GRAND TURK, The Turks and Caicos Islands — Adrift out here on the fringes of the Caribbean, The Turks and Caicos Islands sit at the bottom of the Bahamas chain, nature’s afterthought 575 miles southeast of Miami.
Oh, they’ve had their share of pirates and slaves, shipwrecks and plantations; but scarcely anyone except scuba divers ever vacationed in this 40-island archipelago until the mid-1960s, when development and offshore banking on Providenciales — Provo for short — began, little by little, to attract the resort crowd — and inevitably drew job seekers away from Grand Turk.
But now, Grand Turk’s tourism star is rising. Its ship has come in. Literally. The tiny island that once received perhaps 10,000 visitors in the space of a year is now welcoming an estimated 300,000. In February, Holland America Line’s MS Noordam became the first ocean liner to tie up at the brand new Grand Turk Cruise Center — a far cry from the days when the occasional ship would anchor at a distance and tender passengers ashore.