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Mar. 22nd, 2010 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickSome notes on visiting Grand Bahama Island on a free trip so that you can have a condo ("vacation club") marketed to you. Educational, really.
When undying prose is lost due to an unscheduled laptop reboot, the best you can do is provide a poor shadow of what was. *sigh* The things I do for you folks.
In case you haven't been following along, Trys's friend Beth "won" a "free" trip to Grand Bahama Island for the purposes of being marketed a condo. The trip was for four people, who were originally to be Heather, La, Beth, and Trys. Heather could not get off work. I have a passport and can get off work, so I was the replacement person.
First off, any free trip that you win to the Bahamas is not free. There are port fees and there is airfare and there are meals and you have to spend an otherwise beautiful Friday morning learning about condos ("vacation clubs") instead of being on the beach. However, if you take that as read and are willing to endure the condo dog-n-pony show in order to go on the trip, there are good things to be had.
We flew down to Fort Lauderdale Airport on Wednesday night out of BWI airport. We got to Fort Lauderdale Airport at around 11:30 PM and our boat to Grand Bahama Island (hereafter GBI) was departing from Port Everglades Port at Oh-Dark-Hundred the next morning, so we opted to camp out in the Fort Lauderdale Airport and get a cab to the port bright and early. For saving, you know. Now, Fort Lauderdale has a very nice airport that unfortunately rates a 2 (out of ten) on the sleepability scale. Given their prominence in the Spring Break trade, they're probably quite happy about this.
The seating at the Fort Lauderdale Airport has lovely fixed metal armrests dividing the seating up into ass-sized amounts. The armrests are not moveable or adjustable. Fucking Gumby could not drape himself over the armrests of the seating at the Fort Lauderdale Airport for a comfortable nap. So, the seating is pretty much a wash.
There are floors, though, right? Yes. Yes, there are. The floors of the Fort Lauderdale Airport are concrete, with thin, unpadded carpet over them. They would be workable except that the airport is kept at a cool 65 (felt like it, anyway) so that the concrete floors are unwelcomingly cold. I was in long sleeves and jeans and had a poly blanket and I was still cold. The rest of my party was shivering underneath beach towels. Besides being cold, the floors in the Fort Lauderdale Airport are cleaned at around 2 AM by a madman driving the hybrid offspring of a forklift and a Zamboni. He did not actually hit us with that thing, but it was close.
Ambient background music in the Fort Lauderdale Airport is the peppier sort of classical, stuff with a very active cello line. Oh, and there's also a cellphone-like noise that emits from the TSA area every fifty-three seconds or so, all night long. It was not what I would call restful.
Really, in a triumph of public space planning, the sidewalk outside the airport would have been more comfortable, warmer, and quieter than the airport itself was.
On the plus side, we had no difficulty catching a cab ($20.00) from the airport to the port port so that we could rendezvous with our boat the following morning. Our cab driver forgot his ID (required at port entrance to prevent terrorists from boarding our cruise ships) so we had to walk from the port entrance to the part of the port where our boat was located. In the dark. Toting all our stuff. Without a clear idea of where the boat might be or what it looked like. We still tipped the cab driver. We are idiots.
We located the boat and boarded the boat. The boat-boarding stuff, like the airplane-boarding-stuff, had clearly been designed by Temple Grandin for the comfort and placidity of cows. It didn't do much for me, though.
Our boat (the Discovery Sun, operating with these people) was not a huge boat but it did have rather a lot of deck chairs, a movie theater, Italian league footie on the television, a casino, a massive amount of indoor-outdoor carpeting, excessively loud music near the pool, beige claustrophobic bathrooms, lifeboats with orange interiors, a lackluster buffet (we got breakfast on the way out, dinner on the way back), and amazingly tacky $2.00 plastic souvenir cups in a variety of untasteful colors. I bought one of the souvenir cups because, for a one-time payment of two bucks, it could be refilled endlessly with the house-liquor Adult Beverage of Your Choice, provided that your choice was one of the following: strawberry dacquiri, pina colada, bahama mama, or bloody mary. You could get free drinks in smaller, free, non-souvenir cups but then you had to cast Summon Drinks Man a lot more often and since the summoning of the Drinks Man required tipping the guy, we wanted to maximize our dollars there. (Having to drink out of Barbie-Pink plastic is a small price to pay for bottomless pina coladas.)
