Posted by: Editor on Oct 07, 2006 – 12:32 PM
exoticlocations  Big money and bigger ideas have propelled this island-nation’s return to vogue. Adam Sachs samples the Bahamas’ new high style, and charts a course to its enduring charms…

I’d been all over the Bahamas, but I hadn’t been hugged until I got to Nettie Symonette’s bonefishing lodge on the island of Abaco.

My taxi from the airport slowed to a stop on an empty stretch of road on an empty-feeling island under a bright, barren sky. The driver pointed toward some jungly bush that he thought hid a path. In the hot sun, I walked through a sea grape thicket to a weather-beaten wooden gate, opened it, and found Nettie, who seemed to be expecting me.

“You’re Adam,” she declared. “I was sure you were going to be an old man!” I smiled youthfully and put my bag down, not entirely sure what kind of place I’d wandered into: The room that served as the lobby was half-outdoors and surrounded by green, a ground-floor tree house. Nettie wrapped her powerful arms around me. And squeezed. This was a fine welcome—probably not the kind they teach you in hotel school, but then her place is justly named Nettie’s Different of Abaco. With its rambling wooden structures set in a wild marsh overrun with ducks and flamingos and good cheer, this is no ordinary beach resort. And the Bahamas, it occurred to me for the hundredth happy time in several days, is a different kind of island getaway.

I know what some of you are thinking. The Bahamas? Pink flamingo postcards. Bodies crowded on beaches like french fries under a heat lamp. The canned merriment of the all-inclusive resort. And who wouldn’t worry when, upon clearing customs at Nassau International Airport, he’s handed a rum-spiked Bahama Mama cocktail before he even makes it to baggage claim. But there’s more to this country than conch fritters and casino towers the color of Pepto-Bismol. Walk your Bahama Mama across the airport to the domestic departures wing. Look up at the wall-sized map near the gate (note the singular). See the number and variety of landforms and the ample blue spaces between. Short on people, this scattered island cosmos is spread across a hundred thousand square miles of ocean—an area twice the size of England. The Bahamas is many places. Pick one.

Leaving Nassau for one of the Out Islands, the flight is always the same. The ride is spent as on a glass-bottom boat, staring down in wonder. All the way to the horizon are islands too small to carry that appellation, in water a hundred different hues. The Spaniards who arrived here five hundred years ago named this place baja mar for its shallow waters. They didn’t have the perspective offered by a low-flying Bahamasair turboprop. Out the smudged window, the view is unearthly: nubbly atolls, dark, bottomless wells on the ocean floor, sandbars afloat in still pools of jade, a coral limestone moonscape cut through with blue lava. The trip doesn’t take long. The plane—which sounds like a lawn mower caught on something—settles on a sun-scorched airstrip. Everyone else getting off knows everyone getting on.

This is how I’d arrived at Abaco’s Marsh Harbour, a dusty little town that is, incredibly, the country’s third largest. About four thousand people inhabit the place, many of them Conchy Joes (as white Bahamians are sometimes called). There was just one taxi driver at the airport. As he drove me south toward Nettie’s, at Casuarina Point, I asked what the fare would be. “Sixty-five dollars,” he answered flatly. We drove on for a while in silence.

“Pretty expensive,” I—king of the conversationalists—said.

“This is the only road,” he explained. “The farthest settlement down this way is fifty-four miles from Marsh Harbour. Gasoline costs $3.52 a gallon. Those over there are pine trees. I had to leave my dentures at the dentist’s office this morning in town. I’ll pick them up after I drop you off.” He smiled, all gums.

I nodded. Both of us seemed satisfied by his speech, and together we sped down the endless pine-lined highway, squinting into the sunshine and saying nothing.

I’d been in the Bahamas for about two weeks and had settled into the unsyncopated rhythm of island life. Ask too many questions and you’ll miss the scenery as it passes by. On our right was Abaco National Park, primary home of the endangered Bahama parrot—a bird that shuns the trees to nest belowground in rock cavities. To the left we found a turnoff, and I was deposited at Nettie’s. Built on some three hundred acres, Nettie’s includes a nice patch of white-sand beach, pink wooden cabins, a pool, spartan meeting rooms (although it’s hard to imagine even thinking business here), a wooden chapel no bigger than an upturned canoe, a lake stocked with tilapia and skittish flamingos, a fisherman’s lodge, free-roaming pigs and peacocks, and the ruins of a five-hundred-year-old Lucayan village.

