Introduction to Nassau

The "lost city" of Atlantis from our boat

We arrived in Nassau at 5:15 in the evening – just enough time to set the anchors (we have to use two here instead of our customary one due to the current), put the sails away, tidy the boat, and cook dinner to eat while we watched sunset.  After an easy nine and a half hour motor/sail (there was almost NO wind), we were happy to have reached our destination and thankful that there was absolutely nothing noteworthy about the day’s sail.  And, now, we were drinking our cocktails as we watched the sunset to our west and saw the lights of Atlantis beginning to twinkle through the windows to the east of us. 

Before getting to Nassau, we had heard so many awful stories about anchoring here in the harbor: there are refrigerators and washing machines at the bottom of the harbor; lock up EVERYTHING because there is so much crime; if you can avoid it, just skip Nassau all together (yes, seriously, we were told that).  While the motor-boaters flying through and kicking up a wake that makes us need to grab on to our handrails are quite obnoxious, that is really the worst we’ve seen in our day-and-a-half here so far.  (By the way, sail-boaters talk about the anatomical inadequacies of power-boaters the same way those of us who understand there is an environment around us talk about people who drive Hummers and trucks that need a ladder to enter into… “I feel sorry for your wife” as we hold a pinky in the air.)  However, we can see bottom through the water (a step above the harbor in Florida), we’ve not seen anything down there but sea grass, and our boat and dinghy together may be worth what some people’s dinghy alone cost, meaning that we won’t really be scoped out as a hot item to risk being caught on.  Is this harbor where we want to stay for a while?  No – but we’re only here to provision and to check out the most highly populated area of the Bahamas: their capital.

Yesterday morning, after breakfast, dish-doing, and putting everything inside the boat so it could be locked up, we headed to what we thought was the dinghy dock only a few hundred yards from us.  According to what is considered the Caribbean-sailing Bible, “The Gentleman’s Guide to Passages South” by Bruce Van Sant, this is a dinghy dock anyone who is anchoring in the harbor can use while they go into town for the day.  Now, one part of the story which I have left out is that, after being dragged some 40 miles from Frasier’s Hog Cay, we awoke to find that the dinghy was deflated by quite a bit, so much so that we are spending today dragging it on-board and searching for its hole, a task which makes the Captain and I tired just thinking about.  So, imagine if you will: the two of us in a 10-foot dinghy with our two full-sized, non-collapsible bikes between us, me wearing a backpack with our computer, phone, and passports in it, and we are sitting on two inflated tubes that are slowly but surely deflating while we poke around trying to find this dinghy dock talked about in a book that was written more than 10 years ago. 

We found a dock next to a restaurant who wanted $5 for us to park there for the day; not wanting to pay, we went over to where we had seen a few boats parked and slid into one of their docks.  The Captain jumped off the dinghy to ask one of the men in uniform inside the building if this was the right dinghy dock; laughingly, the man told Rob that we had just docked in a military base and that the BASRA dinghy dock we were looking for was the chunk of concrete with nothing to tie or lock the dinghy to right next to where we were.  The Captain gave sincere apologies for having tied up to a base and jumped into the dinghy as quickly as possible; we then promptly drove to the restaurant and paid the $5 for the day (which was applied toward our end-of-the-day drinks when we returned).

Briefly, I want to talk about two other sailboat parties we were privileged to talk to during our Great Quest for the Dinghy Dock: a couple on a catamaran and a man who was headed back to his boat from the dinghy dock.  The first – the couple – we asked where to park our dinghy then began talking with them about their sailing experiences so far due to their asking about ours.  They have only been in the Bahamas a few weeks, yet they are already finished, cutting short the trip they had planned, because they are frustrated and finished dealing with their “adventure”.  They had already spent over $8,000 more on engine problems and other issues with a boat that probably had a six-figure price tag on it when they bought it; and, from the sounds of it, they had not sailed to begin with and had no idea what they were getting into.  Further, when they spoke of Nassau, they were bitter and scared, making it sound as though we needed to turn tail and run whenever we saw a group of people walking toward us because stores have bars across their windows.  On top of this, they warned us of how expensive the food is here and how none of it was worth it, not the Hard Rock Café or Senor Frogs!  Can you imagine?!?!  However, they were the ones to tell us that if we paid the $5 to dock at the restaurant, we could apply it to a drink at the bar, so that was some good information.

The man who was returning to his boat from getting ice at the restaurant let us know where a good grocery store was, gave us some friendly advice on what to check out, and made sure to tell us about the best bakery he had found in the area.  The man seemed at ease with his surroundings and nonplused about waiting out the time he had to be in Nassau waiting for a visa to the States in an exploratory manner.  He was so pleasant, the Captain and I agreed later, that we were happy to have talked with him after talking to the couple; he put us in a good place for entering the largest city in the Bahamas.

We jumped on our bikes (something I had been against, preferring to walk in “the big city” but being down-voted by the Captain who refused to walk with bikes on the boat) and headed toward “downtown” Nassau, the area of pastel-colored buildings housing over-priced restaurants and duty-free emeralds for the cruise ship passengers.  We were – of course! – riding the wrong direction on a one-way street, meaning that we had to ride the sidewalk, a perpetual size-changing beast that had large semi-covered manholes in the middle, people walking toward us, and the occasional need to ride in the gutter with cars coming at us.  Needless to say, this was not my favorite part of the day; surprisingly, though, it was not the worst part of the day!  The bikes were locked up as soon as we were close enough to walk around town, making this novice bike-rider and avid photo-taker very happy!

