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Seven hundred islands and cays in 15 main groups, scattered to the south-east of Florida, capital Nassau on New Providence, Grand Bahama and ‘Out Islands’, each with different character, English speaking. Nassau easily accessed from US cities (mainly Miami), some access from Europe. Grand Bahama, Bimini, Abaco, Exuma, Eleuthera direct access from Florida, others via Nassau. Extensive tourism in all prices and categories, from package hotel to villas on private islands and boat-based. Excellent beaches and superb sea throughout, other activities depending on island - sailing, scuba, deep sea fishing, bone-fishing, some small and pretty towns on the Out Islands, extensive cruise ship traffic (main centres, even private islands) shopping, casinos.
Nassau, Cable Beach and Paradise Island (beach-based tourism, private villas, cruise ships, shopping and casinos), Grand Bahama (casinos, cruise ships), Abaco (scuba, sailing, Hope Town), Bimini (deep sea fishing), Berry Islands (cruise ship stop), Andros (scuba), Eleuthera (Harbour Island), Exumas (sailing, bone-fishing), Cat Island, San Salvador, Rum Cay, Long Island, Ragged Islands, Crooked Island, Acklins, Mayaguana, Inagua (scuba, liveaboard, excellent birdlife).
For more information about the Bahamas, please link via the headings above. | | |
Below is an article about hotels in the Out Islands in the Bahamas written by James Henderson. The Bahamas is quite well known for its shark diving. Farther down the page you will find a story about scuba diving with sharks.
There are some places in the Caribbean that just make you feel like taking off your shoes. For some reason it seems to happen to me more than anywhere else in the Bahamas. (Before I slip on a geographical banana skin I’d better say that the Bahamas are not in the Caribbean strictly speaking. But I have this canny idea that people go there for much the same reasons as they do to the Caribbean, so in this at least they can be talked of in the same breath.)
That said, the Bahamas are quite different, particularly in that they probably have more sand than all the other islands put together. Based in the archipelago’s limestone rock, the sand is created by wave erosion and fish (yes, fish actually create sand by eating the reef and spitting out granules). It is superb, pristine and blinding white and it stretches for miles and miles and miles. Which is presumably why I feel like taking off my shoes all the time.
Cocodimama, on Eleuthera, sits on a bay 1 ½ miles long. It was built by Enrico and Federica Turrisi Grifeo, a peripatetic Italian couple. (They have been economists, tour operators and marketing managers around the world but have settled here, built and become hoteliers for a while.) Cocodimama means ‘mother’s boy’ in Italian and although you can see the love invested in it, the atmosphere is hipper than the fussy indulgence that the name might imply (and Federica is no big mamma come to that).
The twelve room resort has a stylish simplicity. The three brightly coloured cottages have traditional Bahamian touches in the clapboard and criss-cross balustrades, but inside, the rooms have a sleeker and more international tropical air (teak furniture, Italian tiles). The main house has a huge deck with hefty wooden chairs and tables under umbrellas. If you’re apt to panic at the sight of too many liveried waiters beetling around (elsewhere in the Bahamas they like to offer snap-finger service. Well, sort of…) then this place is fantastically relaxing and low key.
The bay is supreme. It is backed with casuarina pines which in the wind have a small, soporific roar (a bit like an aircraft cabin) and the sea is shallow for hundreds of yards. Once, as we sat on the deck in the blinding sunshine, a ray passed lazily within two yards of the water’s edge, gliding in four inches of inches of water.
Another lovely beach to walk is Cape Santa Maria, which stretches for miles in a graceful curve on Long Island, another ribbon-thin island (fifty-seven miles by two or three) further south in the Bahamian chain. Although the Cape Santa Maria Beach Resort has only recently become known, it has actually been there for nearly forty years. It is owned by the Oak Bay Marine Group (which owns a number of fishing resorts along the coast of British Columbia in Canada), and was mainly used as a fisherman’s hide-away. In the last decade or so they have built some more cottages and pumped up the marketing.
There are now 30 bright and breezy rooms in single-storey cottages, each with a screened porch looking out to the magnificent sea over a boardwalk. This got so hot at one stage that I had to put my shoes back on, but otherwise the atmosphere is emphatically barefoot, just a tiny bit more upbeat than Cocodimama, perhaps more in keeping with the mainly North American clientele. But it is by no means overwhelmed with staff either. Here the staff are all husbands, wives, sisters and aunts from the local area in northern Long Island, and they are resolutely charming.
The bay is named after Columbus’s flagship (he is supposed to have put in here after touching the New World for the first time in nearby San Salvador). When the light is right, translucent shallows give onto jade and then a surreal shade of aquamarine. It’s hard to believe that anything could be so blue. It might be blue squared, if the concept could exist.
While most Bahamian beaches are made of pristine sand, some are more claylike than sandy. These areas are undergoing the same process of sedimentation as Dorset 135 million years ago. Then dinosaurs left footprints in stone around Swanage. Perhaps in a few million years a few of my aimless paces will bring enlightenment to a geologist – ‘ah, tourist man’.
