Hurricane Preparedness 101

As I am writing this blog post, the wind is howling outside, rain is lashing the windows and there is a pretty spectacular lightning display happening across the horizon. This is not, however, a hurricane and a Tropical Storm warning has recently been lifted after Tropical Storm Earl veered West in the Caribbean sea and towards Belize and Mexico instead of the Cayman Islands (heads up, amigos!).

However, after two days of warnings and already two months into hurricane season, I thought it was about time I enlighten you all as to the wonders of living on a hurricane-prone island.

Hurricanes for the Uninitiated 

The short and sweet version of a hurricane is this: Wizard of Oz plus water minus munchkins. A more technical explanation might include mention that warm humid air rises up from warm ocean water, starts as a collection of thunder storms, moisture and heat energy fuel the storms and they start spiralling, when the speed of the cyclonic wind reaches 23mph, the storm is classified as a tropical depression, it then gets upgraded to a tropical storm when winds exceed 39mph and then voila! becomes a hurricane when wind speeds exceed 74mph and can hit up to 225mph. I obviously prefer my explanation.

The hurricane season in the Caribbean runs from 1 June to 30 November every year and in this time, about 10 to 12 tropical storms develop in the region, about half of which become hurricanes. Statistically, Cayman is brushed or hit by a tropical storm or hurricane every 1.68 years and sustains a direct hit from a hurricane every 5.3 years. I am only mildly (i.e. quite) concerned that we are now 5 years overdue for a hurricane. No biggie....

Hurricane Ivan

The last serious hurricane to affect the island was Hurricane Ivan in 2004. It hit Grand Cayman at category 5 (technically known as the Voldemort/Lord Sauron category) on 12 September 2004. The eye of the storm was just 8 miles from Grand Cayman and wind speeds during the storm were between 160 and 217mph. The storm surge, which caused much of the damage, was between 8 and 10 feet and covered most of the island because Grand Cayman is largely flat.

One quarter of the island remained submerged by water 2 days later, 90% of buildings on the island were damaged to some extent, 25% of homes were uninhabitable and 2 people died. It took months to reconnect power, water or sewerage to some parts of the island and 5 months later only half of the hotel rooms on the island were habitable. The damage to the island was estimated to be US$2.86 billion, which is 1.8 times the GDP. It was the 10th most intense hurricane ever recorded.


These three pictures show the before-Ivan, post-Ivan and present-day images of the Grand Cayman Hyatt Britannia Resort, which was one of the nicest hotels on the island and was used for shooting the movie “The Firm.” The damage from Ivan was so severe that it was never rebuilt and remains a shell. 

How to Survive a Hurricane

In view of the Cayman experience of hurricanes, the Cayman Islands motto is BE PREPARED! This is their official brochure which really induces calm, I think.

The whole first week of June is dedicated to talking about hurricane preparedness, which my friends and I realised we had completely ignored when storm warnings started coming in this week. And so it was that I and three of my fellow relatively-new-expats (for whom this is the first hurricane season on island) resolved on Monday night to go hurricane survival kit shopping together. It was obviously a very serious and somber affair.

Luckily, we all live in the same building so could divvy up the supplies a bit so for example, one person has the chocolate (not me thankfully or it wouldn't be there when the hurricane hits) one person has lollies, one takes paper plates while the other takes plastic cutlery etc. On Monday night we headed off to Cost u Less (like Costco) with our checklists (from which I wasn't allowed to deviate, notwithstanding that I think I made a compelling argument that a pool noodle would be helpful in an emergency)

About $150 later we had a selection of the following:

• tinned food (soup, salmon/tuna, vegetables)
• snacks (crackers, muesli bars, fruit cups)
• fun food (Reese's pieces, Hershey's chocolate, sour worms) - not strictly on the list but we felt it was important for morale
• torches
• batteries
• duct tape
• tarpaulin
• thick gloves
• plastic bags
• baby wipes
• hand sanitizer
• 24 bottles of water per person
• toilet rolls
• plastic cutlery and plates
• first aid kit
• mosquito coils
• insect repellant. 