As we had been riding into town, we saw a long line of uniformed protestors walking the same direction we were riding; by the time the bikes were locked up, they had reached the downtown area and were protesting in Rawson Square facing the Parliament Square and Supreme Court.  We now had the chance to read their signs and inquire from people around us as to the nature of the protesting; throughout the day, we got some sense of what is happening through watching the news, talking with locals, and talking with other cruisers who have been here a while.  This is an election year and the election date has recently been announced as May 7^th; the current Prime Minister is the leader of the government party which encourages tourism while the other political party would like to see the majority of goods kept for the Bahamian people (not a great explanation and one I’m hoping to clarify).  The signs people were carrying said such things as: “We are law enforcement officers, not criminals”, “We don’t want to make a killing, just a fair living”, “Health insurance, decent wage, and fair work hours”, “U.S. Government should be concerned: Deported criminals using Bahamas as transit point to Florida”.  As far as we could glean, those protesting were Customs and Immigration employees who are unhappy with their wages and the amount of working hours they have (remember our simple hour getting done with C&I on a Sunday afternoon?).

After watching the activities for a while, we decided to walk to the straw market, claimed as the “world’s largest” by Lonely Planet; I have to admit, it’s large, but I’m not sure the particular writer for the Nassau Lonely Planet guide has been to all that many straw markets.  It was a beautiful display of color with wood carvings, toys, dolls, trinkets, tote bags, beach towels, shot glasses, and every other imaginable piece of tourist collectable in every bright color of the rainbow from red to violet.  The structure was in the general layout of other markets I have been to in Jamaica with row after row of small stalls facing each other, a woman sitting just in front of every stall that is full of almost the exact same products as the stall on either side and directly across from it.  I have never been a fan of these market places due to similarity of all the products and the rat-in-a-maze layout of the market; however, I realize that these are some of the largest forms of commerce in countries that rely on tourism for their GDP such as the Bahamas.  Needless to say, the Captain and I left the market soon after entering it; had we been there on a day when there weren’t two cruise ships within walking distance, maybe we would have strolled through a few of the aisles (by the way, there are four ships today).

Water Tower and Fort Fincastle

After leaving the market, Rob and I decided to just walk and see what we saw.  This took us up the hill by the Governor General’s House, where we sat on the Gregory Arch to look at our map and figure out where we had just walked and a general direction to keep going in.  As we strolled, we saw the largest post office either of us remembers seeing (the main office for all of the Bahamas), the Pubic Health Office, the Police Headquarters, and the Princess Margaret’s Hospital.  By luck, we found Fort Fincastle and learned that we had just climbed to the highest point on this island, saw the water tower up close (which – of course – makes me sing the theme song from “Animaniacs”!), and walked down the dizzying Queen’s Staircase built into what looks to be a manmade gorge through the coral the island is made from. 

At the bottom of this staircase, we realized it was very past time to eat, so we stopped and asked a young man wearing an apron where he thought the best true Bahamian food for a decent price was to be found.  Following his directions, we found a small restaurant that seemed very happy – and a little surprised – to have tourists coming in, but we walked out with stomachs fuller than they needed to be and mouths excited about all the wonderful food we had just taken in.  Oh, and all of our food cost about the same as one entrée in a touristy restaurant, making us happy to find that savings.

After collecting our bikes, the Captain and I rode to the grocery store, another harrowing experience on the main street even though we were going the correct direction; this time, I had to get off my bike and calm down after a dump truck passed me with about two inches of air between us.  You lifetime riders may be able to compose yourselves fairly quickly when this happens, but it freaked me out enough to make me take a moment on the sidewalk to calm down.  This was when two very strong decisions were made: 1) We were riding the sidewalk as much as possible until we got to the grocery store.  2) We are NOT riding bikes in Nassau again.  Ever.  Period.  Serioulsy.

The most noteworthy aspect of the grocery store was the fact that it was just like a store in the States except everything was more expensive, a fact of island-life we had to get used to while living in Marathon.  I am really, really looking forward to being in countries that are able to grow their own fresh fruits and vegetables as opposed to these small infertile islands which must import everything from the U.S.  It is shocking to see the prices of some items versus others, though, like the fact that canned peas were the same price we are generally used to at about $1/can, but green beans were twice what we are used to at $2/can.

At the end of the day, the Captain and I were tired, hot, and aggravated by the prospect of returning to a dinghy in desperate need of being blown back up with the foot pump, something the Captain spent almost an hour doing in the morning.  So, we stopped and had a few drinks in the bar where the dinghy was tied up; better than libraries, these are always the best places of local and tourist information.  The couple we met were on the boat next to us and told us the secrets of cheap fun around Nassau (including the aquarium at Atlantis) and New Providence (including the bus that takes us to the other side of the island), good beaches to go to, and wonderful information about a secure harbor on the next island we are headed for: Eleuthera.

It’s funny because, at the end of last night, neither Rob nor I was in a very good mood: we were tired and overly frustrated because we were not looking forward to dealing with a leaking dinghy.  But, here at the end of the next day, after having written it all up and fixing said dinghy leak with the least amount of hassle we could have imagined, yesterday was a very fruitful day with many lessons learned and adventures had.  While I was wishing we had done it differently yesterday, I know today that I wouldn’t have changed a thing!