Bahamas: Nassau, the Exumas pigs and the Out Islands

The first time I saw it from the plane I thought my eyes were broken. The water around the Bahamas isn't one blue, it's a whole catalogue of them — ink where it's deep, then a band of jade, then a shallow turquoise so pale and clear it looks like the sea forgot to fill itself in. Seven hundred islands and cays scattered across it, most of them empty. I came as a coast person, a small-boat person, and the Bahamas felt like it had been drawn for exactly that.

I based myself in Nassau to start, on New Providence, because that's where the planes and the boats and the people are. It's busier than the brochures let on — cruise ships, traffic, a working harbour — but step off the main drag and the old town shows itself: pastel colonial buildings, hills with forts on them, and a deep blue right at the bottom of the street.

Nassau, forts and straw

I climbed up to Fort Fincastle, a squat little fortress shaped a bit like the bow of a ship, and then over to the bigger Fort Charlotte with its dry moat and dark powder rooms — built to guard a harbour that, in the end, no one ever attacked. From up there the whole turquoise sweep opens out toward Paradise Island. Back down in the heat I drifted through the straw market, all woven bags and conch shells and people who'll happily out-talk you, and ate cracked conch standing up with hot sauce running down my wrist. They told me the real Nassau comes alive at Junkanoo — the drums-and-feathers street parade that takes over the city at Christmas and New Year. I missed the parade by months, but you can feel the city is built around it.

« Seven hundred islands, and the sea between them does most of the talking. »

On connectivity — the house specialty, and I'll always level with you — Nassau and Paradise Island were genuinely fine. I had enough signal to pull up a map, book a boat for the next morning, send a photo of that water to make people jealous. I'd installed my eSIM before landing, so the phone found a network while I was still taxiing — no SIM-counter queue, no airport price gouging. Just know that this is about as connected as the trip gets; once you leave New Providence, the bars start to thin.

The Exumas, pigs and a grotto

Then the real reason I'd come: the Exumas, a long thin chain of cays southeast of Nassau, reachable by a short flight or a longer boat. This is where the water does the impossible thing — sandbars that surface at low tide so you can stand in the middle of the sea, ankle-deep, with deep channels of navy on either side. At Big Major Cay I met the famous swimming pigs, who paddle out to the boats expecting to be fed and are far larger and more determined than the internet prepares you for. Down the chain I snorkelled into Thunderball Grotto, a hollow limestone dome you swim into at low tide, light pouring down through holes in the roof onto fish below. Iguanas basked on one beach; on another, southern stingrays slid over my feet in the shallows like wet shadows. I won't oversell it — but it's the closest I've come to swimming inside a postcard.

Out here, be honest with yourself: the signal goes. On the water between cays and on the smaller islands, coverage runs from patchy to flatly nonexistent, and for long stretches there's simply nothing — which, frankly, is the point. I'd screenshotted the boat plan and downloaded the maps offline the night before in Nassau. Out among the sandbars, with the engine cut and no bars on the phone, the disconnection stopped feeling like a gap and started feeling like the whole reason to be there.

The Out Islands, slow and pink

The Bahamians call the rest the Out Islands, or Family Islands, and they run quiet and unhurried after Nassau. On Harbour Island, off Eleuthera, I walked the famous pink-sand beach at dawn — the colour really is there, soft rose under a thin morning sun, from tiny crushed shells in the white. Andros, the biggest island and the least crowded, sits beside the third-largest barrier reef on the planet and is riddled with inland blue holes, dark freshwater eyes dropping straight down into the limestone. I drove a little here too, and yes — they drive on the left, a leftover that catches you out on an empty island road until it doesn't. Mostly I moved by boat, and let the days go soft.

What I take away

The Bahamas gave me a city with forts and drums, a chain of cays where the sea does the impossible, and a scatter of slow islands the colour of dawn. The connection followed the water: dependable around Nassau, honestly absent the moment I pushed out toward the sandbars. And that felt right. Some afternoons, standing knee-deep in the middle of the sea with no signal and no plan, the only thing worth looking at was the blue — and it was already on.

— Yann, salt in my hair, a boat under me, somewhere over a sandbar in the Exumas.