George Town, Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands

Another George Town! George Town, Penang is one of our favourite cities. How will George Town, Grand Cayman stack up?

The Cayman Islands are the home of offshore financial services and financial institutions. The islands are a popular tax haven because they don't impose corporate tax, personal income tax, capital gains tax or any wealth tax. So multinational corporations located in the Caymans can, um, shield their incomes from tax.

The Cayman Islands don't tax residents either. Across the three Cayman islands, the population is about 80,000. I looked up the GDP per capita and it's almost US$110,000. Apparently the Cayman Islands has the highest standard of living in the Caribbean and one of the highest in the world. Whaaaaat?

This figure must be skewed heavily towards the wealthy. There are certainly some very swish areas. Seven Mile Beach is uber-upmarket, with very expensive hotels and apartments on the beachfront. The beach itself is very beautiful. It seemed to me that there were a lot of very flash cars. We drove past manicured golf courses. The good life, yes? If you can pay for it.

But outside of Seven Mile Beach, it seemed to me that people live much as they do in other Caribbean islands. They are certainly not earning $110,000 per year. No way, José.

So I did a quick check on the Gini coefficient for the Caymans. It's 40%, about the same as Argentina and the USA. Clearly there's inequality in the Caymans. Judge for yourself in the small part of Grand Cayman we visited, which follows.

We did a cycle tour on the west side of the island, in an area called West Bay. It's quite close to Seven Mile Beach. Bear in mind that I am taking many of these photos with one hand while cycling on a very old and unwieldy bike: heavy frame, no gears, smooth tyres, brutal saddle, pedal brakes. The roads were also a bit dodgy, certainly on the kerb side where we were cycling. At least the traffic drives on the left, thanks to the islands' British history.

The Cayman Islands got their current name from the crocodiles (caiman) in the language of the native Arawak-Taíno people. Good ol' Columbus was the first European to see the Caymans in 1503, although he called them Las Tortugas because of the many turtles he saw. Amazingly, the Spanish didn't colonise the islands (hey, you can't do everything) but sailors did massacre those turtles. A trickle of settlers began to arrive including pirates, shipwrecked sailors and deserters from the British army in Jamaica.

Jamaica is not far away. We'll get there in due course.

England took control of the Caymans in 1670 and sixty years later the islands had a permanent population. One imagines that the pirates (and surviving turtles) were a bit unhappy with this. Property owners needed labour, so slaves were brought from Africa. There were about 1000 slaves owned by 120 families at the time of abolition in 1833. So Caymanians today tend to have British or African ancestry.

For about 100 years, the Caymans were administered from Jamaica. When Jamaica achieved independence in 1962, the Caymans became a separate Crown colony and reverted to direct British rule.

Okay, back to our cycle tour. You can see on the map that Seven Mile Beach is north of George Town, and north of that is the wonderfully named Hell. We cycled to Hell on our bike tour. It was very very hot, so at times it did feel a bit diabolical ...

The owner of the shop sells all kinds of Hell memorabilia and has the appropriate line of patter. 'How the hell are you? Where the hell have you been?' The shop is next to a striking geological phenomenon — strange black limestone formations that look like a river running through the bush. From what I understand, salt and lime deposits over millions of years have interacted with coral, algae and bacteria from the ocean in a unique way. At one time this would been under the sea. It's still very close to the sea.

So what does this have to do with Hell? No one is quite sure how Hell, Grand Cayman got its name. But inevitably it would have been someone saying that this stark, spiky landscape looked like hell. Our guide told us a few alternative versions (including one English governor shooting ducks, missing and exclaiming 'Oh hell!') but I think these stories are for the tourists.

Cycle (or walk or drive) a little further and you end up at the coast. Here the 'river' of black limestone enters the sea. Because there is constant moisture, some of the coral in the black rock is still visible and alive.

Another stop in our cycle tour was for rum tasting. Rum is a major business wherever we've been in the Caribbean — sugar cane, right? Every island has its own rum. I tasted some of the rums, but I preferred the rum cake that is prevalent. Tasting 75% proof rum in the middle of a cycle in the middle of a very hot day? A ... challenge. For me.

After cycling and rum, it was definitely an afternoon for the beach. Off to Coral Beach, part of Seven Mile Beach, to a beach club and rum punch. And a friendly lizard.

This was the most stunning, gorgeous beach where we swam on our whole Caribbean trip. Crystal clear water, warm without being too warm, no gungey stuff under our feet.

We met a lovely family from Maryland, US while we were swimming, who asked where we were from. 'Australia,' we said. 'Ah,' they said, 'your breakdancer is very popular right now.' Yes, some Americans can do irony! We all laughed in jolly camaraderie. Personally I'd rather have a weird breakdancer as a compatriot than a weird politician. Two weird politicians.

More to come from another Caribbean island.