The best way to tour the Bahamas, I think, is to marry someone who owns a yacht. If that’s not an option, I guess you’ll have to do it the old fashioned way, by washing ashore following some tragic shipwreck. Or, alternatively, just by throwing tons of money around. I chose the latter.

I got halfway through planning this trip and even booked some things before I had the idea of inviting my father along. My father seemed excited about it, so I started adjusting my plans to accommodate them. And don’t get me wrong, that’s been great, but it did force me to make some changes to the way I’d normally go about traveling. And even then I didn’t get it right. I’d be better going in now, obviously. But without knowing what really to expect or how to plan for it I ended up solving problems by throwing money at them. In some cases quite a lot of money. I’ll know for next time.

Getting here was rough. I had booked a flight through Miami from New York, which hit thunderstorms on the way down and forced us to reroute around them. At one point we were over Cuba.¹ When we landed the already tight 45 minute connection was down to a 15 minute connection. But the departing plane was held back a bit because of the same storms we routed around, they had one of those airport carts ready to whisk us across the terminal, and we managed to roll up at the gate just before they had closed the cabin doors.² An hour later, we were landing in the Bahamas.

The first part of this trip, the part I planned before knowing my Dad was going to be joining me — was to Eleuthera,³ part of the archipelago of the Bahamas on the eastern side. I had done what I imagined you ought to do: find a cabin on a beach, book a flight to a nearby airport,⁴ and plan to catch a cab down to the cabin.

Basically, this is totally wrong. To start with, there’s no way to get up and down the island without renting a car. My guidebook says you only need a car if you’re planning on traveling around the islands; this is a lie. I assumed I could rent a car at the airport; you cannot. You also can’t rent a car online; you need to call ahead or fill out an email form and hope they get back to you. Of course, the cabs are also much more expensive than I expected. The guidebook says it’s about $30 to get from the airport to where I was staying. It actually cost about $100.⁵

But it turns out, even if I had rented a car, I wouldn’t have gotten far. There’s a historic bridge, the Glass Window Bridge, connecting the upper part of Eleuthera to the lower part. The night before we flew in, the government shut it down because of high winds. You could no longer drive from the airport to our hotel. Instead, we caught a taxi to the bridge, waited a couple hours for the ferry,⁶ then caught another cab on the other side.

Many of the businesses across the island are cash only. On the positive side, the Bahamian dollar is pegged at a 1:1 exchange rate and thus is interchangeable with the US dollar, so all local businesses take either. On the negative, there’s only a handful of bank machines on Eleuthera, and the nearest one to where we were staying was a 40 minute drive away.

We eventually got everything straightened out. It rained all day Wednesday, but the sun came out on Thursday and remained out for the rest of our stay. The hotel manager kindly gave us a ride down to Governor’s Harbour where I was able to get more cash and restock on food. The bridge to North Eleuthera was restored. We were put in touch with a local rental company and rented a car which allowed us to see the island for the last few days we were there.⁷

I took advantage of the car to drive up to Harbour Island. Harbour Island is known as the Nantucket of the Bahamas, which should tell you something about the kind of people who vacation there and what their bank accounts look like.⁸ You can rent a golf cart to putter around for the day, past all the pastel-colored colonial-era architecture to one or another of the pristine pink-sand beaches. In a microcosm of what’s happening all over the Bahamas, Harbour Island’s being colonized by the ultra-wealthy. There are resorts up and down the shore, and exorbitant private properties peeking out behind tastefully cultivated island vegetation.

It’s uncertain how well Eleuthera will hold out against that. The area’s still got a lot of public beaches, and there aren’t any grocery stores catering to tourists.⁹ Lots of the restaurants are locally owned and run. But lots of the restaurants are more like snack bars and only open for breakfast and lunch, I assume because the locals are eating dinner at home; when we went out to dinner we ended up at a resort because it was nice and it was open and I could look up the menu online and verify there was something I could eat there. And while there was a great bakery which opened up in Governor’s Harbour a few years ago, it focused on US-style baked goods, not local stuff.¹⁰

But maybe that’s the only choices they have: cater to tourists yourself or hand that all over to outside corporations to do it for you. The beach at the southern tip of Eleuthera, reportedly the most beautiful beach they had, was recently packaged up and sold off to Disney Cruises. Disney’s turning it into a private resort, opening next year. And yes, they’re making all sorts of noises about working with local artists and celebrating Bahamian culture and respecting the environment. And for all I know it’s all true and they’re entirely sincere about it. And I know in theory the locals voted on it. There was a competing proposal by a local collective that wanted to do everything homegrown, and from what I could find that sounded pretty great too. They lost the vote. Disney could just promise so much more.