From Port Everglades to GBI (or vice-versa), it's about four hours on a boat. On the way out, I spent that time enjoying (I use the term loosely) the yaw, pitch, and roll of the boat while lying prone on a deck chair with my blanket over me in a vain and futile attempt to be warm in the thin and watery light that passed for sunshine. That did not work very well but it did eventually get warm about the time we hit GBI. On the way back to Port Everglades, I spent my four hours of boat time standing on the deck of the boat, against the rail, moderately damp from the ocean spray, trying to see how many pina coladas I could drink before I got tired of them (6, plus one bloody mary). While I was not cold due to all the liquor, I was still not very happy about the yaw/pitch/roll business. In summary, I feel very firmly that cruise boat travel is an unpleasantry unredeemable by a bottomless pina colada. In the future, I will fly to the fucking island and spend that eight hours on the beach.
The first thing I noticed about GBI, when we could see it from the boat, was that the water was exactly that unbelieveable turquoise color that it is in the promotional materials. Seriously, shit looks like a fucking swimming pool. It's darker blue where it is deeper and light like aquamarines or something where it's shallow, but it's unreal for people whose experience with the Atlantic is the grey-green waters of the east coast. I would have said it was like that for tourists but we first met the water at a port. There were shipping containers and cranes and big piles of sand (don't know why) and it wasn't all that attractive. The water lapping at the edges of the concrete supporting stacks of shipping containers was still an unearthly blue, entirely unlike the Atlantic I know.
The second thing I noticed, after we'd gotten off the boat and gotten into the mini-van deals that were schlepping us to our respective hotels, was that the island was not what I'd call economically healthy. This was an impression that stayed with me through the duration of the trip, with cause. First, there are a lot of burnt out, deserted, abandoned, half-finished, uninhabited, and otherwise distressed real estates. The stuff that is distressed is not beachfront, mostly, but it's still not bustling. Locals say the island got hammered by hurricanes in 2004, feel that is a sufficient explanation for the distressed real estate market. I'm not sure it is... my overall impression, on GBI, was that it was significantly overbuilt and underfunded. Overall, I felt that the (municipal) infrastructure and (private) financing to build/maintain first class tourist stuff simply didn't exist. This impression was backed up by thecondo vacation club marketing effort, but I'm getting ahead of myself with that.
At any rate, we took the mini-van things to our hotel, which was the Island Palm Resort located in Downtown Freeport. It's not on the beach and we did not expect it to be on the beach so were not disappointed. Check-in took a bit because we were on the free-with-condo-marketing trip so we had to fill out more invasive paperwork than I would have choosen to fill out otherwise. We were served plastic cups of bahama mama (virgin) punch and offered potato chips and weird-tasting pretzels while we did the paperwork and had same processed at a very leisurely pace.
The room was a double, nicely-sized, but the bathroom was on the small side and we felt that the hot water supply was not sufficient. To be fair, there were four of us with waist-length hair and it's possible that we were heavier users of hot water than the average bear. We did not feel that the hotel desk service was comparable with what you'd find at a mid-range hotel in Baltimore or Philadelphia. We had to ask (more than once) for as many washcloths as we had people in the room, for an extra pillow, for an extra blanket, for bath tissue. We did eventually get everything but the extra pillow, but it wasn't on the first try.
I admit that I am a tightly-wrapped American. I tend to live, breathe, and eat at high pressure and in a hurry. However, since The Bahamas are so close to Florida, I'd hazard a guess that the primary consumer of Bahamas-based resort hotel services is more than likely tightly-wrapped Americans like me. In service industries, it's important to know and understand your customer. Expecting Americans to relax into "island time" or to adapt an "island mindset" is not going to work... especially not about stuff like towels and hot water.
