photograph by dreamstime
Splashing into the ocean off Pine Cay in Turks and Caicos is to enter a different world. The tropical sun refracts into turquoise beams. The only sounds are the gentle lapping of water and my own breathing, amplified through the snorkel. The pristine white sand of the sea floor is about 20 feet below. I rotate to my left and see a huge mound of pale rock over a bed of waving sea grass. It’s the reef; that’s what I’m here to see. As I swim toward it, I can see it’s flecked with greens, purples, reds, and oranges, all forming a spectrum I’ve never seen before.
Ahead, a sunbeam reflects off the gentle swells. Then I notice another, identical sunbeam next to it. And another. There are dozens of them, perhaps hundreds. They’re not sunbeams, they’re fish, long and skinny, bright on the bottom and dark on the top, perfectly camouflaged from predators above and below. I’ve swum right into their school, and now they’re all around me, quietly going about their piscine business. I feel like I should apologize for intruding in their space.
I’m almost to the reef when I notice a flurry of activity to my right. It’s my guide, a dreadlocked man named Chilla, waving to me underwater. Out of a brilliant underwater sunburst, a gray ghost approaches. It’s a stingray, gracefully undulating toward the reef. I don’t know how big stingrays get, but this one is enormous and it’s coming my way. It sees Chilla and dives to the bottom, disappearing into a cloud of sand its wings kick up. In a matter of seconds, it’s invisible — if I hadn’t watched it bury itself, I wouldn’t know the two dark spots on the ocean floor were eyes watching me.
For the first, but not the last, time on this trip I wish I had brought an underwater camera.
Turks and Caicos describes an archipelago of about 40 islands, only eight of which have permanent inhabitants. The landscape is precarious, the visible tip of a seamount in the Lucayan chain that starts north of Hispaniola and stretches through the Bahamas and almost to Florida. At last count, the total population is 34,800 — 20,000 of whom live on Providenciales, a long skinny sliver of land on the territory’s northern border. The citizens call the island Provo. Its northern shore sweeps from east to west in a perfect crescent, which defines Grace Bay. Just a couple thousand feet off of the wide white beaches lies a 14-mile-long barrier reef, the third largest in the world. Beyond the reef, the sea floor dives 4,000 feet into the depths. The space between the beach and the reef is Princess Alexandra National Park, an underwater habitat with a tropical rain forest level of biodiversity. The area is currently on the shortlist to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
There have never been very many people in this part of the world. The native Lucayans who were here when Juan Ponce de León arrived in 1512 were soon wiped out by disease or captured for slave labor. In the early 1700s, pirates hid here, and after the American Revolution, a group of British Loyalists fleeing the mainland set up shop on Ambergris Cay. A goodly portion of the current population is descended from the survivors of a pair of slave ships that sank off Grand Turk in the 1830s. The shipwrecks lived in the eastern parts of the archipelago, where their take from the sea could be supplemented with farming from the rough ground.
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Among the resorts that dot Provinciales, Gansevoort Turks & Caicos offers the choice of a luxury hotel on Grace Bay Beach or a newly constructed villa on the cliff overlooking Caicos Bay.
photographs by Chris McCoy
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Among the resorts that dot Provinciales, Gansevoort Turks & Caicos offers the choice of a luxury hotel on Grace Bay Beach or a newly constructed villa on the cliff overlooking Caicos Bay.
photographs by Chris McCoy
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Among the resorts that dot Provinciales, Gansevoort Turks & Caicos offers the choice of a luxury hotel on Grace Bay Beach or a newly constructed villa on the cliff overlooking Caicos Bay.
photographs by Chris McCoy
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Among the resorts that dot Provinciales, Gansevoort Turks & Caicos offers the choice of a luxury hotel on Grace Bay Beach or a newly constructed villa on the cliff overlooking Caicos Bay.
photographs by Chris McCoy
Up until the 1960s, virtually no one lived on Provo, which, for all its beauty, is basically a desert island. Then, a group of Americans built a small airstrip, and Club Med built a resort on Grace Bay, and things have been expanding ever since.
The night of September 7, 2017, less than two weeks after Hurricane Harvey submerged much of Houston in the biggest flood in American history, Hurricane Irene roared through these islands. It sustained 185 mph winds for 37 hours, a record unsurpassed in meteorological annals. Grand Turk, a popular port for cruise ships, and Salt Cay in the east took the brunt of the storm, but no one escaped unscathed. Initial government estimates of the damage on Provo exceeded $500 million.