I considered driving down to see the beach; Disney’s reportedly keeping at least some parts of it open to the public. But I guess they took over all the roads leading in, so you now have to park far away and walk for a half-hour to get there. So much for that.

After Eleuthera, I flew back to Nassau with my father, and I had a lot of trouble figuring out what to do. I had wanted to visit one of the resorts on the Bahamas for two or three nights, just to see what that experience was like. And if I were alone, I probably would have done that and then found someplace cheaper, maybe on one of the other islands.

But traveling with an elderly parent can be tricky. My father can’t walk particularly far, so I had to find a place which had everything close by. I wasn’t sure my father was going to be up for any tours, so I wanted someplace with a lot of things to do even if I wasn’t around to help. I wanted someplace with a lot of restaurants. And I was starting to worry about moving around too often; I sometimes find the pace of travel can be exhausting, and didn’t want it to be too tiring or confusing.

And the more I thought about it, the more I felt resigned to the best option being Atlantis, the mega-resort on Paradise Island. There are 3,805 rooms over five different hotels, with 14 different pools and 6 beaches, all built around a 154-acre waterpark that’s bigger than Disneyland. It’s a monstrosity, in a number of different senses. And I know I just got done running down the resort Disney is building, but I did feel a little boxed in. So, with a few misgivings, I booked a room for two.

I have an uneasy relationship with being a tourist. I’ve always tried to avoid fancy resorts in favor of places which give you more opportunities to understand what it’s like to live somewhere. And it’s undeniable that Atlantis¹¹ is an example of the kind of industry which often provides jobs without the kind of local control which could genuinely be transformative.¹² Atlantis is owned by Brookfield Corporation, a Canadian multinational which manages over $725 billion worth of assets. I’m guessing most of the profit here ends up in Toronto and doesn’t find its way back.

But, I mean, I booked the room. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of all this ahead of time. I could have stayed on Eleuthera the whole week, where significantly more of my tourist dollars were going directly into the local economy. But I looked at the trade-offs and made my choices. This was the best I could manage.

So how was it? Well, it’s huge. It’s a 10 minute walk to get from the central hotel to any of the outlying beaches. The entrance is stunning and the grounds are beautiful, open aquariums with marine life mixed with paths which take you down through underwater viewing tubes or past windows to watch the sea life.¹³ There’s plenty of snack bars and open-air restaurants scattered around the property, although the heavy if not exactly unexpected emphasis on seafood is going to be disappointing if you’re a vegetarian.

There’s also a casino, if you’re into that, which makes sense since the whole complex is clearly modeled after the kind of hotels you’d find on the Las Vegas Strip.¹⁴ You’ve got the same chain restaurants as you’d find in Vegas,¹⁵ the same Chihuly sculptures and spa treatments and exclusive pools with cabanas.

There is, however, that waterpark, which seems a bit of a stretch for Vegas. And the waterpark is phenomenal. I went multiple times over the week.¹⁶ Mixed in with all the pools you have two different towers with a bunch of water slides hanging off of them. And then there’s the river rapids: a long meandering inner tube river which snakes past a wave machine and up a conveyor belt before dropping you off into four different sections of rapids. It takes about 30 minutes to get from the start to the finish. As I can attest, it’s a fantastic way to start the day.¹⁷

But that does bring me to one of the issues I had with the resort. It’s really family focused. And it wasn’t like I didn’t feel there were quiet places I could go to get away from that, so much as there wasn’t a lot specifically for adults. Yeah, I could have done golf or yoga or tennis. And I guess the “Friends of Bill W” meeting wouldn’t appeal to a lot of kids. But most of the “All Ages” events running seemed more for families over single adults, like Coconut Bowling and Arts & Crafts.¹⁸ And there was a whole additional “Kids Only” section in the schedule. The “Adults Only” events are listed as the Sportsbook — no event, just the Sportsbook — the happy hour at the bar, and a comedy club. I guess there are other resorts around which cater to more adult audiences.¹⁹

A bigger issue, though, is the price. Atlantis is expensive. Really expensive. It’s twice as expensive as the previous “most expensive place I’ve stayed”²⁰ and that place itself was about twice as expensive as my typical upper limit on hotel rooms. And I kind of thought, at those prices, the place would feel very exclusive and luxurious, like the places the rich vacation.²¹ And, you know, it doesn’t. It feels more like Walt Disney World, or at least it’s trying to feel that way, and in their best moments they manage it.