After checking in to the hotel, we walked to the International Bazaar for dinner, where the only place open was the Island (something), a bar/restaurant. The tourist materials (handouts that they give you) pimp the International Bazaar but it shuts down pretty much at 5 PM -- and it's got a lot of empty shop space. I was not particularly encouraged by the International Bazaar, myself, not being a fan of tchotchke shops. Anyway, we had dinner at the Island-whatever, there, outside. It was cold. The service was slow and we were the only people in the place. There was one waitstaff person on duty and I believe she also did the cooking. The food was *good*, just very slow service and an absolutely dead joint.
After dinner, we went back to the hotel to await the free breakfast and condo-marketing session that the morning would bring. Our tv remote didn't work.
In the AM, we were up and about when there was a knock at the door to make sure that we were awake enough to be getting ready for the marketing thing. No problem, we were up. We got in another mini van and trundled away (In the Bahamas, they drive on the left. It's kind of disconcerting.) to the Island Seas Resort, kind of a sister hotel to the Island Palm, except on the beach and newer. I never got the exact relationship between Island Seas and Island Palm, but there's a shuttle runs between the Island Palm and the Island Seas, free for guests of the Island Palm. (The hours are inconvenient and I liked the Port Lucaya beach better -- it had more stuff. But anyway.)
We were met and fed coffee (in styrofoam cups, no real creamer, not really enough space for coffee service) and pre-interviewed about our financial status, then went and did breakfast with our "friend" and salesperson Gwen. Whatever. I don't like the kind of marketing where you have people trying to be your friend. Friendly is OK, friend is not. Anyway, I'm kind of difficult to market to, I suppose, so it's not like they would have had luck even if Gwen had been super at this stuff. La thought she was kind of a beginner at the marketing gig. (They all work on commission. We asked.) However, again going back to the importance of knowing your customers... if you expect me to plunk down 18.5K on a condo (the starting ask price), you need to front a bit. I want real coffee, in ceramic cups, with real cream in metal cream pouring thingies. I'd like sugar bowls and metal spoons. And when you promise me a breakfast as part of my being-marketed-to, I do not expect scrambled eggs, floppy bacon, and (instant) grits on a paper plate, served up by Gwen my marketer. I just don't. With plastic silverware. Look. You want money, you want to attract people, act like this is a condo or vacation club or whatever that you are *proud* of... make us want to be proud of it. Make us want to show our friends or our family or whatever. Marketing with plastic silverware and paper plates is shooting yourself in the foot.
Study US-ian marketing. There'd be a waitstaff person to take our orders, so as not to disrupt Gwen from her more-important business of talking to us. Put the waitstaff person in uniform. China, silverware made of metal. Fresh fruit, real juice, ceramic coffee cups. Grits are OK, sausage, non-floppy bacon, and teach someone to cook eggs for over easy, sunny side up, over light, scrambled, cheese omelet. Homefries would be nice. You could also do it as steam table with two servers if that suited better. But don't make your marketing girl the waitress as well. For fuck's sake, front a little.
I realize there are a lot of cold calls on these trip-with-marketing things. Screen people a little bit better, but front more. You'll see more sales, honest.
We walkthrough the units and look at the facilities. Gwen needs work on her patter, but we looksee anyway to be polite. The units are well-laid out, roomy, furnished attractively. But there are little details that say *cheap* to me. It's enough to pass muster on the first glance, but then... no. Now, admittedly, I am looking for stuff like that because of the paper plates and the plastic forks and the soggy bacon and the lack of fruit at breakfast. Maybe I'm seeing what I look for?
