Mr. Green, a sweatshirt hood cinched around his face to protect it from the rain, was waiting with a

One of the great things about living in the Bahamas, is that pretty much everyone else wants to vacation, visit, best pricing airline tickets travel or relocate here.  Especially writers from various news outlets. One such writer is Porter Fox from New York Times who posted this report about traveling, best pricing airline tickets seeing and experiencing the Bahamas best pricing airline tickets via Mail Boats.  Yeah, they may sound dull, but they are far from that for sure.  Here is Porter s story as it appeared in the NYT.
I was on a freighter heading through the Bahamas. The sweeping view couldn't have been more different from the one on deck: shrink-wrapped pallets cradling cinderblocks, baby diapers and bottled water obscured the bow; oiled two-by-eight planks concealed crates of produce, furniture and hardware stowed in the cargo hold. Amidships, best pricing airline tickets a 70-foot crane was lashed to a steel boom crutch. Tucked away in private cabins behind the wheelhouse, two dozen passengers slept soundly.
Waves rolled through the night, pitching the ship from side to side. From the bridge deck, the white sand beaches of the Exumas glowed blue-white under the starlight, and the rising moon spread a thin layer of silver over the sea. A few miles north, toward our destination in Nassau, lightning flickered.
The ship was one of 15 government-contracted mail boats that deliver provisions, passengers and a few adventurous best pricing airline tickets tourists to the Out Islands, the hundreds of remote islands beyond the tourist and commercial centers of New Providence, Grand Bahama and Paradise Islands. My boat was one of three mail boats that I took on a six-day, 350-mile journey last spring to explore the Bahamas best pricing airline tickets the way Bahamians do. I had vacationed in the islands several times before, usually cooped best pricing airline tickets up in a resort with every amenity a guest could dream up, and I'd long wanted to get beyond the more touristed areas. Mail boats have been the primary means of interisland travel for locals for more than a century and seemed the perfect way to do it. There are no tour guides best pricing airline tickets or lido deck, and the nighttime entertainment consists largely of gazing at a starry sky over the drone of a diesel engine. But for a shockingly cheap ticket (from $45), passengers can get a meal, a bed and one thing that eludes even the most dogged Caribbean traveler: immersion in authentic Bahamian culture.
The Out Islands are made up of more than 700 islands, best pricing airline tickets many of them belonging to particular archipelagos or chains. best pricing airline tickets Each chain is served by its own mail boat system, and because I was vacationing with friends in the Exumas, I started my exploration there. A resident told me about a mail boat heading to Nassau, and I was soon onboard a ship listening to Capt. Lance Brozozog outline our loose itinerary: cross the Tropic of Cancer at sunset; bisect the 360-island Exuma archipelago through a 150-foot-wide channel at midnight; arrive in Nassau sometime after dawn. Mr. Brozozog knows the route well. Since he was a boy, the 41-year-old Bahamian has been loading the Grand Master with food, water, tools, scrap metal and every other provision that helps to keep the Exuma Islands operating.
My room, which was the size of a typical train sleeper compartment, was filled with some of those provisions: screen best pricing airline tickets doors, crates of juice and a half-dozen packages addressed to recipients in Nassau — name and phone number only. There were three other berths in the room, but since the ship wasn't full I had it to myself.
best pricing airline tickets After leaving my bags, I wandered on deck, where Mr. Brozozog chatted best pricing airline tickets with passengers over the din of the big diesel engines rumbling to life. As the sun set he shared some of his own history, which included growing up on nearby Staniel Cay and the honor of captaining one of the most famous crossings in the Exumas: in 2006 he piloted (by remote control) the Black Pearl while Johnny Depp clung to the wheel during the filming of "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End."
Our own meal — served on paper plates — was a Bahamian favorite: barbecued chicken with peas and rice. Afterward, I retired to my cabin for the night, but it soon became clear that, thanks to its location just over the engine room, it would be intolerably hot. At midnight I took the cushion off my bed and dragged it to the upper deck where I was rewarded best pricing airline tickets with a cool breeze and a view of that stunning moonrise and a shooting star falling through the Big Dipper.
The next morning Captain Brozozog steered best pricing airline tickets the Grand Master around two Jet Skis, a tourist excursion boat and a cluster of dilapidated steel freighters, before parallel parking between two ships with 20 feet to spare on either side. Our destination, Potter's Cay, home port for the mail boats in Nassau, looked the part: it was crowded with rows of shipping containers, stacks of cardboard boxes and fishermen cleaning snapper and conch. A half-dozen mail boats lined the key, all of which were contracted to make a weekly or biweekly best pricing airline tickets run to one of the major Out Islands. Most return directly to Nassau. The trick to touring the islands, Mr. Brozozog had told me, is finding a boat that lays over for a couple of days or visits twice a week, allowing you to stay for a few nights and catch a ride back.
