Flying and Delays

As I write this post I am in Heathrow Airport waiting for my final connection to Copenhagen. It is currently 1 hour and 10 minutes delayed. I need to catch a train with a connection to Ærø at 4.40 pm. Expected arrival in Copenhagen is presently 4.25 pm. The alternative is a three hour wait for the next scheduled ferry.

There have been several delays during my roundtrip to Cayman - more than I’m normally accustomed too. My flight out of Copenhagen (to London) was delayed an hour. Add to that an hour to find our luggage which had mysteriously disappeared. With the shuttle service closed for the day, a taxi was the only transportation option. However, with a massive queue outside Terminal 3 and one taxi arriving every 2-3 minutes, I faced the prospect of waiting more than an hour. I decided to try Terminal 2. Luckily, the queue there was much smaller and within 10 minutes I was on my way to the hotel. I arrived a quarter past midnight - delayed two and half hours and utterly wasted.

It is surprising that a large international airport like Heathrow is not better equipped to deal with transport issues late at night. The Heathrow express does operate at this hour, but is not very helpful if you are going to hotel in the vicinity of Heathrow. The key lesson to learn is either to avoid Heathrow after 10.30 pm or find a hotel at the end of the Heathrow Express line. And if you find yourself in a massive taxi queue try one of the other terminals.

The flight out of Heathrow the next morning to Cayman (via Nassau) was also delayed, although with no real consequence as Cayman was my final destination. Leaving Cayman yesterday morning, however, was different story. I was still trying to check-in when my flight was scheduled to depart. Technical difficulties at the check-in counter made turnaround impossibly slow. Nevertheless, we managed to make up most of the time before our arrival at Heathrow. With an ongoing connection to Copenhagen I was of course very pleased with this development. However, my excitement was short lived. Upon landing at Heathrow we were unable to taxi to our gate because of traffic on the ground. By the time I stepped out of the plane I only had 25 minutes to reach my Copenhagen flight. Sprinting to Terminal 4, I managed to make the gate 10 minutes prior to scheduled departure, only to find, as noted above, that the plane was delayed.

All in all, you can’t claim I have been lucky in my travels this time around (although I did travel on the 7th of the 7th month of 2007).

UPDATE: To add further dissatisfaction, my luggage did not arrive at Copenhagen airport. I will have to wait a few days before they find it (I hope) and send it to me. In addition, the plane did not land before 5 pm, so I am forced to take the last ferry arriving at midnight instead of 9 pm.

To Hell and Back

Today I went for a walk up the north-west side of Cayman Island. There are two attractions: Turtle Farm and Hell.

Turtle farm breeds turtles - predominately the green sea specifies. Christopher Columbus who discovered the Cayman Islands in 1503 also named them Las Tortugas. It was the presence of the marine crocodile, however, that gave the islands their name, after the Carib word caymanas.

About 60% of each year's turtle hatchlings are raised to 3 - 4 years of age before they are processed for food that is sold locally. A national delicacy apparently and not one I have managed to taste. The remaining 40% are released into the ocean when they are around one year old. Out of these, a few are kept as future breeders.

Hell is an altogether different attraction. Rock formations that supposedly resemble the charred remains of a hell fire. A rock named ironshore makes up the rock formation. Ironshore is common on the island and is essentially limestone although it bears resemblance to volcanic rock. The grayish-black colour is product of algae secreting acid that also erodes the ironshore to create the hellish shapes.

On my way back to the hotel I got a lift from an old lady who was one of the original Caymanians with surname Ebanks. She was able to trace her decedents back to the first official population count in the eighteenth century. The count at that stage was around 900. By the time got back from Hell, the recruitment consultant ad left a message on my hotel phone advising that I had been offered the job. We have until Tuesday to accept. More will follow…..

Some facts about Cayman:

• Discovered by Christopher Columbus on 10 May 1503 when his ships were blown off course by strong winds. Consists of three islands Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, and Cayman Brac
• The capital, George Town, is named after King George III of England.
• The islands are formed primarily of limestone.
• Grand Cayman is the largest island and approximately 35 km long and 13 km widePopulation of approx. 50,000 English is the official language.
• The national flower is the wild banana orchid, the national tree is the silver thatch palm, and the national bird is the Cayman parrot.
• Pirates used the islands as a hideout well into the eighteenth century.
• The country has the highest per capita income in the Caribbean.
• The economy is based largely on tourism and the islands' status as an offshore financial center.
• There is no business or personal income tax
• Major sources of government revenue include import duties, a tax of 7.5–10 percent on land or property transfers, a 10 percent tax on tourist accommodations, airport and cruise ship passenger departure fees, company registration fees, work permits, and business licenses.
• More than six hundred banks are registered, with assets in excess of $500 billion, making the islands the fifth largest financial center in the world.
• The governor is appointed by the British Crown.
• An eight-member Executive Council advises the governor. Five of the council members (called ministers) are elected from the fifteen Legislative Assembly representatives.

From Brisbane to Cayman

So it has been a while since I posted anything. It has been a few very busy months. As I write this post I am sitting in The Courtyard Marriot Hotel on the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean waiting for a response to a job interview. The previous post was submitted from our apartment in Brisbane.

Having left Brisbane on 10 June (Tobias birthday) we made our way to Thailand. Here we spent three weeks doing pretty much nothing. The majority of time we were at the Holiday Inn Resort on Koh Phi Phi Don (about 8 x 2.5 km and the shape of an H), a fantastic island paradise off the southern coast of Thailand.

The resort had all the essentials for the making of a relaxing vacation. Staying within the bounds of the resort you could be forgiven for thinking that this was an island of perfection. However, just outside the resort was the island’s sea gypsy population and other less exclusive resorts giving a more realistic picture of the status of the island. In addition, every morning from around 6 an army of workers would clean the beach allocated to the Holiday Inn resort visitors. Upstream from the resort various rubbish would drift downstream during the night littering the otherwise beautiful beach. Litter in the water seems to be a general problem in the island region. According to Majken who visited the area 11 years ago, it was also problem back then. No matter where you are in the island region you find rubbish. The tsunami may have played a role, but it is unfortunate that locals (and tourists) are not more concerned with this development and have been educated in environmental protection.

During our stay we also managed to visit Phi Phi Don’s sister island Phi Phi Lei. Lei is uninhabited except for the Viking Cave which is guarded to protect the nests of the cave swift.

They are renowned for building nests with a unique chemical mix needed to produce the Chinese delicacy - Bird's Nest Soup. It is also on this island you find the world famous beaches Loh Samah and Maya Bay. The Beach was filmed here.

While the beaches in Thailand are fantastic the main Beach here on Cayman, seven mile beach, is just as impressive and impeccably clean. Despite its name it is only about 5.5 miles long. The stretch of land making up seven mile beach is the most developed and expensive area of Cayman and houses most of the island's luxury resorts and hotels.

I think the job interview went well. Cayman Island could prove to be a good place to live.