Attractions

People mainly travel to Grand Turk to swim, snorkel, dive, and do nothing but soak up the sun. But now that the cruise ships have arrived, local tour operators are offering an assortment of new activities and tours, including horseback-riding trips, jeep safaris, kayaking trips, and dune-buggy tours.

You can take a helicopter tour of Grand Turk and its shimmering seas with Airola Caribbean Helicopters (tel. 649/946-1020; www.airolacaribbeanhelicopters.com), which has two six-seaters that circumnavigate the island ($99/£50 per person) or include a trip over neighboring Salt Cay and uninhabited islands ($189/£95 per person). Airola is also available for whale-watching tours, photo shoots, and custom charters.

It's a pleasant bike ride to the Northwest Point to see the cast-iron Grand Turk Lighthouse, which was brought in pieces from the United Kingdom, where it had been constructed in 1852. Its old lens is on display in the Turks & Caicos National Museum.

Conch World (www.conchworld.com), a combination theme park, commercial conch farm (sister to Provo's Conch Farm), and educational complex should be open and operational by the time this book is published. Visitors can tour a re-created pre-Columbian Lucayan village and an 18th-century Cockburn Village. A restaurant and gift shop are also in the works. Conch World is located on the island's east coast.

The Day the Cruise Ships Came to Town

Grand Turk is the kind of place that lingers with you long after you've left. Maybe that's why some people were concerned that the new kids in town -- the Carnival Cruise Line ships that started arriving at the new Grand Turk Cruise Center in February 2006 -- would rend the very fabric that makes this place uniquely quaint. In a 40-year land-lease deal with the TCI government, the cruise line has built a $42-million "tourism village" designed to look like a Bermudian salt-rakers' settlement from the early 19th century. It's a colorful, respectful representation of the local architecture, but its fantastical theme-park underpinnings can't help but peek through. Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville, for example, is here, bigger, bolder, and brassier than any other Margaritaville on earth, straddled by a lagoon pool with swim-up bars and slides. And silliness reigns when cruise passengers driving multicolored dune buggies parade through the streets of Grand Turk.

Carnival did many wonderful things for Grand Turk in preparation for its opening. Like a good guest, it came in and sort of neatened up the place. It paved the potholed Duke Street area and sandblasted the dirt off the old lighthouse. It brought construction jobs and spiffier taxis to the islands, and locally owned shops opened up in the cruise center. It's bringing business to local tour operators, and a nice touch is the horse-drawn carriages that clip-clop through town. On the downside, it cut a hole (albeit an environmentally sensitive one) in the coral reef to build a passage to allow 2,000- to 3,000-passenger ships to dock here. It had "historic" plaques created -- the ones now gracing Duke Street's historic inns, restaurants, and the like. Many locals claimed the plaques were inaccurate, ungrammatical even, and gave much too much personal information and not enough actual history. As a result, some owners simply removed the plaques.

Even worse is the fear among the diving community that the cruise ships will foment an environment that is too slick and pricey for the folks who have been coming here for years. Only time will tell, but the cruise center at Grand Turk finished its inaugural season with 136 cruise-ship calls and 295,000 passengers. It can accommodate two cruise ships and 5,000 passengers daily. Nearly 90% of the shops in the center are open, locals have opened restaurants and food stands nearby, and tour operators have jumped on the bandwagon with a range of shore excursions. In March 2008 Grand Turk won Porthole Cruise Magazine's award for "The Most Unspoiled Caribbean Destination." And the lovely, laid-back rhythms of Grand Turk continue apace.