6. Smuggler’s Cove (Clare)

All this doing nothing is well and good but it was time to strike out for somewhere. We had been told more than once to go to Smuggler’s Cove, named so – well I’m sure that you can guess – because it is beautiful and the snorkelling is great. Nobody lied. It is a perfect little heart shaped beach with a reef starting at the shore. The sand is white and the sea is that beautiful aquamarine that you see in every photo of the Caribbean. The variety of fish that we saw was phenomenal and I wish that my knowledge was greater to share them with you. But suffice to say that we saw every size, shape and exquisite colour.

The reef was quite close to the surface, so it was safer to swim around it, but coming in the last time, I messed up and ended up in waters too shallow to swim in and too slippy and wavy to stand up in. The result was cuts and bruises all over my hands and legs and possibly a little black spine from a sea urchin embedded in my heel. All this adds rather beautifully to my insect bites to make my legs rather attractive!

After a few days here, we are starting to get the measure of this unique place. At first, it seemed that it had no culture of its own, that it had only borrowed culture from the current dominating power (now the US) and with traces of all the previous powers that have passed through. But with longer here, it feels that the culture is the ability to survive these passing phases, to be completely dependent on the economies outside of the islands but to remain completely independent. People who live here cannot contemplate living anywhere else and they are fiercely proud of what it means to be an islander. They must be outward looking and that makes them knowledgeable about the world and its affairs, but far from feeling cut off from where it’s all at, they are glad when some of the world’s problems pass them by. However, the people that we have interacted with have been predominantly white, perhaps we only know half of the story.