Just to be absolutely clear, all of this stuff sits in a sealed box somewhere in your apartment so you have it when a hurricane hits. That's $150 of stuff you don't even get to use! They also recommend getting battery powered fans, oil lamps, sleeping bags - all of which become outrageously expensive unless you're Bear Grylls, which I am clearly not. If the shopping hadn't been so much fun, I would really have resented the expense. And I'm pretty sure by the time something actually happens, the water will have leaked, the batteries will be dead, the baby wipes will have dried up and the snacks will have gone mouldy, but apparently that's the risk you have to take in paradise!

In any event, I'm now prepared for anything that comes my way (whether it's a hurricane or I decide to become a hermit) between now and the end of November! If anyone is planning to visit me around that time, there is a good chance that the only thing I will be offering you are muesli bars, crackers, tinned fish and sour worms on paper plates with plastic cutlery, washed down with stale bottled water, offset with mood lighting provided by a torch, fragranced courtesy of mosquito coils. Don't all RSVP at once! 

Bahamian Getaway

One of the great things about living on a Caribbean island (other than the weather, the ocean, the people and the taxes) is its proximity to other great places. Coming from Australia, the country where you can drive for 8 hours and still be in the same state, this is something of a novelty, as I’m sure my London-based friends will agree. So it’s hard to stare down the barrel of a long weekend without jumping online to check out where you can pop to for a few nights after a one or two hour flight.   

And so it was that I ended up moseying over to the Bahamas for the long weekend just gone (4 July is Constitution Day in the Caymans - and no to every American we met along the way, the rest of the world does not celebrate your independence day). My friend Aleisha and I literally looked up the places we could reach on a direct flight in 3 hours or less and since we couldn’t get the accommodation we wanted in Honduras (save that for another long weekend!), we picked Nassau instead.

The Bahamas is a collection of 700 islands spread out over 100,000 square miles of ocean just north of the Cayman Islands (a delightfully short 1 hour and 10 minutes by plane). They are basically exactly what you have seen on postcards. Crystal clear turquoise water, white sand and beautiful tropical palm trees. So why, you may be thinking, would I leave my own island with crystal clear turquoise water, white sand and beautiful tropical palm trees? Because water slides.

The Atlantis resort on Paradise Island (next to Nassau) is a 105 hectare water park with 5 hotels, 10 swimming pools and many many cocktail bars. Like its Dubai counterpart, the Atlantis Aquaventure park features two slides that go through a tank filled with sharks plus countless other water slides. 

Thanks to a flight and hotel deal from British Airways, Aleisha and I stayed at the Cove Hotel, one of the more deluxe of the hotels, which was ah-may-zing (and just to be clear - way out of our price range normally!). Most importantly, it was within convenient walking distance of the water slides, meaning we could kick off the first day with minimal delay and get in front of all of those pesky children. 

Our favourite ride, based purely on number of goes, was the river rapids. It incorporated 2 different water slides you could take if you took a little detour, plus a wave section and a number of rapids and best of all, didn’t require you to move from your rubber ring if you didn’t want to. Outside of the river rapids, we also both loved one of the tunnel slides that took off from the top of the Mayan temple, was pitch black, involved two horizontal drops and then landed you in an underground cave next to the fish tank. I was obviously really brave and kept waterslide squealing to a minimum (if Aleisha suggests otherwise, she’s lying).

When we weren’t water sliding, we parked ourselves at the Cain, the adults only pool for guests of the Cove, on luxurious sunbeds with pina coladas in hand. 