Fortunately, the islands were prepared. Hanging out here on the border of the Caribbean and the North Atlantic, hurricanes are an obvious and perennial threat. However, because of the islands’ location and orientation, they are often bypassed by the storms. Before Irene, the last direct hit had been in 1960. Driving from the airport last December, a couple months after the disaster, the occasional blue roof tarp was still visible, but the biggest sign that something was amiss was that all of the electrical poles were brand new. My driver tells me that Irene destroyed the islands’ entire electrical and communications infrastructure.
Miraculously, there were no reported deaths from the storm, which the driver attributes to strict building codes. What was it like that night, I ask?
She shakes her head. “That’s an experience I don’t ever want to do again.”
I’m staying at the Gansevoort, a relatively new resort hotel on Grace Bay built by a company whose first hotel was in New York’s über-hip meatpacking district. As I’m checking in, the concierge pours me a stiff rum punch made with Bombaro, a local rum that my driver said “goes down smooth, then kicks you in the butt.”
I find the driver’s description accurate.
The view from my second-floor room is nothing short of incredible. The room has a full kitchen, king-sized bed, a soaking tub, a rain shower, and spacious lounge area. The property is built around a massive infinity pool that, from the open lobby, appears to vanish into the ocean. The Exhale spa offers facials, detox treatments, and yoga classes, and I had what was probably the best massage of my life there. But the best part of my stay at the Gansevoort was just sitting on my balcony’s chaise lounge, looking out over the beach to the water and sky beyond.
Chilla searches for conch in the pristine waters off Mangrove Cay.
photograph BY CHRIS McCOY
Grace Bay faces north. If you’re used to the beaches of Florida, which all face east or west, that can be disorienting. The next stop north of Grace Bay is Cape Cod, so the visibility is as close to infinite as it gets. Prevailing winds, from the east, propel a parade of clouds in the near and far distance. These are serious stratocumulus numbers that have been building higher and higher since the moisture first coalesced around Saharan dust. There’s no sunset or sunrise over the water. Instead, dawn and dusk are long, slow light shows as the sun reflects on different layers of clouds at various distances and heights, creating a stunning tableau of pinks, reds, grays, and blues. I made a point of being there for the sunset every evening.
Inside the Gansevoort is Stelle, a fine dining restaurant in the charge of chef Joel Vallar, a culinary veteran who has practiced his trade from his native Philippines to Greece. The chef says he tries to keep it local, incorporating native tomatoes, okra, and habanero whenever he can. “It’s very limited. We get some ingredients from small gardens on North Caicos.”
We’re in the middle of some of the richest fisheries in the world. One of Vallar’s specialties is tuna tartar with salmon roe, avocado puree, and sesame seeds, with a little togarashi. His grouper is wrapped in banana leaves and steamed with lemongrass, ginger, shallots, and red curry paste. When you open the leaves, you can smell ginger and fresh mushrooms. Another highlight is the chef’s beetroot salad, made with chardonnay vinegar and sprinkled with goat cheese. “It’s very light, very healthy,” he says. “In my imagination, it’s a little garden on the plate.”
The south side of the island is very different from the north. A Gansevoort staffer drives me to Turtle Tail, where the hotel has carved its latest project out of the side of a limestone cliff. Five sleek modernist villas look out over the pristine, white-bottomed Caicos Bank. A wooden staircase leads down the cliff from each villa to the sea to a small dock, which is also equipped with a trampoline.
The clarity of the water, scrubbed by the bank’s vast seagrass beds, is startling. “It’s crystal clear,” my guide says. “This is the purest sand in the world. The whole island is made of limestone. It was all one big reef at one point.”
Several times throughout my stay, I ask people what to do while I’m here. I get a few answers, like shopping at the upscale Regent Village, going to the weekly fish fries, or hanging out at Boogaloo’s nightclub. There’s parasailing, jet ski rentals, and a kiteboarding school. But the most common answer is, “Why do you want to do anything but go to the beach and get in the water?”
This place is about nature, and about recuperation. I snorkeled every day, and sorely regretted never learning to scuba dive. The undeniable highlight of the entire trip was the half day I spent on the Island Dream boat tour. The aforementioned Chilla and his captain Tino sailed a group of eight of us around the archipelago. The islands are home to the world’s only conch farm, and Chilla dove into the conching grounds and came up with a number of huge shells covered in seagrass he called dreadlocks.
