Into the blue ... the Turks and Caicos islands,east of Cuba,are defined by their quiet beauty.Credit:iStock
In the mid-1970s a lanky,young American engineer,Chuck Hesse,stumbled upon a sliver of land in the far west of the North Atlantic. He anchored a little yacht,Alandra,which he'd sailed on a rough and sickly passage down the east coast of the US,and decided to stay on those far-away islands the Turks and Caicos,east of Cuba.
It was then a forgotten archipelago of fishermen,ragged sea ports,remnants of pirates,a few sullen strangers escaping a past and the"Belongers",as the close-knit islanders descended from African slaves are known. Held by the British since they drove off the French and Spaniards in 1799,the islands have been visited by the Queen just once,in 1966. She has never been back.
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The beauty of the islands ringed by the world's third-largest coral reef,filled with exotic fish in an azure sea so struck Hesse that he and his marine biologist wife soon founded an organisation to fight their commercial exploitation.
The bleached,frail hull of the Alandra now rests upon the sandy stone at the marine farm outside the old seaport town of Providenciales,where these days Hesse grows and exports conch ("konk"),the huge saltwater snails that live in the warm shallows. For a small fee the island people employed here will show visitors the mysterious world of the giant snails and what an environmentally friendly island enterprise looks like.
Directly across the road,however,is a garish testament to the rise of the empty money men who Hesse feared;it is the $US8 million ($10.7million) home of the recently resigned,locally elected premier of the islands. Its mock Corinthian columns,deep green lawns and tall gates indicate the pretensions of its occupant one Michael Misick,who paid himself more than the prime minister of Britain,blew millions on jets,servants and a US television starlet wife and duchessed foreign and sometimes shady land developers. He resigned late last year after suspicious British MPs forced a public inquiry into corruption on the islands. Britain,which retains the Turks and Caicos as an overseas territory,is preparing to take back day-to-day control by expanding the powers of the governor-general.
For once,it's not too late. The property sharks have been stopped or at least checked before the beachfronts could be plastered with more stacked concrete boxes.
The charm of this place is that it is still possible to see the old Caribbean:tall,graceful people walk slowly to churches,hundreds gather on a Saturday to fly quirky home-made kites,rusty freighters laze around the archipelago,young men dive into the sea and share their catch with visitors. Nightlife is mostly confined to a beer and fresh fish in a beachside shack amid the casuarinas where you can watch startling sunsets and try to catch the mysterious green flash on the horizon that often occurs at sundown. Did Christopher Columbus see it when he sailed through these islands on his way to the New World in 1492? What is not here makes the islands special. You won't trip over bodies on packed beaches,be assaulted by jet skis,harassed by hawkers,cornered and ripped off by resorts nor be discouraged by rental car prices.