Nettie Symonette is seventy years old, though you would never believe it to look at her. She is funny and elegant, and, thanks to a diet built on the preserving powers of Guinness stout, she is going to live forever. Her voice reminds me of Julia Child’s, a warbling poetry with a quiet power behind it. At the main lodge, the unfinished walls and rafters are signed and doodled on by satisfied fishermen—architecture as guest book. Nettie served me her secret-recipe lemonade, which I suspect she spikes with some of the roots she says she uses to make healing teas. Standing by the bar, she pulled the top off a bottle of Guinness and told me how she found herself here.

Nettie grew up on Eleuthera, another Out Island, and worked in hotels there and in Nassau. She planned to open a place like Different on Eleuthera, but one night she was directed elsewhere. “A voice in my head declared, ‘Abaco!’ ” she said. “I didn’t question it. I just came down and built this place myself. This was a dump when I got here, a swamp, and I built it up as I wanted it. I love this land. I love it because this is a place where you can come and be yourself.”

When Hurricane Floyd hit in ’99, her simple wood-framed buildings somehow remained standing, though around her, entire villages disappeared. She replanted what was lost, raised money to help her neighbors rebuild, and expanded Different.

Nettie’s place reminded me, in a weird way, of another exotic Bahamian resort—Atlantis, the stately pleasure dome built by South African billionaire Sol Kerzner on Paradise Island ten years ago. He stocked it with exotic fish and created a moneymaking tourist draw the likes of which the Bahamas had never seen before.

Atlantis has 2,300 rooms, waterslides, caged sharks, and a casino; at Nettie’s, the attraction is natural splendor. The first time I was on Paradise Island, I met Lee Iacocca and talked to him about the waterslides. At Nettie’s, I met a man who introduced himself as a voodoo practitioner and who told me a story about how his great-grandmother saved the Bahamas from Blackbeard by baking him a coconut pie. The similarities between these two places are not immediately obvious. But Nettie’s and Sol’s are both the product of an individual’s single-minded determination. They reflect the doggedness and dream life of their creators. And each, in its way, tells the story of the changing landscape of the Bahamas, islands that can’t be summed up in a single postcard image.

There’s a headline from a march 1861 edition of the New York Times that reads, “Wintering in Nassau—Immense Influx of Americans—Some Particulars of Its Climate, Accommodations and Amusements.” The story begins, “The unsettled condition of affairs in the Southern States has turned the tide of American Winter travel from the Florida peninsula to the Bahamas.”

These days, we too find conditions unsettled. And the tide of travel has turned again toward the Bahamas—which, let’s face it, hasn’t been considered all that chic since around the time the Duke of Windsor was dispatched here to act as governor during World War II, and set up house with his fashionable wife, Wallace. To be sure, the country’s accommodations and amusements have been upgraded since the Times correspondent summarized Nassau’s diversions with the report that “there is a billiard table in town, but its legs are unsteady.” Bucolic Harbour Island has become hip. The Four Seasons just opened a luxury outpost on Great Exuma. Atlantis continues to rise. Sol Kerzner plans to build more rooms and facilities there. New villas are under construction on the groomed grounds of the Ocean Club, his posher, grown-up resort farther out Paradise Island Drive. And Nettie Symonette just added a beachside hammock for two.

“What’s your story about? How the British have returned to muck things up?” quipped David Flint Wood, standing in his study at Hibiscus Hill, the grand plantation-style house on Harbour Island that he shares with his partner, former Ralph Lauren model India Hicks, and their three sons. “We used to run this place, you know,” he informed me in classic English deadpan. India’s maternal grandfather, Lord Mountbatten, used to run the rather larger colonial outpost she is named for. Her father was the famous British designer David Hicks. She and Flint Wood are part of the recent influx of money and glamour to this clubby island just off the northeast coast of Eleuthera.

