Georgetown, Grand Cayman

We'd been here in the 2018 World Cruise, so check out our adventures then.

 
This was a tender port, but since we were ship escorts again, there was no hassle with tender tickets.
In looking at the Cayman website extension KY, I suddenly realized the meaning: K + man represented by the Y--either a stick figure of a man or a Y chromosome. Cute.

Dean's excursion was a Segway tour.

One destination on this excursion was the Observation Tower at Camana Bay in Grand Cayman,
which has cool mosaic walls around the staircase.

 
The view from the top.

A fish market at the beach...

My trip was a van trip to an historic house and the botanical garden, which we didn't get to last time we were here in 2018.

Pedro St. James Castle: We began our tour in the basement of this historic house where there was a multimedia show to tell the stories of the history of the islands and this house in particular.

 
The kitchen was a separate building for safety and for comfort.

 
The wattle-woven sides allowed air in for ventilation but kept out the rain. Also, it made good use of local resources.

 
The entrance to the main part of the house was up these stairs. The ferns add charm to the old bricks, which seems rather primitive. But inside the house it was quite elegant and it was built high to catch the breeze and to avoid storm surges.

 
After the house tour, the next stop was the Queen Elizabeth Botanical Garden. Our driver was our guide for the garden where he explained the flag's story.

 
There was a large section of the garden with various tropical crops that were grown in the Caymans. Black pepper is a vine from India and this is the crop that Columbus was looking for in his voyages. But of course it was not growing in the New World naturally back then.

 
Being December, the poinsettias were in bloom. A garden shelter was being thatched.

And as promised by the entrance sign, we did see some large iguanas.

Ochos Rios, Jamaica

We hadn't been to Jamaica before. Ocho Rios is a port on the north side of the island, while the more famous port of Kingston is on the south side. This island had been a Spanish colony and then a British colony before gaining independence.

We were excursion escorts again.

 
Dean's excursion was a cooking and drinking-based tour of some of the famous island treats.

 
Margaritaville was the second stop where there were lessons in fixing drinks and also dancing.

 
A demonstration on how alcohol burns. That they burn it on the bar seemed strange. And of course everyone received samples.

Then there was lunch. No one went hungry or thirsty on this excursion.

My tour was a hike uo to Konoko Falls. From the bus, the cloud behind the mosque was the same shape as the dome.

A school with nationalistic symbols and ...

... the island's counties and parishes painted on the wall.

 
Our first stop was Konoko Falls where there was an animal hospital called Hope Zoo.

An American crocodile.

We hiked up to the top of the falls, which stair-step their way down through the layers of rock.

 
The overlook includes a selfie sign so you know which Caribbean overlook it is.

It was a nice view.

 
A traditional water filter using porous lava rock.

After the Spanish left and before the British took over, many slaves escaped to the mountains and married into the native people's tribes. They were called maroons. I talked about them in one of my presentations, because they were the ones who developed the jerked meat processing using slow heat and native herbs and spices.