Well, I've found my future vacation home.

Anyone have 1.4 million laying around?  

Can you hear the ocean?

We’ve had a busy week here in Paradise!  Full of conch, turtles, and sketchy developments.  The conch was the most relaxing part of the week.  For those of you who aren’t up to snuff on your gastropods or Caribbean seafood, conch is essentially a big snail that’s fried up an eaten around here.  The shells have a rosy glow and are absolutely gorgeous, so you might know those as well.  Anyway, conch is a big fishery here on South Caicos, and we’ve been doing an assessment of the population as I mentioned in my previous post.  The next step in the assessment was conch towing.  This means holding on to a wooden board and being dragged behind a motorboat, counting as many live conch as you can.  It’s really a ton of fun, kind of a combination of water tubing and science.  The only difficult part is holding onto your snorkel at high speeds!  And by high speeds, I mean really slow speeds, but it feels fast as you’re dragged through the water.  All in all, a pretty sweet way to survey the population!

Yesterday we did the same thing, except we were looking for sea turtles, and if we see a turtle, we try to catch it.  This is a little less relaxing, a little more high-stakes.  We saw a few turtles, but didn’t catch any, unfortunately.  Still a good morning out on the water!

On Friday, we visited the two hotels in development on the island, which is where the sketchy part comes in.  One hotel, East Bay, is almost completed, has a couple hundred units, and looks like it will be really nice, and not too much of a strain on the resources of the island (I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but South Caicos is tiny, with a population of approximately 1,100 people and a economy entirely dependent on fishing for conch and spiny lobster).  This is where I plan to retire too after I become a billionaire.  We visited some of the penthouse condos and oh my goodness.  Three walls of windows looking out over the beach and ocean with vaulted ceilings of pine shipped from Canada.  Seriously gorgeous.  And with washing machines, which is about all I want in life at the moment.

Like seriously beautiful.

The other development is a little…different.  It’s called High Point here, and has some fancy name like Caicos Beach Resort and Marina or something.  It’s in an isolated part of the island, separated from the rest of the community by a couple of miles of bad roads.  It’s up on a cliff, in an absolutely stunning spot.  

 However, they’re building 1,000 units and at a minimum would triple the population of the island.  The hotel has been in development for 13 years, and everyone I’ve talked to says not much has changed in the last few years.  They say they’ve sold 95% of the units in phase 1, set to open in the next few years.  However, there’s no infrastructure for people to come on to the island, and absolutely nothing is completed.  They only have 45 people working there at the moment.  It also may or may not be owned by a group of Sicilian businessmen.  Just saying….

We’ll tour some hotels on Providenciales, the most developed island, next week.  I’m really curious to see the differences between the developments here and on Provo.  There’s a lot of talk about South becoming the next Provo, but it’s impossible to imagine at the moment, given that South has no infrastructure and is a pain to get to.  Not to mention, besides water activities, there’s nothing to do here.  It’s fine for us because we have so little free time and the water activities are astounding, but there are no restaurants, shops, beaches without seagrass, dive shops, or the multitude of other amenities that are associated with tourism.

We’ll get a good look at the difference, as our mid-semester break begins next week.  Most of us will be in Provo, though I’ll be staying with my parents in a different hotel.  It will be a nice break to not have any work and to have daily showers and clean clothes!  I do think I’ll be ready to get back to my own personal piece of paradise here on South once the break is over, however!