Experience Hell in a tropical haven

Nov 22 2009 by Ettrick Scott, Sunday Sun

ETTRICK SCOTT is Hell-bound at the Cayman Jazz Fest, held on an island paradise in the Caribbean . . .

I’VE been to a fair few music festivals over the years, and, while they all offer various distractions of a non-musical nature, I’m fairly confident that there’s only one festival in the world where you could feasibly pop out to swim with stingrays halfway through somebody’s set.

I’m talking about the Cayman Jazz Fest, held on the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman, which I was lucky enough to be invited to last year, and which returns in its sixth year in December, with Alicia Keys topping the bill this time around.

Last year’s headliner was Michael Bolton and, while I can’t confess to being the chiselled crooner’s biggest fan, there can’t be a better place to catch his show than sitting in a deck-chair while the Caribbean Ocean laps gently at the shore less than 100 metres from the stage.

I arrived at Grand Cayman after a short transfer from Miami airport, which I flew into from Heathrow. This second leg of the journey only takes an hour or so, but it seemed to pass by even quicker, quite possibly aided by the delicious glasses of rum punch that the cheery flight attendants were handing out.

The festival itself takes place over three consecutive evenings, but Grand Cayman offers visitors plenty to do with their daytimes as well . . . especially if snorkelling and diving is their thing, because the island and its two sister islands – Little Cayman and Cayman Brac – hosts some of the finest, crystal-clear dive sites that the world has to offer.

Our party took a boat trip out to a place known as Stingray City, a series of sandbanks about a mile or so offshore. The water there doesn’t get any deeper than chest-height in a lot of places and the area is often spoken of as being possibly the finest snorkelling site in the world. Now that I’ve been, I can understand why.