Cocodimama, Governor’s Harbour, Eleuthera +1 242 332 3150, info@cocodimama, www.cocodimama.com, rooms are $190 in winter season
Cape Santa Maria Beach Resort +1 242 357 1006, US 1800 663 7090, www.capesantamaria.com. Rooms are $285 in the winter season.
Elsewhere in the Bahamas
Another hotel that has existed for a few years but which has recently raised its profile is Kamalame Cay, which is situated on its own private (eponymous) cay in Andros. Kamalame (pronunciation close to calamity, though this would be to underestimate it) has 24 cottages built with coral stone and natural wood. It is very low-key, so much so that dinner is held at communal tables, unless of course you want to arrange a romantic dinner for two tucked away in a private corner.
If you have to overnight in Nassau both Compass Point and the Ocean Club are in good fettle but don’t forget Graycliff, with its unexpected but delightful setting in a lovely old colonial house on the cliffs right in the city of Nassau. It is going into its second season since its major refit but there are now 20 rooms and suites, including seven new junior suites in the Cigar Factory, which also contains their Humidor Restaurant. The Humidor is more contemporary in design and cuisine than the original Graycliff, but cigars are rolled for you personally by Avelino Lara, who used to roll cohibas for Fidel Castro.
Shark Diving in the Bahamas
A dorsal fin carousing in the ocean, or at a drinks party for that matter, would generally be something to make your skin creep. But see a shark underwater and you realise how these animals have extraordinary grace and fitness to their environment. Real sharks (rather than the party animal) ride on three fins, set in perfect symmetry at 120 degrees to one another. I noticed this, with wide-eyed fascination, as a Caribbean Reef Shark swam straight at me.
After years of denial that sharks were a problem in their waters, the Bahamas have managed to turn sharks into something of a tourist attraction in recent years. About ten dive operators around the islands offer specific shark dives. It’s hard to be an apologist about an animal that is mostly mouth, particularly when their teeth are on a conveyor belt - new ones constantly roll out as others break off. Also sharks are known to be cannibalistic in the womb. But after years of such resolutely bad press, perhaps they are due a rehabilitation.
My dive was with Unexso in Grand Bahama. We descended fifty feet to a sandy bottom and, shepherded by armed guards we were lined up, kneeling, arms tucked in to our stomachs (we were told not to let our hands stray from our bodies), with our backs to an old hyperbaric chamber. It felt as though we were all about to be beheaded in one swoop.
Soon the feeder, chain-mailed and lumbering like a zombi, loomed into view. The sharks knew what was up already. About ten Caribbean Reef sharks, between six and nine feet long, cruised in and circled him waiting for the food, which he kept in a tube with split rubber ends. Gradually more sharks arrived. Constantly moving, some loitered on the edge, while others dived right in there, nuzzling the feeder in the chest. He grabbed them and held them to him. It all seemed quite tender really.
At Walker’s Cay in the Abaco Islands you receive a bit more of an educational experience to go with your dive. It turns out that the womb sac has hundreds of eggs, most of which don’t develop, providing a ready source of food for those that do. So it seems that sharks are animals, not monsters after all. And intelligent ones too by the sound of things. It was shown here that sharks have long term memory. One shark remembered after six months which coloured button to nose in order to get food. And it was shown that they can communicate. Spookily, other sharks could do the same.
At Walker’s Cay divers descend first, and then a frozen ‘chumsicle’ (think fish popsicle made in a bucket) is tethered to the bottom. A hundred Caribbean Reef, Blacktip and Nurse sharks cruise in. You are asked not to go into the ‘zone of competition’, within fifteen feet of the food, but you are free to swim among them elsewhere, even touching them if you are brave enough. They seem not to mind. The reason that you must be wary about letting your hand stray from your body is not that it’s a suddenly available meal to any indiscriminate eater within fifty metres, but that it looks and moves like a fish. (The whiter your hand the more like a fish it is to a shark – a good reason for getting a tan if there ever was one.) There hasn’t been an attack in thousands of dives.
Back at my dive, the feeder was taking the fish sparingly out of the tube, playing with the sharks swirling around him. Suddenly it all threatened to go wrong as one of the sharks knocked the feeder’s mask. Quickly he put the tube down under his foot and concentrated on refilling his mask with air. A Southern Stingray shot in and, using its impressive suction power, hoovered at the tube before darting away. For a moment the feeder was rapidly disappearing in a plug-hole of swirling rubbery grey flesh, but he managed to restore calm. It was then that the shark turned off the main pack and headed for me…
It moved with the laziest insinuations of its body, hovering like a space ship. It was mind-bogglingly graceful. And then, as it continued to swim at me, increasingly alarming. In slow motion, eight foot of shark passed within a couple of inches my head: snout…, diabolic, gummy smile…, pectoral fins…, belly… and then, to my relief, a slowly switching tail. Skin can creep underwater as well. |
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