Far from mucking it up, they’ve put their funds and design talent into projects like the reconstruction of the chic The Landing hotel. They’ve also made something of a cottage industry of their own admirable escape from urban existence, collaborating on a design book called Island Life: Inspirational Interiors, renting their guesthouse to the public, and hiring out Hibiscus Hill for photo shoots like the one that was in progress on the day I stopped by. A small crew was photographing a very pink wall to be part of an advertisement for a Ralph Lauren line of aspirational paints called Island Brights.

The main topic of conversation on Harbour Island was the question of how to preserve life here as it is, or as it was until recently. Tourism fuels the Bahamian economy, but too much of a good thing—too much benign interest or even good press—might run the place into the ground. Briland, as the locals call it, is like Manhattan in a way: an island community where everyone but the newest residents agree that it used to be better back when. The other topic of communal interest was the whereabouts of Mick Jagger. It was the week before he was to be knighted, and he was on the island somewhere. Wherever I wandered, His Mickness had just been sighted or was due to arrive shortly.

Harbour Island is small—about two square miles of narrow lanes, squat pink buildings adorned with quoins, stately wooden homes behind picket fences, and a famous pink-sand beach. (How pink the sand is depends on the time of day you view it and how desperately you want it to be pink.) There is not much to do besides drive your rented golf cart around and wave back at the people who are waving hello to you. Everyone waves to everyone. For someone who lives in a big city and cannot remember names, this is like a corrective penance.

Brilander fishermen have long shared their island with the likes of Diane von Furstenberg and duty-free billionaire Robert Miller. Elle Macpherson has a house here. Photo crews arrive and take pretty pictures on the beach. The rich and famous come and drive their golf carts around the village, waving to everyone. A fine balance is struck between a sense of being nowhere and one of being in exactly the right place, between escaping civilization and still being able to order up a bottle of ’89 Château Margaux from the excellent restaurant at The Landing.

For more than forty years, the poshest digs on the island were the Pink Sands, named for its famous beach and reopened in 1995 by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell. Its cottages, with nods to Moroccan and Indian design, and its beachside Blue Bar remain popular spots. The newest arrivals on the island are Don Purdy and J. Wallace Tutt III. A builder from Miami, Wallace was the man behind Gianni Versace’s South Beach palazzo. He and Don imported a bit of that glitz to the Rock House, their nine-room hotel that opened last year on the bay side of town, just up the hill from The Landing. In the main room, Modigliani sketches hang above an overstuffed couch. Thatched-roof cabanas surround the pool. By Harbour Island standards, the Rock House is remarkably modern, which is to say there are televisions and working telephones in the guest rooms. It’s also comfortable. Even after I checked out, I found myself drifting back to have lunch at the outdoor grill, to rest by the pool, and to quietly wait for Mick Jagger to show. “Are you really sure that this is what you want to do with your life, Adam?” The voice belonged to Pip Simmons, proprietress of the Oceanview Club, a small, lovely house with rooms of sun-bleached grandeur, unbeatable ocean access, and all the life advice you care to take. “Travel writer?” she said, in the same tone you might employ to deliver the words puppy assassin. She offered me a glass of pastis and tried to save my soul. A bulbous-headed statue of Louis Armstrong stood grinning on the bar. Pip is from Canada but has been here running her little inn forever. She wore a bandanna on her head and a housedress; the guests wandered wherever they liked, taking books from the shelves, napping on daybeds, watching Portia at work in the kitchen. The Oceanview Club has a kind of Grey Gardens feel to it, but I like it and am wistful about it since I’ll probably never be allowed to return.

“Promise me you won’t write about me,” she said. I laughed noncommittally, and the two of us walked next door to Sip Sip, a popular lunch spot that was being used that night for a charity event. Wine and crackers were being served to adults, as kids were anxiously preparing poetry readings and dance routines. The show, put on by a nonprofit literacy program, was turning out to be the social event of the season. People whispered that Mick Jagger was on his way, though nobody saw him that night. Despite Pip’s view of the island (and my motives), there’s a sense of community that made me want to get involved—to relocate immediately to a cottage here and begin a new life painted in Island Brights.

I finally did see Mick Jagger. It was my last day on the island. He was having lunch with his implausibly tall Brazilian girlfriend and their young son at the Rock House. Wallace and Don had set up a private table for them in one of the thatched cabanas, but they’d decided to eat in the normal dining room. Nobody paid them any attention.