Okay, tour done. We admit to at most being interested in the 1-br unit because it's cheaper. It (sleeps 4 or something) is 18.5K. They need money down, will finance the remainder at 18% for a fairly short term. What this buys you is thirty years of right-to-use for one week a year plus also you have to pay a yearly maintaining fee and you can swap it with other units elsewhere or something. My eyes were glazing over at that point, but I'd finance at 18%, too. We mumble about not having that kind of money. The price goes down and down. We meet the closer, whose name I do not remember, but she's pretty and good at her job. We get a "final offer" which is not final but which is like 11K. We dick around some more. I want to go to the fucking beach. We get a more-final final offer which is 9.9K. Offers are only good for the day they're made, that's printed on the offer paper. They keep wanting to know who the person with the money is. La is the only one who makes the "income limit" that they screen for. I have the money but there's no fucking way I am ever going to buy a condo in the Bahamas and anyway I won't pass a credit check b/c not a high enough credit score. Trys and Beth are too young for their metrics. So, eventually, they let us go. We get four bottles of Bacardi (small bottles, not big ones but not "hotel minibar" size either) and four tshirts advertising Island Seas Resort. The tshirts are see-through, again shooting themselves in the foot with insufficient follow-through on the marketing. And we get half off a Tourist Activity of Our Choice. We choose snorkeling even though none of us has ever snorkeled. Snorkeling was scheduled for the following day (Saturday) in the afternoon.
And that was the marketing thing.
It being about lunchtime, we went to Port Lucaya (shops, food, beach across the street) for lunch and beach. Lunch was at The Prop Club, which made the best pina colada I had while I was at GBI. Food was good, but not the desserts. (Get a second pina colada instead.) I didn't have a decent dessert the whole time I was there.
At the beach, we were hit by some of the beachly enterpreneur types. This is an occupational hazard of beachgoing. They take no for an answer, so don't stress over it too badly. Some enterpreneurs hawk ankle jewelry and other sorts of jewelry (which I do not wear) and some sell tshirts and some offer you banana boat rides and some offer to braid your hair with beads in it. La and I opted for the braiding with beads. I have straight, fine brown (and grey) hair to my waist. It's baby fine and slippery. It knots in the breeze if you look at it. I got the good braiding lady... she was lightning fast and the braids stayed in and looked good until I took them out. It cost twenty-five bucks to get my hair braided back to my ears, kind of. (I have pictures which will make it to flickr in a day or two.) While the braiding lady worked on my hair, La and I talked to her about how the braid industry works. It turns out that the government licenses sections of the beach to a given braid lady. There are licenses to be a braid lady. There are standards and quality control and all kinds of shit. It's all very organized.
The only downside to having your hair braided is that you have to remember to sunscreen your head to keep the parts between braids from burning. Otherwise it's quite comfortable and really keeps your hair out of your eyes. Also, it's unfun to disassemble. I'm doing that at the moment, in between spates of typing. (The tasteful brown beads from the hair braids will be my souvenir of the trip to the Bahamas. Gonna make 'em into a keychain.) Anyway, to my never-had-cornrows lexience, I recommend getting cornrows as part of your Bahamas experience. It's kind of neat and they braid like ninety miles an hour so it doesn't take long.
The beaches are beautiful white sand, firm near the water, soft and powdery not-near-the-water. There were not a whole lot of shells where we were, but we were not at all the beaches on the island. The water continued that amazing blue color that looked very swimming pool. It totally isn't fake. There were not a lot of waves where we were (Port Lucaya, the Island Seas beach, and the Gold Rock Beach out by the park with the caves). We did not feel it was crowded at Port Lucaya, but a taxi driver dude said that spring break ran for three weeks and was mostly over by the time we got there. Our hotel was running about 25% occupancy, we thought. It did not seem at all full.
Following beach, we did dinner at the Latin Fusion place, which was good but expensive (all the food was kind of pricey -- it has to be shipped in b/c there's very little native agriculture. Also, apparently the dirt doesn't grow things for shit.) and not sufficiently tex-mex for my tastes. And then we had a fruity drink and went home. We tried the hotel bar for fruity drinks. They did not succeed at the pina colada. :( I didn't finish it.
On Saturday, we went out to breakfast at The AfterDeck, in Port Lucaya. They did an OK breakfast, but again with the massively leisurely service. *sigh* We took a banana boat (red shark, really) ride on the beach. It's a big inflatable thing with handholds and a long tow rope. An enterpreneur person rides a personal watercraft and tows the banana boat thing along with all ya'll holding on to it. That was actually pretty fun in an about to die sort of way. We all had life jackets, though, so death was, in truth, not that likely. After that, we went to the snorkeling place.
