Lazy Days in the Turks & Caicos

It was on Valentine’s Day 1990 when I learned about Philistina Butterfield’s Hot Rhythm Pills. Also known as “Peanuts,” Butterfield is a gregarious woman who emerged that day from her little blue shack on the waterfront of Cockburn Town with a steaming plateful of deliciously browned, deep fried conch fritters she called Hot Rhythm Pills. “Make you irresistible to men,” she whispered conspiratorially.

What did I have to lose? I was traveling alone on one of the least known of all Caribbean islands, a seven-square-mile sandbar called Grand Turk, where donkeys still pull wooden carts along the single-lane main road. So when a handsome Parisian doctor materialized on a scooter later that day and invited me for Valentine’s dinner at a beachfront cafe, who could say it wasn’t due to the potent powers of Peanuts’ cuisine?

Caribbean islands have a romantic quality that simply can’t be matched by arid deserts or mountain landscapes. It has something to do with the sway of palm trees in a breeze, the candy-colored pastels of clapboard buildings, and how a walk on a beach is a gentle form of foot massage, so that suddenly any vacation takes on the rosy glow of a honeymoon.

When I first visited the Turks and Caicos Islands, it was their quirkiness, beauty and lack of commercialism that made me fall in love with them. Since then, the islands have gotten considerable press in diving magazines as a great hideaway, so last year my boyfriend, Philip, and I spent two weeks there during our Christmas vacation. More than most Caribbean islands, the Turks and Caicos have managed to remain a backwater. With a good map and a magnifying glass, they come into focus as a sprinkling of 40 low-lying islands 575 miles southeast of Miami, due north of the Dominican Republic. The Caicos group of islands is separated from the Turks Islands, to the east, by the 22-mile-wide Turks Island Passage, and we split our time between the two groups.

The Turks and Caicos are dry, flat and scrubby little isles bristling with cactuses, but their edges are trimmed with some of the world’s most perfect beaches. Just offshore, where turquoise waters give way to cobalt depths, vast tracts of virgin reef make this a favorite domain of scuba divers and snorkelers. Ponce de Leon stopped here in 1512 during his search for the Fountain of Youth, and in the 1600s pirates plundered the region. After that the Turks and Caicos became the object of political pingpong: They were part of the Bahamas, then annexed by Jamaica; now they are a British colony.

Of the eight inhabited islands, Providenciales (“ ‘Provo,’ mon, don’t hurt your tongue,” the expression goes) is the main base for visitors. Provo is home to almost half the islands’ total population of 13,000; that includes locals--who call themselves “belongers”--and a high proportion of expatriate Canadians.

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Despite the usual Caribbean airport humidity, and misplaced luggage, within an hour of our arrival we were sipping champagne by starlight on the deck of our own swimming pool alongside our one-bedroom cottage two minutes from the beach. Although Provo has many small hotels and condos, we instead rented a small house for no more than the cost of a room at the nearby Ramada or Club Med. (We booked reservations through a Florida service that specializes in Turks and Caicos trips; see Guidebook.) Landlord Colin Saunders had left his hometown in Ontario, Canada, some years ago to become a well-tanned, laid-back expert at shucking conch. During our stay his Bahamian-born wife, Kit, whipped up some conch into a wicked Tabasco-laced salad and took me on the circuit of fresh seafood shops, a supermarket and a liquor store to stock up on supplies. Colin pointed out the cottage’s island vacation essentials: a gas barbecue and a hammock. We were set for a week of candlelight dinners on our own patio, disturbed only by the gentle clacking of bamboo wind chimes.

Early the next morning we were picked up in a ramshackle yellow school bus driven by Philippe “Fifi” Kunz, an energetic Frenchman we’d hired to take us diving. He wore a glittery gold and lime green bikini, a sliver of a bathing suit that left little to the imagination. Fifi runs Caicos Adventures, one of the few dive companies that avoid the heavily visited scuba and snorkeling sites on Provo in favor of the uninhabited shores of West Caicos, an island 50 minutes away by boat.

And the trip is worth it. The reef is pristine, covered in corals, sea fans and barrel sponges. We saw brilliant tropical fish, and there were no other boats in sight. Midday was spent on a white West Caicos beach unmarred by footprints, where, while lunch was being prepared, we walked for an hour.

On another afternoon, after diving in the morning, we made a 10-minute trek on foot into the interior of West Caicos to the ruins of a settlement called Yankee Town. Although it was Bermudan traders who first set up shop in the Turks and Caicos in the 17th century, British loyalists fleeing the American Revolution in 1797 brought their slaves and started cotton and sisal plantations on East and West Caicos islands, shipping their goods to New York and London. We saw a well and cistern from that plantation still standing amid scrubby trees buzzing with hummingbirds.

Although Provo is the busiest spot in the Turks and Caicos, it is still in tourism infancy. Indeed, a KFC outlet was so frowned upon by locals that it remains closed most of the time. Even with most of the major hotels fronting onto Grace Bay, a 12-mile-long stretch of beach, there was not another soul in sight as we slipped into the water early one morning. Just yards from shore, a turtle appeared and leisurely swam by, ignoring us. Nearby, in front of the Club Med, we found a small knot of people in waist-deep surf surrounding Jo Jo, a bottlenose dolphin that is the islands’ unofficial mascot. He cruises the shallows along this beach almost every morning. Jo Jo, a wild “contact dolphin,” inexplicably seeks out human companionship, explained local marine biologist Dean Bernal, who has been trying to protect and raise international awareness about these unique creatures for 13 years.