While this sounds glamorous (and it was to an extent), I couldn’t help but feel like I had accidentally walked into a shoot from the OC / the Hills / Entourage / some other show featuring rich and entitled Americans and didn’t quite fit in. For a start, the Cain’s sunbed reservation policy leaves a lot to be desired and seems to be based on an unspoken scale ranging from “tiny waisted, skimpy bikini wearing blonde with artificial enhancements” to “middle-aged overweight white man with cigar, younger wife and weirdly ostentatious jewellery”. I’m not quite sure where Aleisha and I fitted on that scale and I think the staff struggled to place us in order of priority too. There was one pool boy in particular who advised us (3 hours after we’d selected sunbeds, on which we’d left our belongings when we briefly went away to show that they were ours) that they were reserved for other people and we’d have to move. He confirmed he had seen us set up a few hours before, knew we were sitting in reserved spots, but didn’t deign to tell us until all other seats were taken several hours later. The same guy had assured us the day before that he would let us know when a bed became available and we never saw him again. We obviously communicated our confusion to management (who seemed equally confused) who eventually set us up with 2 different sun beds. Unfortunately these ones seemed to be in a blind spot for the wait staff (notwithstanding that they were central and poolside) who didn’t offer us a drink until maybe 5 hours after we’d arrived. I can only assume we weren’t flashing enough cash around or weren’t correctly barking orders at them across rows of sun beds. 

The days by the pool were, however, a delightful insight into the lives of the rich and entitled and an entertaining (if infuriating) few hours of people watching. The clientele of the Cain were, in short, horrific. But us commoners stuck it out nonetheless because the bartenders made a mean pina colada. We're selfless like that. 

Unlike many tourists, we made sure that we stepped outside of the Americanised bubble of the Atlantis resort to check out Nassau itself. We were lucky enough for our trip to coincide with the Junkanoo summer festival, which involves weekly festivities throughout July in downtown Nassau. There is some debate about how the Junkanoo festival started (some believing it was established by John Canoe, a legendary West African Prince, who outwitted the English and became a local hero, some say it comes from the French ‘gens inconnus,’ which translates as 'unknown' or 'masked people', while others say it developed from the days of slavery when the slaves celebrated their 3 days off at Christmas by singing and dancing in colourful masks, travelling from house to house, often on stilts.) but it’s now supposed to be one of the best street parties in the world. The main event happens around Christmas but there is now also an offshoot over summer.

When we headed into town on Saturday night it was the official opening of the Ministry for Tourism’s Summer Junkanoo Festival, which kicked off with a limbo performance by Obeah man (did you know the limbo was originally a slave dance, performed by slaves to buy their freedom? Puts a bit of a damper on the traditional kids party game!) and a Junkanoo jet ski show. It was then time for the main event -  a parade of competing dance troupes (they take it seriously enough that there is an A and B division) who danced and played music down the street in colourful costumes made from coloured crepe paper and cardboard, each following an extravagant float (one of them had three enormous moving peacocks, seriously). The crowd favourite was the Bahmi-Boys who were AMAZING and certainly my favourite. Mainly because I’ve never seen so many attractive, masculine men dancing and playing instruments! I fear I will no longer be contented with a man unless he can play tunes with a cowbell and/or play drums on a repurposed goatskin-covered oil drum, while walking down the street in in bright colours.

Behind the parade there were 30 or 40 stalls with local food and crafts. The fried chicken was predictably amazing, as was the local beer, Kalik (according to Aleisha anyway). After the parade we hit up the fish fry, which is an area in town, beyond the end of the parade, lined with traditional fish fry restaurants. This was clearly the place to hang out on a Saturday night and was pumping with people both inside and spilling out onto the street. I had snapper with ‘rice n peas’ (traditional rice and beans) and salad. The snapper in their secret herbs and spices was possibly the most delicious fish I’ve ever had in my life.

Dinner on night 2 was at the Bahamian branch of Nobu which was predictably delicious. The sushi chefs were amazing and I am now obsessed with their spicy tuna sushi, which may lead to my financial undoing if I ever live closer to a Nobu.

The one thing we didn’t get to do while in Nassau was swim with the pigs. There is an area off Exuma, another of the islands in the Bahamas, where you can swim with wild pigs in the water. Unfortunately the only day trip from Nassau was booked out for our weekend so we will just have to go back to the Bahamas some time!