I thought the snorkeling was going to be lame. The water you can see on the beach, the bottom is just entirely sand and there's not a damn thing at all to see. It's totally sand. White sand. Boring white sand. But for snorkeling, you get on a boat and they drive you out a bit, where the water is still clear but it looks like there's mud and shit or something on the bottom. There's patterns, anyway, but it doesn't look like much. So you get your pfd and your fins and your snorkel and mask. You get basic instructions on how to snorkel (it is not difficult). And then you hop your ass in the water. It's colder than hell and the mask mashes your nose and it's weird and you sound all Darth Vader with the breathing.
And then you stick your fucking face in the water and it's like being in god damned Finding Nemo. Really. It looks just like that. Okay, no sea anemones that I saw but there were purple fan things and there were monkey tail things that swayed in the breeze and there were sergeant major fish and I saw the Dorie fish from Nemo and I saw a barracuda and I saw blue fish and green fish and so fucking MANY fish. Seriously a lot of fish. Millions of fish. It was like an aquarium only without the glass. There were fish everywhere, just past the reach of your arms. And they were all so pretty, just kind of swimming around and not scared. There were corals. Parrotfish. Yellowtails. Black with little purple trim fish. FUCKING MILLIONS OF PRETTY FISH. Seriously, this is an excellent deal. The water (our tour dude said) is about ten, twelve feet deep and it's clear to the bottom and you can see all the fish and you can swim around with your fins and stuff and the fish don't much run (swim?) away and seriously, if "go snorkeling" is even remotely on the list of things you think you might like to do at the Bahamas, go for it. It's an excellent deal at twice the price.
We did that for an hour. I did like fifty minutes because I was freezing to death for real, could not feel my fingers at all. My lips were blue. But it was amazing. So. Go Snorkeling. IT DOES NOT SUCK. Also ask your boat dude about the fish, odds are good he knows a fair amount on the subject.
Then we went to dinner, at Zorba's, a greek eatery at Port Lucaya. Zorba's (owned by greeks) had the best waitstaff we saw the whole time we were there... and it still wasn't to USian standards of, y'know, your local Denny's or similar. Food was good, but pricey. We had baklava for dessert, one piece for three people. (La doesn't eat honey.) It was sticky but good.
Home again. Next morning we got up and breakfasted at the hotel cafe. It was breakfast but nothing special and again at the speed of snails. Jeez, folks, we have Stuff to Do, here. We went to Port Lucaya for some shopping (the horse people buy stuff for everyone back home when they are on vacation) and met up with the dude who was pitching banana boat rides yesterday -- the wind was up and they couldn't do banana boat rides or anything else on the beach, so he offered to find us a driver so that we could do something else. We opted to go look at the cave park on the end of the island and also check out that beach.
The park is kind of rustic but it has a good walkable trail and some nice exhibit explainings about the caves and stuff. It's comparable to our state parks. Across the street, there is a boardwalk trail over the mangroves (this is on the way to the beach) and you can look down into the water and see the fish there. They weren't as bright as the reef fish but they were still interesting. If we'd had more time, we could have looked for birds, but we wanted the beach. (It's called Gold Rock Beach and apparently they filmed parts of PoTC2 there.) When we got there, it was high tide and there wasn't much beach to start. However, when the tide started to go out, the beach showed up all of a sudden, it being extremely flat and not sloped at all. There was NOBODY AT ALL at the beach. It was empty except for us and like five other people. It was quiet. Nothing was painted "beach" colors. Nobody was blaring music over crappy speakers. There was the ocean and the sand and blown-over trees bleached white and that was pretty much it. It was amazing. Because the beach was so flat, the tide going out made beautiful patterns in the sand. I hope my pictures of that come out.
We rode the minivan back to our hotel, got our luggage, and went aboard the boat. We rode the boat to Port Everglades, took a cab back to the unsleepable airport, flew back to BWI, drove home to here. My cats were glad to see me.