Later, we put in at Pine Cay, a tiny island Tino claimed was the only place in the world you could walk from the Caribbean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean in less than five minutes. As we marveled at the wild iguanas, the island’s only inhabitants, and swam in Half Moon Bay, where Sports Illustrated and Victoria’s Secret bring their models for photo shoots, the crew made fresh conch ceviche that we ate on the beach. Even here, there were signs of Irene — all of the scrub pines were pointing away from the direction the storm blew in.
Snorkeling all day burns a lot of calories, so you don’t feel guilty about eating a lot. I visited the Shore Club, a brand-new, state-of-the-art resort with eye-popping architecture, and dined on yaki at Sui-Ren. For lunch, it was the Somewhere Cafe, open to the beach, just beside Bight Reef, where I swam beside enormous sea turtles and lion fish. But the one restaurant whose name came up more than any other was Coco Bistro. Set among a thick palm grove, chef Stuart Gray has created a genuine phenomenon. His Conch Two Ways is a unique and fabulous take on the national dish, half sweet and sour with fresh pineapples, half lemon ceviche with a dash of hot pepper. August to March is spiny lobster season, and Coco Bistro’s take on the crustacean is legendary. “The Caribbean lobster is spiny. It’s different, but very rich in flavor,” says Aldolpho, the general manager.
As we sit beneath the palm grove, it begins to rain. The staff passes out umbrellas, and no one in the packed eatery moves to go inside. Aldolpho looks up wistfully. “Before the hurricane, you couldn’t see the sky through the palms. We didn’t need the umbrellas as much,” he says. “It’s just going to take time.”
It could have been worse, I say.
“We empathize with what is going on over there in Puerto Rico,” he says. “We were really lucky.”
Later, as I’m heading back, I ask my driver about the night of the hurricane. “My friends saw the tidal wave come in and turn back, away from Grace Bay Beach,” he says. “It only can be God. I don’t care what anybody says. To see a 30-foot wave come in and turn back … man couldn’t turn that back. It would have wiped us right off the map. We depend on tourism. Grace Bay Beach is the stretch that the resorts are all on. Everything would have been wiped right off. God kept us safe.”
It’s early morning on my last day in paradise, and I’m tromping down the beach as fast as I can. When I told Aldolpho I was spending most of my time snorkeling, he asked “Have you been to Smith’s Reef? It’s the best.” Turns out Smith’s Reef is a mile walk down the beach from the Gansevoort. The only marker on it is a metal pole in the sand. I walk past it and keep going until a channel blocks my way, where I discover a small sign with a crude map marking what has been called the best beach-accessible snorkeling reef in the world. I wade into the surf and quickly find myself caught in a strong current, moving over a seagrass bed like a Cessna flying over a forest. Then, the first reef appears.
The variety of life is mind-boggling. I find myself following one bright blue fish making his morning rounds through the brain coral while singing ELO’s “Mr. Blue” into my snorkel. For a moment, I panic. Have I been washed out to sea, into this alien environment? Could I get back? Poking my head above the waves to get my bearing, I discover that I’m only about 20 yards from the beach. I let the current carry me past three more alien worlds. But even here, the reality of the recent disaster intrudes. Wedged between a pair of coral mounds is a big chunk of what used to be a dock, with a tattered rope waving forlornly in the waves.
At some point, I reluctantly pull myself onto the shore. I’ve got to be on a plane at 2 p,m, but I don’t want to leave. On the long walk back to the Gansevoort, I meet a newlywed couple strolling the beach, holding hands. Lorenza Brascia, a producer for CNN, and her new husband, Peter Ingram, have just arrived on Provo. “We had decided on Turks and Caicos before the hurricane,” she says. “After, we were a little back and forth. Do we really want to go into a disaster zone? But we realized at that point that we were being selfish. This is an island that needs tourism money. That’s why we decided to see this through. We could have changed things up, but we wanted make sure we brought our tourism money here, to a place that needs it.”
I point the happy couple toward Smith’s Reef and wish them well in their new life together. Despite all of the fascinating wildlife and high-end luxury, my lasting impression of Turks and Caicos is not as another world. Provo is a small town, much like the one I grew up in, full of friendly, resilient people trying to return to normal after unimaginable disaster.