On paradise island, the view from my window resembles a Saul Steinberg perspective drawing: in the foreground, the scrubbed green lawn of the Ocean Club and then, in receding order, a strip of white sand, buzzing Jet Skis, drifting Para-Sails, a line of empty yachts, and beyond that, Africa. It was on this slice of sand off Nassau that Huntington Hartford II, heir to the A & P supermarket fortune, built his island paradise complete with a twelfth-century Augustinian cloister and frolicking babes in bikinis. Indians and industrialists, rumrunners, royals, and celebrities—all have been taken with the former Hog Island. The feeling that you could stay put here forever (assuming you can afford nine hundred dollars a night multiplied by forever) is reinforced by the knowledge that you’re better off not leaving the manicured grounds of the resort. Nassau just does not invite walking around, and I’d left my golf cart on Harbour Island. I had one nauseating meal at the Ocean Club’s Dune restaurant. (Attention, chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten: Some rogue, betoqued madman has hijacked your kitchen and is coating breast of duck with molten chunks of Jordan almonds. Thought you’d like to know. Sincerely, a worried fan.) Otherwise, though, the Ocean Club is as fine as a resort can be. But even a perfect resort can only be an approximation of the truly private preserve, which I think is what we all really want when we come to the islands—the faraway, untouchable, “hold all my calls but please stock the bar and lay some fresh Frette down on my lounge chair by the toe-tickling tide” kind of place. Is that too much to ask?

To get a taste of private-island life, I called Mark Roberts, manager of Little Whale Cay, a ninety-three-acre retreat for up to thirteen guests that can be rented for about fifty thousand dollars a week. He agreed to fly me out to the little island off the coast of Nassau to take a look. He also agreed to my demand that we have a real Bahamian breakfast on the way.

As a tourist, it’s hard to find real local food. There’s a lot of conch, but—I will say this here and forever earn the scorn of a nation—conch is a dull, chewy thing. I know that the conch is revered here. On leaving the grounds of Nassau International Airport, I am duly impressed by the giant shell statue in all its conchiform glory. When, driving closer to town, I see a billboard reading, “First the conch, then the love… not without a glove,” I respect its central role in Bahamian culture. But it’s lousy on a plate.

A Bahamian breakfast, if you can find one, is a hot, heavy, soul-stabilizing affair. Mark sprang me from the luxury confines of Paradise Island and delivered me to a Mr. T’s Lounge on Mackey Street, where we had johnnycakes and souse (a kind of watery stew). Thus fortified, we flew over to Little Whale Cay. There was no wind that day, not a cloud. Seeing the staff waiting for us, ready to help shake the jet lag of a twelve-minute flight with cold drinks and lobster, helped me focus my life’s goals into two beautiful words: island ownership.

Fun though it would be, running a small island as if it were your own tiny country would surely lead to some form of madness. For inspiration and warning, one needn’t look farther than the next green hump over, Big Whale Cay. In the 1930s, these eight hundred acres or so were the domain of Marion “Joe” Carstairs, the cross-dressing, champion speedboat-racing Standard Oil heiress. Marlene Dietrich and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were among her guests, along with numerous female lovers and a small stuffed toy man named Lord Tod Wadley, whom she kept on her shoulder and dressed in mini Savile Row suits. Anyone considering relocating from reality to an island kingdom of his own making would do well to read Kate Summerscale’s biography of Carstairs, The Queen of Whale Cay.

Little Whale Cay has the feel of a small village built in the middle of the sea just for your pleasure. Guests stay in three airy houses with ocean views, and staff live in colorful little bungalows near the airstrip. There’s a pretty church (used as a school under a previous owner) and a little store selling crafts and sunscreen. Having the run of an island for an afternoon but no royal guests or minions to do our bidding, Mark and I satisfied ourselves with playing some tennis in the high afternoon sun and running down a few peacocks. We drank Kalik beer, and I dreaded the return of the two-engine plane that would shuttle us back to Nassau.