And that was my trip to Grand Bahama Island.
When undying prose is lost due to an unscheduled laptop reboot, the best you can do is provide a poor shadow of what was. *sigh* The things I do for you folks.
In case you haven't been following along, Trys's friend Beth "won" a "free" trip to Grand Bahama Island for the purposes of being marketed a condo. The trip was for four people, who were originally to be Heather, La, Beth, and Trys. Heather could not get off work. I have a passport and can get off work, so I was the replacement person.
First off, any free trip that you win to the Bahamas is not free. There are port fees and there is airfare and there are meals and you have to spend an otherwise beautiful Friday morning learning about condos ("vacation clubs") instead of being on the beach. However, if you take that as read and are willing to endure the condo dog-n-pony show in order to go on the trip, there are good things to be had.
We flew down to Fort Lauderdale Airport on Wednesday night out of BWI airport. We got to Fort Lauderdale Airport at around 11:30 PM and our boat to Grand Bahama Island (hereafter GBI) was departing from Port Everglades Port at Oh-Dark-Hundred the next morning, so we opted to camp out in the Fort Lauderdale Airport and get a cab to the port bright and early. For saving, you know. Now, Fort Lauderdale has a very nice airport that unfortunately rates a 2 (out of ten) on the sleepability scale. Given their prominence in the Spring Break trade, they're probably quite happy about this.
The seating at the Fort Lauderdale Airport has lovely fixed metal armrests dividing the seating up into ass-sized amounts. The armrests are not moveable or adjustable. Fucking Gumby could not drape himself over the armrests of the seating at the Fort Lauderdale Airport for a comfortable nap. So, the seating is pretty much a wash.
There are floors, though, right? Yes. Yes, there are. The floors of the Fort Lauderdale Airport are concrete, with thin, unpadded carpet over them. They would be workable except that the airport is kept at a cool 65 (felt like it, anyway) so that the concrete floors are unwelcomingly cold. I was in long sleeves and jeans and had a poly blanket and I was still cold. The rest of my party was shivering underneath beach towels. Besides being cold, the floors in the Fort Lauderdale Airport are cleaned at around 2 AM by a madman driving the hybrid offspring of a forklift and a Zamboni. He did not actually hit us with that thing, but it was close.
Ambient background music in the Fort Lauderdale Airport is the peppier sort of classical, stuff with a very active cello line. Oh, and there's also a cellphone-like noise that emits from the TSA area every fifty-three seconds or so, all night long. It was not what I would call restful.
Really, in a triumph of public space planning, the sidewalk outside the airport would have been more comfortable, warmer, and quieter than the airport itself was.
On the plus side, we had no difficulty catching a cab ($20.00) from the airport to the port port so that we could rendezvous with our boat the following morning. Our cab driver forgot his ID (required at port entrance to prevent terrorists from boarding our cruise ships) so we had to walk from the port entrance to the part of the port where our boat was located. In the dark. Toting all our stuff. Without a clear idea of where the boat might be or what it looked like. We still tipped the cab driver. We are idiots.
We located the boat and boarded the boat. The boat-boarding stuff, like the airplane-boarding-stuff, had clearly been designed by Temple Grandin for the comfort and placidity of cows. It didn't do much for me, though.
Our boat (the Discovery Sun, operating with these people) was not a huge boat but it did have rather a lot of deck chairs, a movie theater, Italian league footie on the television, a casino, a massive amount of indoor-outdoor carpeting, excessively loud music near the pool, beige claustrophobic bathrooms, lifeboats with orange interiors, a lackluster buffet (we got breakfast on the way out, dinner on the way back), and amazingly tacky $2.00 plastic souvenir cups in a variety of untasteful colors. I bought one of the souvenir cups because, for a one-time payment of two bucks, it could be refilled endlessly with the house-liquor Adult Beverage of Your Choice, provided that your choice was one of the following: strawberry dacquiri, pina colada, bahama mama, or bloody mary. You could get free drinks in smaller, free, non-souvenir cups but then you had to cast Summon Drinks Man a lot more often and since the summoning of the Drinks Man required tipping the guy, we wanted to maximize our dollars there. (Having to drink out of Barbie-Pink plastic is a small price to pay for bottomless pina coladas.)
