Position: N 24 19.168 W 075 28.416
One of the pastimes we enjoy when visiting the Bahamian out islands is hitch-hiking. It’s a 2 sided coin, both sides of which are winners. Heads, we get to meet and chat with the local inhabitants. Tails, we get to see parts of the island that we would otherwise miss from the water.
On Cat Island we barely need to hitch hike; cars stop and ask if you need a ride even without flagging them down. We’ve even been just walking and had full cars stop and the driver apologize for not having room! What warm, friendly people! We really love it here.
One day we got a ride from a teacher. He teaches high school math and science, and transferred along with his wife from Nassau, “the big city”. After three years on Cat Island they are now considering accepting a new post on San Salvador, another Bahamian out island 25 miles southeast of Cat. It’s a big decision for them as Cat Island is fairly rural but San Salvador has only one school for all ages and is even more rural and less populated. He told us there are only about 30 children in the entire school. He was an interesting conversationalist, well educated and erudite.
Another ride was with a pastry chef who had received his training at a culinary school in the US. After several years working in the States he decided to move home to Cat Island and work as a chef at one of the resorts. We learned about “generation land” from him. Generation land is land that is owned by a family and passes along to the younger generations. It cannot be sold – it belongs to the family in perpetuity. Anyone from the family can homestead on the land but they are not able to secure a mortgage because the property cannot be repossessed if they default. This is why we see so many homes that are under construction. People tend to work and earn money for a while, then work on the home, then work to earn more money – everything “pay-as-you-go”, no mortgages here. Our pastry chef is in the process of building a deli-bakery on his family’s generation land and hopes to be ready to open in a year or two.
These are just 2 examples of interesting conversations we’ve had while getting a ride. We usually set off with no specific plan of where we are going. When someone stops and asks where we are going, we say “No place in particular, where are you going?”
One day we decided to hitch hike south toward Old Bight with our friends Beep and Ed from Mid Watch. The lady who picked all four of us up told us there was a “sports day” at the school. We said “Oh that sounds like fun. Will you drop us there?” Often people will drive out of their way to take us where we want to go even though we try to get them to let us out at their convenience.
At any rate, the sports day was great fun. We arrived close to the end and got to see the finals of the junior and senior basketball competitions. Both games were played outside on a concrete court. It was pretty much full contact basketball – not a lot of fouls were called. These kids are tough! Luckily no-one was badly hurt. We dined on macaroni and chicken wings purchased from the food booth, mingled a bit with the locals, and laughed at the antics of some of the spectators. And what high school basket game is complete without a few tailgaters?
Another day we got a ride north to the end of the road at Orange Creek. Our driver works at the hardware store there. We wandered back down to the next town, Arthurs Town. We saw a little bar/restaurant and went in to get a cold drink and a sit down. We were the only ones there and had a lovely chat with the lady that ran the place. She has a 10 year old daughter who lives in Nassau with relatives so that she can be part of the big junkanoo there. There was a beautiful Junkanoo costume hanging from the wall – oops, we forgot our camera again. I can’t imagine letting a child so young move so far away but it is quite common here in the Bahamas.Another highlight was “The Hermitage”. In the 1940s and 50s, Father Jerome built a medieval style stone monastery in New Bight on Mt. Alvernia, at 206 ft high, it’s the highest hill in the Bahamas. It’s really quite amazing. He hewed spaces for his interpretation of the Stations of the Cross out of the limestone along the steps to the top. From down below it looks really impressive. Once you get up there, though, you realize that the imposing looking tower is only about twice as tall as Mark!
And this brings us to our last entry in this Khronicle – Ms. Hazel Brown. Hazel is about 80 yrs old and owns a little two-room bar on the shore just north of Smith Bay. Hazel taught us to play Bahamian-style dominos, an integral part of which involves slamming the tiles down on the table “when you got a good play”. Hazel loves to play with all her customers; we wondered if that was why she had opened the bar.We plan to leave tomorrow for a trip west and a bit north to Little San Salvador for a few days. Then we don’t know where we’ll go. Ain’t cruising grand?
Fair winds,
