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Stingray City, The Caymans 17 June 2005 ~ 16:27 I'm sorry Las Vegas, sorry Nairobi, Copenhagen, Croatia and Greenland. Sorry Tazmania, The Bahamas and Cuba. I'm no longer bothered about visiting you. I now have a new favourite place I want to holiday at!Just off Grand Cayman island in The Carribean, there is an area known as Stingray City. There, you can dive in the warm twelve-foot waters and mix and interact with the beautiful tame stringrays that live there. There are about thirty 'regulars' though some 280 rays are said to inhabit the area. Visitors can play with them, hold them and feed them. The place was first discovered in the Eighties when fisherman who threw unwanted parts of fish into the sea saw rays come to feed on them. They recognised an opportunity and now several companies offer trips out to Stingray City and Stingray Sandbank. The main food is frozen squid. The rays do not have teeth but suck the food up with their powerful mouths. They sting rarely, only as a means of defence. One diver joked about being stung by his ray 'girlfriend' whom he called Lucy. In rough waves he had accidentally fallen on top of Lucy when holding her. Though unharmed she instinctivly stung him with her powerful tail sting and he still has the scar to prove it. He is philosophical about it however. "That's what you get when you go out with a ray," he shrugs. This perception about stingrays as aggressive is untrue and needs to be challenged. Even Nightdragon asked me, "Yeah, but don't they inflict a bad sting?" He used to lump them in with sharks and killer whales as creatures he'd never want to swim with, but his mind has started to change after seeing rays at the London Aquarium. I wanna go to Stingray City!
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