Fun Facts about Offshore Tax

If you have made it this far (i.e. beyond the title), thank you for persevering and being optimistic enough and/or loving me enough to read a page about tax laws. I had originally intended to post this last weekend but after the debacle that was Brexit I figured the world needed a week off. I promise that in return for your faith in me, I will make this offshore tax snapshot informative and witty and if you make it all the way to the end of the page, there'll be a picture of a cute teacup pig doing ballet as a reward.

I thought I would write this page as "what's the tax situation over there?" was one of the most common questions people asked me when I said I was moving to the Cayman Islands, after "so you're going to help rich people hide their money from the government, hey?" (As an aside - no I don't - I more often help track it down and return it to investors, so I'm really the Robin Hood / Sherlock Holmes / Wonder Woman of the offshore financial market - you're welcome, world).

There is some disagreement among historians about how the Cayman Islands came to be a tax neutral jurisdiction. Some say that it is because 10 British ships were shipwrecked on the island in 1794 and as a thank you to the Caymanian people for saving those aboard, who included a Prince, King George III decreed that the people of the Cayman Islands would forever be free from tax and conscription. Others say it is because before the airport was built in 1952, there were so few companies and incomes were so insignificant that it was not worth imposing any form of direct taxation.

I prefer the first story obviously but I suspect it was more likely the latter. Either way, I'm keeping an eye out for shipwrecked princes in case there are grateful decrees to be bequeathed from the motherland (perhaps along the lines of....thou shalt have no further HECS debt).

As a result, there is currently no income, inheritance, sales, corporation, capital gains or property taxes in the Cayman Islands.

Tax Haven v Tax Neutral Jurisdiction

Much like "Donald Trump" and "vehicular manslaughter", the term "tax haven" has some justifiable negative connotations. You hear "tax haven" and you think of a low visibility jurisdiction, with minimal financial disclosure obligations and an uncooperative approach to global tax obligations.

However, contrary to popular assumptions, the Cayman Islands are actually one of the more transparent nations in the world when it comes to financial information sharing (please note how protective I have become of my new home a mere 5 weeks in). Since 2000, the Cayman Islands have been a member of the Global Forum on Taxation (now, that sounds like a thrilling annual conference!) and signed up to the OECD's project to eliminate harmful tax practices. Cayman has had a tax information exchange agreement in place with the USA since 2001, has also long been reporting interest income earned by EU citizens in Cayman Islands bank accounts to the 28 EU states who are members of the European Union Savings Directive and has tax information exchange agreements in place with some 35 countries.

In contrast, one of the biggest tax havens in the world is actually the USA (gasp!). While the US imposes disclosure obligations on everyone else, it hasn't signed up for any of the international reporting standards and its own reporting legislation - FATCA - which requires countries to report to the IRS accounts owned by American citizens, is unsurprisingly unilateral. States like Nevada, Delaware and South Dakota enable you to set up a shell corporation with the flick of a pen and the US as a whole has the laxest regulations for setting up shell companies of anywhere other than Kenya (who admittedly, probably have priorities more urgent than stringent financial management and reporting). Meanwhile here in Cayman, the financial regulations, anti-money laundering legislation and various other regulations made opening a bank account here the hardest thing I've ever had to accomplish in my life so far.

All this is basically a long-winded way of saying - lay off, guys - unlike shady Delaware**, our banking and tax practices are as transparent as the crystal clear Caribbean water we get to swim in each day!

Duty

While there is no direct taxation in the Cayman Islands, one particular inconvenience given our proximity to the USA (the missed online shopping possibilities!) is the import duty. It can be a killer.

Import duty of 10 to 25% can be imposed on goods imported into the country. Most mail order items are hit with a 22% duty, including gifts from family and friends! I have a horrible suspicion that this means my birthday next year is going to be very expensive for me. Clothing and electronics also have a 22% duty and cars are between 29.5% and 42% depending on the model and value. Devastatingly, there is also a CI$3.60 duty charge for every bottle of wine brought into the country. The one saving grace is that books are exempt! Amazon, here I come.

