Articles tagged with "Bahamas"
The Bahamas asks older travelers the same questions it asks everybody, with the stakes raised on one of them: how far the island you have chosen is from serious medical care, and whether your insurance covers getting you there.
Access in the Bahamas is shaped by geography before it is shaped by buildings. Emergency medical facilities are limited on all the Family Islands, and serious cases are transferred to Nassau or Freeport.
A visitor tracing African and Caribbean heritage in the Bahamas is reading three layers at once: the Lucayan people who were here first, the enslaved Africans brought by Loyalists in the late eighteenth century, and a nation independent since 1973.
Junkanoo is the celebration the Bahamas is known for: whistles, cowbells, horns and goatskin drums on Boxing Day and New Year's Day and many Saturdays through the summer. Its origin, on the official account, is not settled.
A small population spread across sixteen inhabited islands, an official language that is not the only language spoken, and a national independence within living memory: three facts that shape how a visitor should arrive.
This is a food safety guide rather than a menu. The two vaccines the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists for the Bahamas, hepatitis A and typhoid, are both transmitted through contaminated food and water, which makes eating the practical health question of the trip.
Official advice on the Bahamas is unusually specific: it names which islands carry the crime risk, records that the outlying islands carry less of it, and gives one instruction about entering the water that admits no exception.
Two things about moving around the Bahamas are worth knowing before you arrive: the combination of left-hand traffic with left-hand-drive hire cars, and an official assessment of the water sports industry that should change how you book a ride on the water.
Most of a Bahamas packing list is a matter of taste. Four things are not: your passport validity, a vaccination certificate if you are arriving from certain countries, your driving license, and proof of insurance.
The Bahamas issues its own currency, the Bahamian dollar. What this guide can tell you about money is where the real costs sit, and the largest of them is medical care.