Another way of saying this, I suppose, is that it’s relentlessly middlebrow. It’s not aspiring to grandeur so much as putting in enough work to tick the boxes. I’m not knocking that per se — people are on vacation here, they just want to relax someplace nice with waterslides and a Starbucks — but it’s so expensive I would have hoped for more than having the casino carpet held in place with duct tape.

And that’s kind of the paradox of the place. The Bahamas is gorgeous, with thousands of islands and nearly every one deserving of a Condé Nast cover. The locals are friendly, the weather is typically great, the wildlife is photogenic and largely non-threatening. I kind of feel like that ought to be enough. And sure, I know it’s not; people are gonna want the golf course and the casino and the same chain restaurants they visit back home. But the effect is a jarring kind of dislocation. They opened an Atlantis resort complete with waterpark in Dubai about 15 years ago. And why not? All the place really requires is well-off tourists and water.

I did book a tour with a local company for my final day. They picked me up and for the next eight hours we whizzed around the Exuma Cays by speedboat. We fed native iguanas, snorkeled the bay where Pablo Escobar’s drug plane went down,²² visited a sea aquarium, swam with and petted some very placid sharks, dropped in on the famed swimming pigs of the Bahamas,²³ then got lunch and finally chilled on our own for an hour on the beach. And sure, that was super touristy. But I got to spend a couple hours zipping across the open water and taking in the natural beauty of the islands. That felt pretty authentic to me. At least I got to see it.

I had dreams of flying into Cuba from Nassau and spending a few days there, but it’s not straightforward for US citizens to visit and the difficulties of planning²⁴ made me reluctantly skip it. We flew back to New York, where I dropped my father off at JFK and turned around to catch a flight to Toronto.

It was a bad flight; thunderstorms pushed the departure from 8:40pm to 10:40pm, and even after boarding we sat on the tarmac for two hours waiting for a break in the storm. The flight out was moderately bumpy, punctuated by the plane nearly getting hit by lightning.²⁵ But it’s a notably short flight, and I landed in Toronto far too late but intact.

I’m here for a few days doing very little — a vacation for my vacation — before returning to New York and finally heading back to Europe. I’m going to eat a ton of vegan food, watch some theater, and sleep. A lot. And good for me.

Next: Toronto (YYZ) to New York City (JFK)
Prev: New York City (JFK) to Nassau (NAS)

Footnotes

¹ It’s easy to forget that Havana is no further from Miami as New York is from Boston.

² And then got to wait at the desk while they called down to see if they could get a waver for the weight restriction on the plane, which had been imposed because we were taking off in a thunderstorm. We got it. Everything was fine.

³ From the Greek, ἐλεύθερος, meaning “free.” A group of Puritan settlers intended to establish a democracy beating the United States by more than a century.

⁴ I really, really tried to make sense of the ferry schedule online, but it was incredibly confusing and I literally couldn’t tell when the ferries were running and whether you could book them in advance and whether they were likely to run out of room. So flights it was.

⁵ I have no idea who’s writing for Fodor’s, but I can safely say, hands down, they’re the worst guidebooks I’ve ever had the misfortune to flip through. I reskimmed the one I had after I got here and saw what things were actually like, and it fundamentally fails at the most basic task you need: to explain to someone who’s never been somewhere what to expect and how to plan a visit.

⁶ It’s really just a bunch of locals with small boats carrying people ad hoc from one side of the bridge down to the harbor on the other side at $6 a pop. The government doesn’t even have an official webpage mentioning they closed the bridge, let alone any kind of organized response. The hotel manager found out because they belong to a local Facebook group.

⁷ We rented a Nissan Note for $80/day plus a $150 security deposit, and further paid $50 for a ride to the airport after we returned the car. The rental company drove it to our hotel, handed over the keys, and took a look at my driver’s license. I said I would need to go to a bank machine to get the cash, they said that was fine and just hand the cash to the hotel manager when I had it. And they left.

I hadn’t handed over a single dollar, nor signed a single piece of paper. I did eventually get to a cash machine, and did end up handing over the money the next day. But it was deeply weird.

Another great thing: the Bahamas, being a former British colony, drives on the left side of the road. That means most cars are right-hand drive. My Nissan Note accomplished this by being a Japanese import, and the control system would happily chirp at me in Japanese when I turned the car on and off. I spent the whole time I was driving turning on the windshield wipers whenever I tried to signal a turn.