The short point is, my online shopping dreams (and yours, if you were hoping to use me as a PO Box for US online shopping) are dead. To the many of you who have numerous gifts to send me, don't bother, because I'll have to pay the duty at this end. From stories I've heard, customs often has difficulty calculating 22% of the value of goods and in those circumstances, picks a number based on the "vibe" of the package, which may well exceed the value of the goods themselves!

And that, dear friends, is my pithy summary of Cayman Islands tax issues. Probably wildly incorrect, offensive to Americans and the most boring tropical island blog post you've ever read, so here is your promised teacup pig. You're welcome.

** The writer has never actually been to Delaware and is sure it's a delightful, if slightly lacking in stringent financial regulation, place to live, work and visit.

Flowers Sea Swim

I participated in my first Island community activity last weekend in the form of the annual Flowers Sea Swim!

Now, this is not an event that involves swimming through an ocean strewn with petals, as one friend thought, but an annual charity fundraiser organised by the Flowers family. Frank Flowers started the swim 24 years ago as a way to increase participation in open water swimming, raise funds for charity and create an event for everyone to participate in, from kids to Olympic swimmers. This year the swim was supporting the Cayman Cancer Foundation and it was particularly poignant as Eve Flowers, the matriarch of the family, had passed away earlier this year from cancer.

And so it was that Mel and I donned our yellow caps on Saturday afternoon to swim 1 mile along the shore line with 1100 of our closest Cayman friends. We had to fight for our caps, however, as we almost missed the registration cutoff thanks to a car breakdown. We weren't overly concerned as nothing on this Island has ever started on time in our experience so far, and we assumed the swim would be no different. Alas, it seems that the Flowers Sea Swim is the one activity on Island that is run with a strictness that would make an army drill sergeant's eyes water. But thanks to some sweet talking, begging, sob stories or more likely simply exhausting the volunteer who had better things to do, we were given our caps and numbers.

At this point, we gratefully splashed into the water to escape the oppressive heat on the sand and I came face to face with one of my new supervising partners. If anyone is looking to break the ice with a work superior, run into them in a bikini at the end of week 2 in the office - that'll do it, trust me. (In all honesty though, he is lovely and was there doing the swim with his 9 year old son, who Mel threatened to drown if it looked like he was going to overtake us).

After the race, some people said they saw a turtle or stingrays underneath when they were swimming. I must have missed these while I was trying not to drown. I had done 1 practice run of the distance (OK, fine not the full distance as I had got bored walking down the beach) and knew I could finish if I paced myself. But it turns out 1 mile is a REALLY long way! I have done 1km ocean swims before and thought "easy peasy, mile/kilometre, same same." No. They're really not. 1 Mile is closer to TWO kilometres than one. AND we had to swim AGAINST the current (my practice run was in the opposite direction with the current because I don't hate myself). The result of this confluence of factors is that I resisted looking up to see where I was for what felt like forever, because I didn't want to look up until I was close to the finish and when I did finally glance up after what felt like an hour of swimming, the finish line was obviously nowhere in sight. When it did eventually appear, I somehow didn't manage to get any closer to it for a weirdly long time. I am sure they kept moving it along the beach.

However, spoiler alert, I didn't drown and did make it through the darn finish line in 43 minutes and placed 521 of 1100 #crushedit. I scored a water bottle, T-shirt, towel and random other goodies for my trouble. After laying down on the floor of my air conditioned apartment for a while to confirm I wasn't going to die (it sure felt like it - I probably shouldn't have done hot yoga and paddle boarding that morning), it was pina colada and prizes time!

The other reason the Flowers Sea Swim is so awesome is that they have the best prizes of any competition like this, ever (I have no authority for this statement but it simply must be true). There are about 150 prizes on offer for swimmers, meaning there is a 1 in 7 chance of winning, and the prizes include amazing things like flights to New York, Chicago, London, Paris, Havana, money, phones, dinner vouchers, holiday vouchers, petrol vouchers and other random gifts. Devastatingly, neither I nor any of my friends there that day won any prizes. There were also more than 7 of us so statistically, I am a little suspicious.....

