Usually “Fall” as in Autumn refers to the red, golden, brown and yellow leaves falling to the ground and carpeting it with their rich colors. This Sunday afternoon though it just refers to the rain that has been falling all day from the low, overcast sky.
No wonder my mind turned to sunny beaches and taunted me with visions of the Cayman Islands, Cozumel, Costa Maya and Roatan, those Tropical ports of my recent cruise. I had written about Roatan then forgot all about posting about the other ports, mostly because I didn’t get off the ship at the others so I didn’t take any pictures on shore. In my reverie this afternoon I remembered that I had some pictures from a previous trip. It took some fishing around in my files to find them because I couldn’t remember what year I had visited them. Time has become such a blur.
When I saved those pictures my older computer software just put them into folders which I labelled with the year. I have not yet transferred them to my current catalog which tags my photos in several different ways making it easy to retrieve them. My favorite is the Place tag that brings up a map of the world with a stick pin indicating places where I have taken pictures. Click on a pin and those pictures appear on the screen.My next camera should automatically do that tagging.
A pirate might greet you in George Town, capital of the Cayman Islands, but he will be a friendly fellow and instead of plundering you he will be offering great prices at a Duty Free store.
The real current buccaneers are just further down the street, in what seem like warrens of small offices in highrises. These are the “offshore banks”, havens for corporate and wealthy taxdodgers in the US, Europe and other big countries, politicians hiding nest eggs for when they are out of power, and money launderers. I never knew there were so many Irish banks, for example. Don’t look for counters and bank tellers or local customers waiting to cash a check in these places. These buccaneers are affable, young, college graduates, mostly expats armed with laptops, cellphones and degrees in finance, not cutlasses. And they are well-dressed. No bandanas. At the time unregulated Reaganesque and Bushian hedge funds and other wealth-from-nothing financial schemes were bubbling along nicely in the US and these offshore banks were flourishing. I wasn’t tempted to go ashore this time to stock up on the duty free cognacs and whiskey because you can no longer take liters of liquids as hand luggage onboard the flights home and it’s risky to pack bottles in your manhandled checked luggage, but I was tempted to go to see how many of those “banks” were out of business on this cruise.
Perhaps it’s fitting that just a short drive from these financial operations takes the traveller to Hell:
Not a bad place at all in this tourist version. The only heat is from the glorious Tropical sun. No brimstone here, just a harmless interesting lava formation:
There are all the comforts of Paradise: lush greenery, magnificent multi-hued seas, beaches, swimming pools, airconditioned five star resorts, free samples of rum cake, even a post office (no need to wait for the Hungry Ghosts month to contact the folks).
You can assuage your environmental zeal by visiting the turtle conservation center:
or just pick up shells on the beach.
The ultimate in peaceful coexistence, Hell and a Tropical Paradise?