We found that renting a scooter is the best way to explore Provo, an easily manageable 25 miles long and three miles wide. There is no “downtown” here, just an occasional cluster of shops on the way toward Northwest Point, on the other side of the island from our cottage, where thatch-roofed huts provide shade on a truly spectacular beach. We also took a boat to Little Water Cay, a speck of an island off the eastern tip of Provo that you can walk to during low tide. There we took a peek at the endangered rock iguanas. But years of being plied with tourists’ potato chips has made the reptiles aggressive and annoying to watch after 15 minutes.

That evening we stopped for dinner at the Pub on the Bay, an unpretentious local establishment overlooking the sea at Blue Hills, near Provo’s Northwest Point. The menu’s Caribbean fare included perfectly grilled lobster tail, and the ubiquitous conch: in salad, chowder, fritters, stew or curried.

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To see the other half of the islands, we took an Inter-lsland Airways flight from Provo, picking up and dropping off passengers from our small plane on a hopscotch run over cookie-flat North, Grand, East and South Caicos islands. Finally we flew over the Turks Island Passage, and the already slow Caribbean pace shifted into an even lower gear when we arrived at Cockburn Town on Grand Turk Island. In this charming outpost of the British Empire, hefty cannons point out to sea in front of the wood-shuttered government buildings. Narrow Front Street, the town’s main street, was just as I had remembered it. The occasional car still has to stop for roaming wild donkeys that graze at the base of old English-style street lamps. There was not a whiff of gentrification among the peeling exteriors of the town’s faded clapboard buildings. The whole place looked as if it had fallen asleep the day its Victoria Library opened to commemorate 50 years of Queen Victoria’s reign.

Even Peanuts herself was there, now well into her 70s and resplendent in her multicolored floral dress, still serving up conch fritters and Dragon Stout from her shack, the Pepper Pot.

One happy new addition to the town since my last visit was the conversion of the old Guinep House into the Turks and Caicos National Museum. Built by a Bermudan family in the 1860s out of salvaged beams from a shipwreck, the building’s main-floor exhibits revolve around the mysterious Molasses Reef Wreck, a Spanish caravel found near West Caicos Island. Upstairs, exhibits include grainy black-and-white photos of Queen Elizabeth’s visit in 1966, when she toured a lobster processing plant, and of astronaut John Glenn, who after his 1962 Earth orbit splashed down in the waters just off Grand Turk.

The route by taxi to our hotel at the southern tip of the island was a dirt track through the former missile tracking station that monitored Glenn’s adventure (the buildings now house Turks and Caicos government offices). At the sun-bleached, lemon yellow Arawak Inn you can rent a horse for a couple of hours and wander miles of deserted beach. The sand is littered with bright pink conch shells spit up by the surf. But Grand Turk’s biggest draw is its scuba diving, with a coral wall just 300 yards offshore from Cockburn Town. The entire west coast of the island is a protected marine park with no fishing allowed.

We spent much of the week diving with Sea Eye Divers, a firm run by local Cecil Ingham and his wife, Connie Rus, who gave up diving in Alaskan waters for the balmier surf of the Caribbean. The island is so small and informal that whether we ate our customary lunch of chili-covered Goo-Burger at the Water’s Edge Cafe or shopped at the local supermarket, all we had to say was “We’re diving with Cecil” and we were able to run a tab.

We finished up our stay on Grand Turk with an afternoon outing to Gibbs Cay, a tiny isle about a mile off the southeast shore. It was a real family affair--kids, moms, dads and grandpas were loaded on Cecil’s small boat for the short ride to the deserted spot offshore. In shallow waters en route, the brave among us donned masks and snorkels to tackle the high seas adventure of “conch fishing”--diving down three yards and plucking them off the bottom--for a salad to accompany our barbecue lunch. Around the cay, the limpid turquoise sea was patrolled by harmless stingrays that everyone hand-fed with tiny fish, the children shrieking with delight as the creatures, about 18 inches square, hovered around their ankles.

Grabbing a couple of rum punches, we found a secluded sandy cove around the far side of this desert island and kept watch for the telltale spouting of humpback whales that migrate past here from December to March. The surf gently frothed the white sand at our toes, and ice cubes tinkled in our glasses. It was then that we decided it wasn’t Peanuts’ Hot Rhythm Pills, but the Turks and Caicos Islands themselves that harbor romantic powers.

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GUIDEBOOK

Island Hopping

Getting there: Providenciales is a major stop among the 40 islands in the Turks and Caicos Islands. You can fly LAX to Providenciales, through Miami, on American Airlines. Round-trip fares start at $758.

Where to stay: “The Cottage,” one-bedroom house near the shore with a pool, Providenciales; telephone (649) 946-5376. Rates: $150 a day or $1,000 a week. Turks Head Inn, Cockburn Town, Grand Turk Island; tel. (649) 946-2466. Room rates: $140-$355 a night. Arawak Inn, P.O. Box 190, Grand Turk; tel. (649) 946-2277.. Room rates: $120-$140 a night double, weekly $563 per person, with continental breakfast.

Diving treks: Caicos Adventures, P.O. Box 47, Providenciales; tel. (800) 513-5822. Diving rates: $65 for a full day. Sea Eye Diving, P.O. Box 67, Grand Turk; tel. (649) 946-1407. Diving rates: $45 for morning dives. For island-hopping flights try Inter-island Airways; tel. (649) 941-5481.

For more information: Turks and Caicos Islands Tourist Board; tel. (800) 241-0824, e-mail tci.tourism@carubsurf.com. Dick Zebo’s Turks and Caicos Reservation Site, 240 Pebble Beach Blvd., No. 712, Naples, FL 34113; tel. (800) 645-1179.