The Bahamas

During the last week I went a lot of places with no internet connection and thus am posting here again for the first time since I left. The island nation of the Bahamas is the eighth that I have visited outside of the United States. This trip was my first by boat and I tried many things that were new to me.

At our first port of call, Port Carnival, a Norwegian cruise line stronghold in Northern Florida I saw my first wild dolphins from the balcony of our stateroom. There is little to do at the port itself and Norwegian reaps a great deal of profits from the excursions here which include trips to Disney World and Sea World for the day. My friends and I chose the Kennedy Space Center instead, since it was less expensive. after a short bus ride we were deposited on the doorstep of the headquarters of the American space exploration program. It was a surprisingly chill day and a cool breeze shook the palm trees. March was a month too proud to be ordered about by climactic expectations. The Shuttle storage building was draped with an enormous American flag and the great square building erupted from the flat boggy Floridian earth with every intention of containing an object powerful enough to escape the planet that created it and wise enough to come back. It made me sad to think that the shuttle launch program will soon come to an intermission for an unknown length of time.

Great Stirrup Cay will probably always be the location at which I became the most sun-burnt. A merciless Norwegian encampment, the private island is owned entirely by the company. There is a small swatch of beach developed for sunbathing and swimming, and a buffet building open to the air and intrepid beach flies. There is a restroom, a pair of pavilions full of picnic tables, a collection of shacks full of sunscreen and beach towels and coconuts carved to look like pirate heads presided over by Bahamians who haggle much better than I do. I was not much interested in the fact that the island was home to the world's largest inflatable water slide, tellingly named the "Hippo Slide" which periodically shook violently as overweight young women in expensive bathing suits paid $20 for the brief exhilaration of rocketing towards a beach full of sand and bouncing safely to a halt, dripping wet and laughing wildly. I spent as much time as I could making use of my rented snorkel gear to explore the shallow reef around the island which was a very rewarding decision. Although most of the bathing areas offered little in the way of fish, a short swim into the waters around the "Off-limits" portions of the beach offered a rich variety of marine life. Parrotfish, angelfish, butterfly fish, grouper, snapper, squirrelfish, and colorful varieties of wrasse were present in abundance, alongside many soft corals and some sea urchins. The rest of the rocky island, untouched by Norwegian bulldozers, had been left to the lizards and mangrove trees.

The third day at port brought us to Nassau, capital city of the Bahamas. Here we rented mopeds, an experience I found far more thrillingly dangerous than being prisoner on an island fun camp with six dollar sodas and no sun screen. We navigated Bahamian left-driving traffic successfully, or at least passably enough to remain alive and ate lunch at the fish fry near Andros Cay. The restaurants here serve delectable conch, grouper, and snapper, seafood being unsurprisingly the main delicacy of the islands. From there we explored the ruins of fort Charlotte, a fort built during the age of imperial European power where nothing note-worthy happened until the Bahamas gained independence from Britain there in 1973, an event which also included no battle of significance. From there we took the ferryboat to "Paradise Island" home of the Atlantis Resort, and the beach properties of Nicholas Cage, Oprah, and Tiger Woods, among other celebrities. One of the tour guides on the ferryboats soliciting cash from a captive audience was thoughtful enough to inform us that the island was formerly known as Hog Island due to an abundance of wild pigs. Now that it is home to celebrities and wealthy vacationers, I fail to see what necessitated the name change.