Offbeat Bahamas

Anytime one travels to a foreign country a lot of the fun is finding things that are very different from home, and The Bahamas is no exception.

To start with there are swimming pigs. Big Major Cay is uninhabited and the pigs are not native to the island. Some say they were left by a group of sailors, who planned to come back and cook them. Or that the pigs swam over from a shipwreck nearby. Although technically feral, they are used to being fed daily by tourist boats and so they jump in the water and swim to the boats as you approach the store.

It isn’t unusual to see a yacht at anchor with all their toys rafted to it. Here is a yacht with its small powerboat, dinghy, and jet ski. Fortunately the rafted vessels are lightweight and all are on a mooring ball, and downstream from us. Sometimes there are issues with so many boats rafted together on one anchor that the whole thing will drag and cause damage to surrounding boats.

Black point Settlement is a lovely little town just south of Staniel Cay. It is here I came across my first “Bahamian Walmart”—-the Rockside Laundromat.

In addition she sells some groceries, souvenirs, basic hardware ( all in a 10 x 10 space), will rent golfcarts and bicycles and you can even get a coin shower. The owner stays busy, she was upstairs cleaning the rental units during most of the time we were there. If you wanted to buy something you either had to put money on the counter or just wait. And when she left for an hour to go to lunch she locked up the store, and everyone in the laundromat just had to wait for her to return to sell more tokens for the washer and dryer.

Benjamin, Aislin and I took our laundry here and can attest to the deliciousness of the footlong hotdog, ice cold soda, and homemade carrot cake. And you can’t beat this view.

And here’s where you can wait on your loads of laundry while eating hotdogs and carrot cake.

We did have an incident at this laundromat. The kids and I were just hanging out waiting on our dryers when we smelled something weird. At first the kids thought it was a new boat smell, like when we are at a boatshow. Then I realized it smelled like a plastic or electrical fire. I started looking around and noticed one of the dryers with our stuff in it was smoking. I opened the dryer door and saw flames in the back of the dryer. I removed our items, found a fire extinguisher on the wall, and with two brief sprays with fire was out. The owner came running downstairs from where she had been tending to her rental units with several men in tow. There was lots of commotion with loud animated speaking in the local language, but the excitement was over. They turned off the breaker to the dryer, got a broom and shovel and cleaned up the mess. There is no fire department on that or most other islands. I’m just so glad she had the fire extinguisher right there on the wall that was easy to find and in working order. As is she.

In Barraterre there is a nice lady named Juletta who in addition to running the local straw market also rents cars from her living room. No credit card or security deposit required, and she gave me the keys a day early in case she wasn’t going to be awake yet the next morning when I needed to pick up the car. The next afternoon I returned the keys to her next door neighbor when I was done with the car, hopefully she knows that and everything is ok. There is a public bathroom by the straw market, the ladies room even has two stalls in it.

The city of George Town has a huge cruising community. I hear in the height of cruising season 500 boats are anchored in the harbor. There is access to shore and most of the shops, gas, laundry, and groceries by means of Lake Victoria. You have to take your dinghy under a bridge, where there is a dock with a hose for fresh water, a grocery market, and even a place to take your trash.

This is how they handle trash disposal. In the parking lot next to the dinghy dock is a white pickup truck. You place the trash bag in the bed of a pickup truck and and then put your money through a slit in the opening of the front window and it drops onto the driver’s seat.

Although how this little truck handles 500 cruisers’ trash during the height of cruising season is beyond me.

The various store and restaurant hours are unpredictable. The Exuma Market grocery store is open regular hours during the week but only from 8am-11am on Sundays, although they do play church music during that time. I’m not sure if they were trying to convert us heathens who were missing church to shop or just help us feel like we were multitasking.

We tried to go to a restaurant called “Same Old Place” in Barraterre for lunch and the sign said it opened at 11, but the lady told us not to come until after 1:30 and then when we called her she said maybe she would open at 4 but maybe not at all that day. We found that most of the restaurants in The Bahamas work on reservations, even the casual ones. You have to contact them earlier in the day, and then set a time to come, and you order your food when you make the reservation. In general they want at least two hours notice. That way everything is fresh made to order without any waste.