putting it mildly. For 30 minutes, he talked about everything from local fishing holes to the importance of COVID vaccines.
Fed by Josephine and charmed by Nat, we revisited the idea of staying on Middle Caicos. Before anyone said a word, it was clear that we were staying. A full belly went a long way towards improving our outlook at the prospect of having a few hundred extra roommates. The fish was that good. But more importantly, the sun was now fully out. The island went from beautiful to stunning.
It’s magic was undeniable. So we decided to take our chances and head back to the hotel (stopping at a local convenience store to pick up a can of bug spray for good measure). The place felt infinitely better the second time around. I don’t know if it was the full sun or the full belly, but the hotel looked completely different. Guests were swimming at the beach, and the smell of grilled seafood wafted over from the now-open restaurant. A cheerful manager greeted us as we walked up, and before we could say a word, told us that our cabin had recently developed a water bug infestation. “The bites hurt, and cause your skin to blister. We don’t want that for you.” We loved her already.
She told us that our check-in would be a bit delayed since the maintenance and cleaning crews were still finishing with the pest abatement. Torn between slow clapping and shedding a tear, we just stood there with dopey grins melting onto our faces. We listened as the manager told us that she had also worked out a backup plan. She would prepare two other cabins that we could move into if more bugs came out at night. Given that it was nearly too late to catch the ferry by that point, we were enamored with her honesty and resourcefulness.
This is the Caribbean. Humidity bottoms out at 80%. Bugs are an inevitability, and it’s unreasonable to expect anything different. This is their turf. We’re just visiting. We fully embraced that, and would have settled for anything smaller than a baseball falling on us while we slept. This was clearly going to be far better than that, and we were more than a bit embarrassed that we had considered abandoning the place. And we were so glad we didn’t. As we waited for the room to be ready, we walked down to the beach. I don’t even know where to begin.
Not only was it one of the prettiest beaches on the planet, it backed up to the largest system of above-ground caves in the Antilles. The soft limestone had been worn down over millennia to create one of the most unique environments we had ever seen. In fact, we followed an unmarked cobblestone path from our cabin down a homemade set of steps to a hidden beach that would have otherwise been unreachable.
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| Photo: Jill Knuth |
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| Photo: Jill Knuth, obviously |
Absolutely magical. What were a few blisters in the morning?
