This sectiontackles the how-tos of a trip to the TCI, everything from finding airfares to deciding whether to rent a car. But first, let's start with some background information about this increasingly popular destination.
Getting to Know Turks & Caicos
It seems only yesterday that public awareness of this island archipelago was essentially "Turks & Caicos who?" For years, these islands were little more than a beautiful, slumbering backwater, home to a close-knit society of islanders called "Belongers," and the haunt of a smattering of fishermen and divers, beach bums and drug smugglers, and, of course, the well-heeled looking for an untouched cay in which to drop anchor.
Today the TCI is fast on its way to becoming one of the premier destinations in the Caribbean, winning numerous travel industry accolades -- including the 2005 World Travel Awards for World's Leading Beach (Grace Bay) and World's Leading Boutique Hotel (Point Grace). Air flights were up 25% in the year 2005 alone. So far, the tourist boom has been largely concentrated on the main island, Providenciales ("Provo" for short). While many of the outlying islands retain the feel of an idyllic outpost that time has forgotten, Provo is the fastest-growing spot in the Caribbean, its dazzling beaches attracting upscale hotels and boutique resorts -- including Amanresorts' first foray into the West Indies, Amanyara, in 2006.
Still, Provo isn't the only Turks & Caicos (pronounced Kayk-us) island romancing the tourist dollar. Sleepy Grand Turk is getting something of a wake-up call, with a projected quarter-million cruise-ship passengers scheduled to disembark at the spiffy new cruise terminal in 2006. The Ritz-Carlton is developing a high-end, low-impact hotel/condo/resort/village in the heretofore uninhabited West Caicos, a national reserve. And amid the little fishing villages of South Caicos, the island of Ambergris Cay is being transformed into the Turks & Caicos Sporting Club by the renowned Greenbrier Resort.
Why is little TCI ripe for all this activity? For one, the country's beaches, water, and coral reef system remain astonishingly unspoiled. The seas have an intense blue-green hue that puts Technicolor to shame. The climate -- best described as an "eternal summer" -- is ideal year-round. Gentle breezes blowing in from the east provide relief from the relentless sun. For North Americans, the TCI has other pluses: English is the official language, the U.S. dollar is the local currency, and the islands are incredibly accessible by plane: Nonstop flights out of places like New York City (3 hr.), Boston (3 1/2 hr.), Charlotte (2 hr.), and Miami (1 1/2 hr.) mean you can jump on a plane in the morning and be lazing about on a tropical beach by early afternoon.
The islands also enjoy zero unemployment -- and, probably not unrelated -- the lowest crime rate in the Caribbean; you simply do not see the kind of impoverishment and homelessness that continue to plague other Caribbean countries. The TCI government is stable (the TCI is a British protectorate with a representative democracy and a constitution), and the island citizens -- "the Belongers" -- enjoy one of the best primary and secondary educational systems in the region. The Belongers share such a warm familiarity that it's easy to see why many have embraced the possibility that all are connected by blood, descended from the 193 African slaves freed on these isolated islands when the slave ship Trouvadore, carrying them to lives of bondage in the Americas, wrecked on the East Caicos reef in 1841. Research is underway by a Turks & Caicos National Museum expedition team to discern whether a shipwreck found off East Caicos in 2004 is the Trouvadore -- and if so, whether its inhabitants were indeed the progenitors of the modern-day Belongers. For the latest information, go to www.slaveshiptrouvadore.com.
For those who knew and loved the TCI in slower times and who may be concerned that the islands are in danger of being overdeveloped (or even ruinously developed), it's comforting to know that of the 40 islands that comprise the TCI, only eight are inhabited. Even the most populous beach, Provo's Grace Bay, has long, dreamy stretches where you're the only soul on the soft sand. And except for a couple of scary concrete behemoths rising up out of the beach on Grace Bay (when did the oceanfront height limits jump from 5 stories to 10?), the focus has been on "sustainable development" and low-impact, high-end properties -- boutique resorts with ecologically sensitive bones. Let's hope this vision holds through the fizzy boom times. In the meantime, TCI offers a fresh and exciting experience for travelers in search of a pristine (and accessible) island paradise.
