When most people hear the name Cayman Islands, they think of banking.

Certainly, Cayman is home to hundreds of banks in a way Bermuda is not, but the islands south of Cuba, have, quite rapidly, developed an insurance industry about to incorporate its 500th captive. Bermuda, the market leader, has about 1,000.

Twenty years ago, Grand Cayman resembled, in many ways, a long-lost Bermuda of nostalgic yore and lore. Its famous Seven-Mile Beach boasted a single hotel, a Holiday Inn, whose loss no one who ever stayed in it would lament.

Bermuda's often restrictive building codes have kept development in Bermuda to a level the Cayman Islands would consider laughable. Today, Cayman is a hotbed of growth, condos and offices going up higgeldy-piggeldy, with Seven-Mile Beach rapidly turning into Seven-Mile Strip. Unlike Bermuda, Cayman allows fast food; a Burger King meal can be had for about $5 Cayman, or $6.25 Bermudian.

The only building visible in 1999 which I can recall from my only previous visit in 1981, is the central Post Office at the heart of George Town. Its metallic arc adds something of an historic note to what is otherwise almost an entirely new town in the past 20 years.

Cayman is a British Overseas Territory, like Bermuda. Cayman is, generally, hotter and more humid. Certainly, in September, it was fiercely both.

George Town and Hamilton have grown up in similar ways, with an equivalent of Front Street on the water. Offshore sit the cruise ships, which ferry their passengers into town for days out and spending sprees. As Hurricane Floyd threatened, a Mexican vessel appeared, not entirely dwarfed by the giant cruise liner it moored next to, a few hundred yards off-offshore, as it were.

"Casino'', said large neon signs draped on the vessel's sides.

Cayman does not allow casinos, either, nor does it require them to sail into the path of a hurricane the size of Floyd. Then again, like all boom towns, Cayman has the air of being itself a giant casino, with everyone on the island, all 40,000 of them, rolling the dice of life.

To an extent, the ways of old Cayman are likely to survive longer in some parts; the `sister islands' as Cayman Brac and Little Cayman are known, are at distances of 100 miles or more from Grand Cayman, where the boom condition is being most keenly felt.

Cayman has neither the history nor the accumulation of culture, by volume, that Bermuda has; here, one suspects, the two-for-one comparison will not hold water.

Behind the equivalent of Front Street lies a burgeoning business district, its road grid less organised than Hamilton's. At first, the familiar names come as something of a shock. The Bank of Butterfield is probably the most prominent Bermudian institution, visible all over the place, more so than it is in Hamilton, it seemed.

With its secondary listing on the Cayman Stock Exchange, Butterfield provides full community banking and treasury services, plus a range of specialist offshore services in Cayman. A handful of others operate at the retail level in Cayman, but few of the close to 600 banks for which the island is noted are visible on a stroll through George Town.

Caymans a hotbed of growth The process is the same as the one by which only about 350 of Bermuda's 11,0000 international companies and partnerships can be spotted in Hamilton and elsewhere in Bermuda.

Bermuda service providers are in Cayman, its lawyers, accountants, investment and other professionals.

The names of the insurance companies, brokers and managers in Cayman are often highly recognisable to one familiar with the Bermuda scene: Mutual Risk Management, Aon, Marsh.

The issues which touch the Bermuda international business industry usually have equal application in Cayman. The pesky foreign regulators, the costs -- a week in Cayman for a visitor unfamiliar with local ways and without a rental car, requires a financial fortitude that takes away the breath of one who cannot after 25 years come to grips with Bermuda's unfeasibly high cost of living.

And they say newspapers don't offer good news. Be lucky you only have to pay Bermuda prices; imagine living in a place where two cups of coffee you make in your own hotel room cost $16.