There are some very good places in the Bahamas to feel lost and pampered at the same time. Fortunately, not all of them are on private islands. Kamalame Cay, near Andros Town, is a fine example. Andros is the biggest island in the Bahamas, though it is remarkably underpopulated and unexplored. Like the Bahamas itself, it isn’t really one place but a thousand little landmasses. You can do some of the best snorkeling, nature walks, and fishing in and around its many cays and sounds and bights. You can also make your way to Kamalame Cay and do almost nothing at all.

Kamalame Cay lies across a shallow bay from Staniard Creek, on the eastern end of North Andros. Brian Hew—a laconic and funny Jamaican who owns the island with his wife, Jennifer—has expertly planted its ninety-six acres so that every sandy path is shaded by plush sea grape, casuarina, and palms. The rooms have good wood furniture and books and slowly turning fans. There is a sense of extreme calm to the place—if calm can be extreme. Sitting in my cottage, I could see nothing out the door or windows but overgrown green and sky. The sound of my own feet on sand was the only thing I could hear. A curly-tailed little lizard ran by. A pelican flew overhead on its morning commute to sit on a post at the dock all day. And when I got back to my room, I found that someone had sneaked in and filled a mason jar with warm chocolate-chip cookies. It’s perfect.

Seeing that I was loath to leave Kamalame and figuring correctly that I had to be bribed to go, Brian offered to run me down to Tiamo, a South Andros ecolodge, in his boat. The only approach is by water. Though barely twenty miles from Nassau, I felt as if I’d traveled to the fringe of civilization. As I arrived, I half-expected to see a grizzled castaway waving from the shore and floating messages in bottles. What I found instead was a team of studious, well-informed young guides who were very keen to talk to me about how their toilets worked.

Tiamo is designed to respect and sustain the environment. The entire resort operates on solar power. The elevated, screened cabins are built to be naturally cool, and the staff may ask you to take some trash home with you. They don’t serve conch for reasons that they say are environmental (but I suspect are really humanitarian). There’s a feeling here of being at an exotic summer camp. The counselors may wish to correct your wasteful ways, but they’re not against having fun. Tiamo sits at the edge of the third-largest barrier reef in the world. Dipping your masked head in the water is like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. It’s amazing, and you can’t believe it took you so long to get here.

Rolling into Freeport’s little pink petit four of an airport, I noticed a silver-bellied Boeing 707 at the gate. It was the only large jet around. Odder still, it had Qantas markings. It seemed unlikely that there would be sufficient demand for direct service between Sydney and Grand Bahama Island, but there it was parked, shiny and huge.

Sitting at the island’s remote western tip is Old Bahama Bay, a yacht club, marina, and resort whose pretty grounds and small-island charm are happily out of step with the rest of Grand Bahama. With about fifty rooms along the beach, many of them just remodeled and more to come, it has a relaxed, lived-in quality even as it feels like a work in progress.

Old Bahama Bay is growing but taking pains to keep up the level of service and the surroundings that brought people here in the first place. Private houses are going up, and plans call for a fishing lodge. Acres of casuarina and banyan trees surround the development, and if you walk past the villas in progress, you come across a vast clearing and an 8,100-foot runway, the pride of a previous owner, battling the weeds.

Later that night, at dinner, I met the owner of the 707 with the mysterious flying kangaroo. John Travolta had flown in with some friends. He was dining with a large party, although his plane—which he personally pilots—surely could have held more. I mentioned that the work on the resort seemed to be coming along nicely. “As a part owner, I have to agree,” he said, beaming. Travolta owns two of Old Bahama Bay’s hotel buildings and is supposedly buying more. I heard that he had the reopening of the old jumbo-friendly airstrip written into his contract.

The private planes lined up at George Town’s one-shack airport on Great Exuma are smaller than Travolta’s, but they’re causing a big stir. The owners of these Gulfstreams and Lears have come for the new Four Seasons at Emerald Bay and its Greg Norman-designed golf course. This is the first time the luxury chain has opened a property in the Bahamas. That it chose not Freeport or Nassau but the Exumas—until now a sleepy string of islands on the Tropic of Cancer—is seen by many as a great boost for the Out Islands and a vote of confidence in the Bahamas as a whole.