⁸ One of the restaurants claims its cheeseburgers are the inspiration for Jimmy Buffet’s “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”

⁹ Getting supplies to and from the island is a little rough, and if you need things you go to a locally-owned convenience store, which is basically like doing all your grocery shopping at a New York bodega. Albeit one without a deli counter.

¹⁰ The hotel manager, a local who had only recently moved back after living in Italy for decades, was absolutely thrilled with it. As was I; the bread pudding was great. And it was locally owned and operated, so I can’t slight it there.

¹¹ Like Disney

¹² Over 70% of the GDP of the Bahamas is in tourism and tourism-related industries like construction. To quote a recent report: “Promising sub-sectors include hurricane-sustainable construction materials for new hotel and second home construction; hotel equipment; restaurant equipment; airport and infrastructure development; and goods and services for the marine and yatching industry.”

¹³ The most interesting bit of this is “The Dig,” a set of tunnels themed as if they were an archeological dig of a lost Atlantian civilization, so you’re looking into tanks of corroded pottery or sculptures or submarines currently inhabited by jellyfish or eels. It’s cute and fanciful and manages to even be a little pleasantly creepy.

¹⁴ The Atlantis Royal — the one which ripped off The Little Mermaid aesthetic and was subsequently used to retheme the whole resort — opened in 1998, between the openings of the Bellagio and Mandalay Bay in Vegas.

¹⁵ In this case, there’s a Nobu and an Olives, alongside the more downmarket options like Carmine’s, Starbucks, and Ben and Jerry’s. I tried to get ice cream at the Ben and Jerry’s one night but there was an excruciatingly long line and I was stuck behind a bunch of ten-year-Citizensold basketball fans who were yelling “Let’s Go Celtics!” over and over again with the kind of enthusiasm which comes from never having had to pay taxes.

¹⁶ I mean, it was free for guests, by which I mean there was a mandatory $50 “resort fee” per guest per day tacked on to the hotel rate.

¹⁷ I was especially delighted the time I ended up at the start of the ride near a family of four, where the 8-year-old daughter got pretty far ahead of the rest of them and I got to hear an exasperated father keep calling out “Frenchie! Frenchie! Wait up! Frenchie!”

Frenchie — short for Francesca, it turns out — was having none of it and living their best life far downstream.

¹⁸ Although I’ll admit to being excited about the “Lifesize Candyland” until I thought about it for a bit.

¹⁹ Even discounting the “clothing optional” ones.

²⁰ Not counting the Galactic Starcruiser.

²¹ The second-most expensive hotel I’ve stayed at, Cameron House, is the kind of place rich people book into. And that mostly means rooms which don’t feel prefab, understated elegance, and an emphasis on personalized service.

I’m still trying to sort through the differences. Obviously plenty of rich people go to Atlantis, and there’s probably a whole separate resort-within-the-resort catering to them the same way Vegas casinos do. But Cameron House felt weirdly more exclusive despite being significantly more affordable.

²² It’s still there, although the drugs it was carrying disappeared before the authorities arrived.

²³ Pigs are not indigenous to the Bahamas, and no one’s really sure how they ended up on Big Major Cay in the Exumas. History was made when one of them realized not only that tourists would feed them but they could beat the line by swimming out to meet the boats first.

There’s apparently been a number of knock-off islands located much more conveniently to Nassau, where pigs have been deliberately introduced as a tourist trap. I prefer the serendipity of the original, and the Exumas really are particularly beautiful, even without the pigs.

²⁴ US citizens have limited reasons for getting a legal visa, and while the vague “Support for the Cuban People” is one of them it mandates you don’t do out-and-out touristy stuff like visit beaches or hang out in bars, you can’t spend money in any government-owned hotels or restaurants or businesses, and you’re further required to spend at least eight hours a day doing cultural things. Plus you have to bring all cash and keep receipts for five years and there’s limited WiFi and SIM cards and there’s weird tax interactions with being there and yes, I know they don’t really check all that closely so you’re probably fine if you make a good faith effort but it’s still a lot. And add on the fact that I would have been escorting my father around which adds this whole other set of complications and I just punted it for the time being.

²⁵ I happened to be looking directly out the window when it happened, and I’ve no idea how far off it was. It certainly felt like it was just off the wing. I’m pretty sure it didn’t hit us because there wasn’t any increased turbulence, but what do I know?

In any case, I highly recommend the experience. I mean, if you’re forced to fly through a thunderstorm, which I can’t recommend under any circumstances.