From Port Everglades to GBI (or vice-versa), it's about four hours on a boat. On the way out, I spent that time enjoying (I use the term loosely) the yaw, pitch, and roll of the boat while lying prone on a deck chair with my blanket over me in a vain and futile attempt to be warm in the thin and watery light that passed for sunshine. That did not work very well but it did eventually get warm about the time we hit GBI. On the way back to Port Everglades, I spent my four hours of boat time standing on the deck of the boat, against the rail, moderately damp from the ocean spray, trying to see how many pina coladas I could drink before I got tired of them (6, plus one bloody mary). While I was not cold due to all the liquor, I was still not very happy about the yaw/pitch/roll business. In summary, I feel very firmly that cruise boat travel is an unpleasantry unredeemable by a bottomless pina colada. In the future, I will fly to the fucking island and spend that eight hours on the beach.
The first thing I noticed about GBI, when we could see it from the boat, was that the water was exactly that unbelieveable turquoise color that it is in the promotional materials. Seriously, shit looks like a fucking swimming pool. It's darker blue where it is deeper and light like aquamarines or something where it's shallow, but it's unreal for people whose experience with the Atlantic is the grey-green waters of the east coast. I would have said it was like that for tourists but we first met the water at a port. There were shipping containers and cranes and big piles of sand (don't know why) and it wasn't all that attractive. The water lapping at the edges of the concrete supporting stacks of shipping containers was still an unearthly blue, entirely unlike the Atlantic I know.
The second thing I noticed, after we'd gotten off the boat and gotten into the mini-van deals that were schlepping us to our respective hotels, was that the island was not what I'd call economically healthy. This was an impression that stayed with me through the duration of the trip, with cause. First, there are a lot of burnt out, deserted, abandoned, half-finished, uninhabited, and otherwise distressed real estates. The stuff that is distressed is not beachfront, mostly, but it's still not bustling. Locals say the island got hammered by hurricanes in 2004, feel that is a sufficient explanation for the distressed real estate market. I'm not sure it is... my overall impression, on GBI, was that it was significantly overbuilt and underfunded. Overall, I felt that the (municipal) infrastructure and (private) financing to build/maintain first class tourist stuff simply didn't exist. This impression was backed up by the
At any rate, we took the mini-van things to our hotel, which was the Island Palm Resort located in Downtown Freeport. It's not on the beach and we did not expect it to be on the beach so were not disappointed. Check-in took a bit because we were on the free-with-condo-marketing trip so we had to fill out more invasive paperwork than I would have choosen to fill out otherwise. We were served plastic cups of bahama mama (virgin) punch and offered potato chips and weird-tasting pretzels while we did the paperwork and had same processed at a very leisurely pace.
The room was a double, nicely-sized, but the bathroom was on the small side and we felt that the hot water supply was not sufficient. To be fair, there were four of us with waist-length hair and it's possible that we were heavier users of hot water than the average bear. We did not feel that the hotel desk service was comparable with what you'd find at a mid-range hotel in Baltimore or Philadelphia. We had to ask (more than once) for as many washcloths as we had people in the room, for an extra pillow, for an extra blanket, for bath tissue. We did eventually get everything but the extra pillow, but it wasn't on the first try.
I admit that I am a tightly-wrapped American. I tend to live, breathe, and eat at high pressure and in a hurry. However, since The Bahamas are so close to Florida, I'd hazard a guess that the primary consumer of Bahamas-based resort hotel services is more than likely tightly-wrapped Americans like me. In service industries, it's important to know and understand your customer. Expecting Americans to relax into "island time" or to adapt an "island mindset" is not going to work... especially not about stuff like towels and hot water.