Nevertheless, it was a fantastic day and an excellent item to check off my island to-do list in only week two!

Hello Grand Cayman

As you may have noticed from my shameless social media bragging over the last fortnight, I eventually made it to the Cayman Islands after the longest visa processing delay in global immigration history (well, that's what it felt like).

After a three month wait for my visa, on 27 May 2016 I finally departed Australian soil and set out for the Caribbean. So how, I hear you ask, did I even get here? Well that, unfortunately for you dear reader, is a 30 hour story.

Tragically for Australians, while there are a surprising number of cities in the US with direct flights to Grand Cayman, none of those are cities to which you can fly directly from Sydney. If you are in the market for a stop over from the US, you'll be pleased to know you can get to Grand Cayman from Miami (1.5 hours), New York (4 hours), Houston (2 hours, 15 minutes) and Chicago (3 hours, 15 minutes) among several others. However, en route from Sydney one must find a way to one of these airports from LA, San Francisco or Dallas. For a brief few months of the year, you can fly direct from Dallas to Grand Cayman, however those flight times in no way line up conveniently with the arrival times of the Sydney > Dallas flight.

The easiest route from Sydney is Sydney > LAX > Miami > Grand Cayman.

You get a thrilling layover in LA where you have to collect your baggage, clear customs and check your bags back in again at the transfer desk (whoever thought putting the baggage transfer desk at THE TOP of a steep ramp is nothing short of sadistic - my trolley loaded high with 4 suitcases almost took me back down with it), then sprint to the next terminal over to go back through security in an unrealistically small time frame and hope your visa paperwork is in order so they let you on the plane.

Needless to say, by the time I landed in Grand Cayman (after the Miami flight was changed to a different plane, which was then stuck on the tarmac for 2 hours), I was a mere Gem-shaped shell dragging my suitcases behind me.

However after all of that, things started to look up as I was met at the airport by two colleagues who promptly whisked me away for welcome cocktails!

So, now that you all know how to come and visit me, please form an orderly queue here....

Goodbye Sydney

Any day now, I am relocating from busy city life in Sydney, Australia to George Town on Grand Cayman, in the Cayman Islands.

By and large the reactions of friends and family to this news has been a several-stage process, which goes something like:
1. Yay, you got a new job!
2. No! You're leaving?
3. Wow, the Cayman Islands!
4. Hang on, where are the Cayman Islands?

So I thought I would start this little blog experiment (it remains to be seen how long I can keep it up) by setting out a little bit of information about the Cayman Islands from my extensive (but unsurprising if you've met me) research prior to making this decision. I also need some place to share this otherwise-completely-useless knowledge with the world.

The Cayman Islands is a tiny archipelago of 3 islands in the Caribbean, sitting between the East coast of Mexico, Cuba and Jamaica. It's about an hour's flight from Miami, Florida.

 
The largest of the 3 islands is Grand Cayman, and it is flanked by two smaller islands, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac, which are former British colonies and now known as British Overseas Territories. They have a Governor, appointed by the Queen, but have their own parliament.

The population of all three islands is a whopping 55,000ish people meaning there are more registered businesses on the island (over 95,000) than humans. Many of these businesses are banks, making the Cayman Islands the fifth largest financial centre in the world. One five storey building in George Town, Ugland House, has over 18,000 businesses registered at that address. Apparently everyone loves a tax free low-visibility jurisdiction!

Weather wise, the Cayman Islands are a balmy 26-30 degrees year-around. They don't really have a spring or autumn, just a hot, wet summer and then a hot, dry winter. However, if you are feeling jealous about this weather, bear in mind that summer is hurricane season (I will do a separate post when I set up my hurricane survival kit!) plus humidity in summer will be about a thousand per cent, so my hair is going to be a hot mess.

For the time being, I will enjoy my hair straightener while it works and pack up my lightweight corporate wear for what I anticipate will be the longest and most inconvenient flight path on the planet, from Sydney to Grand Cayman....