Advertisement
Published: June 13th 2010
Edit Blog Post
Lone tree
This tree was sitting all alone on a mudflat A day out at Harbour Island
On one of the days when we were in the Bahamas we decided to make a trip to Harbour Island. Harbour Island is less touristy than Nassau but is still somewhat of a tourist trap. It is a cute place though. Dunmore Town, the major settlement on the island, is an old fishing village with narrow roads and low houses. Today it is a popular destination for tourists and the major draw card is a beach where the sand is pink. It's called Pink Sand Beach. How they came up with that name is a complete mystery. 😊
The actual grains of the sand are not pink at all. They are either red or white. The combination of red and white grains makes the sand appear to be pink. We never managed to find out where the red grains come from but the likely culprits are red coloured seashells.
There are very few cars on Harbour Island. Instead most common vehicles are golf carts. In the tour we took to get to Harbour Island there was included a golf cart that we could use for the day.
First we were taken
The Haunted House
This burnt down mansion is locally known as the Haunted House on a guided tour of the island so we could see all the tourist sites. The tour was a bit silly because the sites we were taken to weren't really worth seeing. We understand how desparate they must have been when they had to come up with ideas for the tour.
Tour guide #1: "So where how can we put together a tour of this island? There nothing at all to see other than the pink beach."
Tour guide #2: "My uncle has this restaurant with a talking parrot. That could be one of the stops."
Tour guide #1: "How embarressing... But I can't come up with anything better so let's go for it."
Tour guide #3: "We could show them the Wall of Bottles."
Tour guide #1: "The Wall of Bottles?!? Are you out of your mind. It's just a lot of trash old loony George collected before we finally managed to get him locked up in the mental hospital."
Tour guide #3: "Well, what else
do we have?"
Tour guide #1: "Oh crap! Nothing... Let's include that too in the tour..."
...and so on...
The places we went to, other than the restaurant with
The Haunted House
This was the least boring of the sites we stopped at on the tour of Harbour Island. That gives you a good idea of how dull the other sites were the talking parrot and the wall of bottles, were a church built from wood from a wrecked ship, a burnt down mansion known as the haunted house and the local library. The biggest joy of the tour was, as you understand, not the sights but to drive the golf cart. That was good fun!
Don't misunderstand us now. The visit to Harbour Island wasn't boring or anything. The fishing village Dunmore Town was a very nice place to spend some time in. Pink Sand Beach was also a fun to have seen, even for Ake who isn't a big fan of beaches. Ake doesn't like to get sand in his underwear and snokelling is usually not good at beaches.
We stayed at Pink Sand Beach for over an hour before it was time to go back to the ferry to return to Nassau. On the way back we stopped at a mudflat where an uprooted tree was stranded. The tree was standing on the mudflat all alone and was very picturesque. You can take a look at the photos we took of it and you'll understand what we mean.
On the way back to Nassau we saw
Paradise
On Harbour Island you can live in hut next to the ocean. A piece of heaven on Earth a manatee. Manatees are very gentle sea living mammals. They are large and very very friendly but are threatened to become extinct. They live where people live and because they are very slow they often get hit by boats, get cut by propellers or get stuck in fishing nets.
There is one more thing we would like to say here in the end. This is pretty silly but we want to write it anyway. It's about time we tell the world how silly we really are. In the months before our trip to the Bahamas we wanted to get into the right mood, the Caribbean mood. We did that by listening to Kokomo by the Beach Boys.
Listen to it yourself and read the lyrics (further down) and maybe you'll understand.
"Aruba, Jamaica ooh I wanna take ya
To Bermuda, Bahama come on pretty mama" You still don't get it? Try and sing it and pretend you are on a beach in the Caribbean with a coconut in your hand. You are shaded by a palm tree and the water is blue and the temperature is just perfect. Hope you get it now. If not, keep singing it
Lone tree
This is the same tree on the mud flat. The photos of it were so good we just had to upload a second one on the blog and dream yourself away. Do it enough times and you'll eventually get it. When the magic kicks in you can taste the coconut, smell the water, hear the wind in the palm trees and feel the soft sand under your body even if you are thousands of miles away from Bahamas.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.094s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 7; qc: 34; dbt: 0.041s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Tom
non-member comment
How do you get from Nassau to Harbor Island?
Hello, great blog, but how do you get from Nassau to Harbor island and how much does it cost? How long is the trip?