The Emerald Bay development has been in the works for years. Now it is here, and the island feels as if it’s in the throes of expansion. Tens of millions of dollars’ worth of villa lots have sold around the hotel, and something on the order of twenty percent of the population of the Exumas are working for Emerald Bay. Like the special salt-air-thriving paspalum grass planted on the Greg Norman course, the hotel is a kind of experiment. The seeds of a tourist boom have been planted. It just remains to be seen if the whole thing will take.

Not everyone comes to the islands looking for plenty of company and a fancy Italian restaurant with room service. For those who do, the rooms at the Four Seasons are big and tastefully done, the grounds attractively laid out, and the service chipper to the point of absurdity. The concierge desk called my room four times to discuss my taxi needs. Several staffers dropped by to see how I was doing—though only once did they let themselves in without knocking. I couldn’t take a nap for all the attentive friendliness. The pool is a lovely, relaxing spot, however, and they’re quick with the drinks. As construction finishes up and the Emerald Bay settles into the landscape, I could see it being a very attractive backdrop for a meeting or a round of golf (though I’m guessing, as I don’t go to meetings or play golf). Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I could be in a gated luxury resort anywhere, away from the real life of the island.

Stocking Island is a five-minute boat ride across placid Elizabeth Harbour from George Town. There’s not much here other than a few private homes around a protected inlet and the wild dunes and untouched beach on the ocean side—which is clearly how David and Carole Higgins like it. Their five-cabin Hotel Higgins Landing is not for everyone. Vegetarians, for instance, need not apply. Carole cooks all the meals, and David lets prospective customers know that special dining requests will not be honored. Which is not to say the Higginses won’t dote on you once you’re here. They’ll take you fishing or drop you on an island where you will see nobody, and pick you up when it’s time for David’s rum punch back at the beachfront bar. Theirs is an unrehearsed kindliness. If you don’t need your human interaction wrapped up like a chocolate truffle left on your pillow at night, it is a supremely comfortable place to be.

Cat Island is famous mostly for being something that it is not. For four hundred years, it was generally believed that this was the place Columbus had landed in 1492, dubbing it San Salvador. Then historians decided that—oops!—Columbus had docked somewhere else. You get the feeling that Cat Island still hasn’t gotten its groove back. Being huge and underpopulated doesn’t help with the identity crisis. Some two thousand people inhabit its 150 square miles—about a third of the number who work at Atlantis.

Donna Keasler met my Cat Island flight and picked me out of the crowd, probably because she knew everyone else coming off the plane. Donna manages Fernandez Bay Village, a string of wooden cottages lined up along a narrow white beach. Jimmy Buffet stays here, as do truck drivers and German playboys who lie naked on the beach with their girlfriends. There’s an honor bar and everybody eats together. Cat Island is not a fancy island. The sign outside one of the better places to eat reads BEER & SWEETS. The only real shopping is at Iva Thompson’s house, where she and her sister make palm-leaf baskets. Iva, eighty-two, sits on her porch laughing and singing and stashing the money she makes in her bra.

Cat Island is the Bahamas untouched—not just by development but, in many ways, by the modern world. Obeah, a kind of Bahamian black magic, is practiced and feared here. Abandoned slave cottages decay beside the road, while mother-in-law’s-tongue and wild cotton grow in and around them. Like Loch Ness, the lakes are thought to hold hungry monsters in the dark depths of their blue holes. The main road is called “the road.” It is considered the height of rudeness to drive past anyone without honking and waving.

At Mount Alvernia, near Fernandez Bay, Donna and I climbed to the rocky peak, which, at 206 feet, is the highest point in all the Bahamas. Here, in the 1940s, an ascetic hermit named Father Jerome built himself a chapel and home called The Hermitage. Walking through the miniature stone buildings where he lived and died, we admired the view: Over the hill lies the Atlantic, below us calm Exuma Sound. From this perch, it’s easy to imagine the islands as they were when Columbus landed, wherever he landed. Father Jerome found his ideal piece of the Bahamas, and like anyone—hermit, hotel builder, or first-time tourist—he wanted to stay.

By Adam Sachs Published in Conde Naste Traveler (May 2004) Prices and other information were accurate at press time, but are subject to change. Please confirm details with individual establishments before planning your trip.