I'd learned on previous trips that schedules, assurances and even time itself were abstract concepts in the Bahamas, so I walked the docks anyway, asking if any boats were leaving — for anywhere. An old man standing beside a stack of lumber told me that the Island Link would sail for Eleuthera at noon that day. The cleaning woman on the Island Link told me it would leave at 3 p.m. Dockmaster Craig Curtis said he thought the ship was departing in two days.
Then I found Conrad Sweating, who owns the boat and was selling tickets in a tiny blue shack with his grandson. He said that the boat would actually leave that day, at 1 p.m. Then he sold me a $90 round-trip ticket and booked me a hotel room and a rental best pricing airline tickets car through his cousin with a single phone call. "Mr. Green will be waiting for you at the dock," he said.
I spent the next four hours walking among the wooden food stalls I'd been directed to by passengers on the Grand Master. Cooks mixed diced conch with onions, sweet pepper, celery and lime juice into what was rumored to be the best conch salad in the Bahamas. Across the street, I bought mangoes and bananas from a row of tarp-covered vegetable best pricing airline tickets stands.
The Island Link wasn't best pricing airline tickets close to leaving at 1 p.m., but I boarded anyway, edging best pricing airline tickets past a man trying to back a Buick LeSabre up the slick ramp and a forklift loaded with pallets of toilet paper trying to get around him. An hour later the crew cast off, and the captain steered the ship through the narrow slot separating Potter's from Paradise Island. The 130-foot catamaran was newer and faster than the Grand Master best pricing airline tickets — was able to cruise around 13 miles per hour compared with 8 — and had an enclosed passengers' lounge with airplane-style seats, a snack bar and a 50-inch flat screen seemingly programmed with Queen Latifah's filmography. best pricing airline tickets Wind and rain whipped the windows as the boat pulled away from Nassau. I fell asleep in my seat, and five hours later saw the bowling green coast of Eleuthera rise up from the ocean.
Mr. Green, a sweatshirt hood cinched around his face to protect it from the rain, was waiting with about 50 other islanders best pricing airline tickets when we docked. He waved me down, hustled me into a gold Jeep Cherokee, and in 10 minutes we were in Gregory Town, a tiny settlement best pricing airline tickets with a few restaurants, bars, a gift shop and a liquor store, which happened best pricing airline tickets to be the only place to swipe a credit card. So he hopped out, billed me for both the hotel and the rental car, and pointed me to Daddy Joe's hotel three miles north. "See you in a couple of days," he said.
Bahamians refer to the limestone-crusted Out Islands as the Family Islands, because they look like a family surrounding Nassau. But there's a second meaning. Residents on the Family Islands stick together, live a life largely independent from foreigners and are, for the most part, related.
Three centuries after Columbus is said to have made landfall in the Out Islands in 1492, the indigenous people had been either wiped out or shipped to Hispaniola, and the largely deserted land was settled by British best pricing airline tickets loyalists and their slaves, whose descendants make up most of the Bahamas' residents. Today, almost everyone in the country shares a few dozen last names — Rolle, Nixon, Wells — inherited from British slaveholders.
Tiffany Johnson, manager of Daddy Joe's hotel and soon-to-be personal guide, best pricing airline tickets is from one of those families. She told me that each island chain is distinct and passionately independent. Spanish Wells is the lobster capital; the Abacos are the most popular tourist destination; Andros is the bone-fishing hub; the Exumas are the domain of celebrities like David Copperfield, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. The islands share a similar dialect best pricing airline tickets — work is "woik," "reached" means arrived, "sip-sip" means gossip — but each maintains a distinct identity, as well as its own municipal government, and all are competitive with one another. "You ought to hear them yelling at each other at Regatta," she said, referring to the interisland sailing competition held in George Town annually.
Tiffany gave me a tour of some local secrets, including the Queen's Bath, a set of natural stone pools cut into the island's Atlantic coastline, and Eleuthera Island Shores, a rustic commune on the east coast where a few dozen surfers and hippies live in geodesic domes and homemade shacks above Surfer's Beach, home to what locals say are the best waves in the Caribbean. She took me to Diana "Lady Di" Thompson's pineapple farm next, owned by a 64-year-old who shared her experiences cultivating goats and pineapples on a homestead she started 30 years ago. "I signed the lease on a Tuesday and went into labor with my firstborn on Wednesday," she said.
Tiffany had to go shopping that afternoon — everyone shops the day after the mail boat arrives — so I went for a drive on Queen's Highway, the only north-south thoroughfa