Mélange Travel & Lifestyle Magazine July 2016 | Page 47
Lazy Days in Eleuthera | Mélange Travel & Lifestyle Magazine
golf carts through the narrow streets.
area and French doors opening to a concrete deck which ran the length of the house and had a stunning vista of the Caribbean. Below the house was a cistern where rainwater collected for our use. We rented a rubber dinghy with an outboard motor for the week so that we could zoom around to other beaches and drop anchor for a snorkel wherever we liked.
Tourist infrastructure on Eleuthera is significantly less than on the more visited islands of Paradise and Grand Bahama and in order to pick up our rental car (keep left!), we had to stop at a tiny bar to get the keys to a 1970’s clunker that barely ran and had no radio but we didn’t mind as we zoomed alongside spectacular white sand beaches on the Queen’s Highway, Eleuthera’s one main road.
From our palapa we watched barracuda and bonefish, small sharks and colorful parrotfish go by. We took a picnic lunch and beach blankets to Ten Bay beach and set up for the day in the welcome shade of the pines and luxuriated in reading books and finding sand dollars in the shallows.
We stopped by Governor’s Harbour, the main settlement on Eleuthera and visited a little grocery where we bought some staples and local produce from a friendly old gentleman, before heading to our vacation rental cottage in Ten Bay Beach. The islanders make a living through farming and fishing and fresh fish and pineapples are readily available while most other items are imported and very expensive. A low quality half gallon of orange juice was a prohibitive $8.00 but in the rum shop next door we found good local rum for $3.00.
Some days we drove to the little settlements along the coast: Tarpon Bay, Palmetto Point or Rock Sound to try out the various luncheonettes for cracked Conch served with coleslaw and homemade breads by gregarious Bahamian women. We visited tiny bakeries housed in the front rooms of private homes to buy fresh loaves and sweet breads and stopped into the cool shade of little galley like rum shops for frosty Kaliks or rum punches. Everyone we met was welcoming and kind.
Ten Bay Beach is a gorgeous stretch of white sand ringed by Casuarina trees and pines. The water is gin clear and shallow out for over a hundred yards so you can stroll in knee to waist deep water far from shore and splash with the friendly island dogs that frequent the area. Our “villa” sat on a small cliff ’s edge with steps down to a little thatched palapa where we could step into the water and have near complete privacy in our own cove.
Our week in Eleuthera ended with a flight to Abaco aboard a little prop plane with five seats. The Captain arranged us by weight to keep us aloft and I had the honor of sitting in the copilot’s seat where I watched the pilot lazily glide us away from the mermaid shaped island and back to civilization.
For $650 we had two bedrooms and two bathrooms, a full kitchen and dining area, a comfortable living