After checking in to the hotel, we walked to the International Bazaar for dinner, where the only place open was the Island (something), a bar/restaurant. The tourist materials (handouts that they give you) pimp the International Bazaar but it shuts down pretty much at 5 PM -- and it's got a lot of empty shop space. I was not particularly encouraged by the International Bazaar, myself, not being a fan of tchotchke shops. Anyway, we had dinner at the Island-whatever, there, outside. It was cold. The service was slow and we were the only people in the place. There was one waitstaff person on duty and I believe she also did the cooking. The food was *good*, just very slow service and an absolutely dead joint.
After dinner, we went back to the hotel to await the free breakfast and condo-marketing session that the morning would bring. Our tv remote didn't work.
In the AM, we were up and about when there was a knock at the door to make sure that we were awake enough to be getting ready for the marketing thing. No problem, we were up. We got in another mini van and trundled away (In the Bahamas, they drive on the left. It's kind of disconcerting.) to the Island Seas Resort, kind of a sister hotel to the Island Palm, except on the beach and newer. I never got the exact relationship between Island Seas and Island Palm, but there's a shuttle runs between the Island Palm and the Island Seas, free for guests of the Island Palm. (The hours are inconvenient and I liked the Port Lucaya beach better -- it had more stuff. But anyway.)
We were met and fed coffee (in styrofoam cups, no real creamer, not really enough space for coffee service) and pre-interviewed about our financial status, then went and did breakfast with our "friend" and salesperson Gwen. Whatever. I don't like the kind of marketing where you have people trying to be your friend. Friendly is OK, friend is not. Anyway, I'm kind of difficult to market to, I suppose, so it's not like they would have had luck even if Gwen had been super at this stuff. La thought she was kind of a beginner at the marketing gig. (They all work on commission. We asked.) However, again going back to the importance of knowing your customers... if you expect me to plunk down 18.5K on a condo (the starting ask price), you need to front a bit. I want real coffee, in ceramic cups, with real cream in metal cream pouring thingies. I'd like sugar bowls and metal spoons. And when you promise me a breakfast as part of my being-marketed-to, I do not expect scrambled eggs, floppy bacon, and (instant) grits on a paper plate, served up by Gwen my marketer. I just don't. With plastic silverware. Look. You want money, you want to attract people, act like this is a condo or vacation club or whatever that you are *proud* of... make us want to be proud of it. Make us want to show our friends or our family or whatever. Marketing with plastic silverware and paper plates is shooting yourself in the foot.
Study US-ian marketing. There'd be a waitstaff person to take our orders, so as not to disrupt Gwen from her more-important business of talking to us. Put the waitstaff person in uniform. China, silverware made of metal. Fresh fruit, real juice, ceramic coffee cups. Grits are OK, sausage, non-floppy bacon, and teach someone to cook eggs for over easy, sunny side up, over light, scrambled, cheese omelet. Homefries would be nice. You could also do it as steam table with two servers if that suited better. But don't make your marketing girl the waitress as well. For fuck's sake, front a little.
I realize there are a lot of cold calls on these trip-with-marketing things. Screen people a little bit better, but front more. You'll see more sales, honest.
We walkthrough the units and look at the facilities. Gwen needs work on her patter, but we looksee anyway to be polite. The units are well-laid out, roomy, furnished attractively. But there are little details that say *cheap* to me. It's enough to pass muster on the first glance, but then... no. Now, admittedly, I am looking for stuff like that because of the paper plates and the plastic forks and the soggy bacon and the lack of fruit at breakfast. Maybe I'm seeing what I look for?
Okay, tour done. We admit to at most being interested in the 1-br unit because it's cheaper. It (sleeps 4 or something) is 18.5K. They need money down, will finance the remainder at 18% for a fairly short term. What this buys you is thirty years of right-to-use for one week a year plus also you have to pay a yearly maintaining fee and you can swap it with other units elsewhere or something. My eyes were glazing over at that point, but I'd finance at 18%, too. We mumble about not having that kind of money. The price goes down and down. We meet the closer, whose name I do not remember, but she's pretty and good at her job. We get a "final offer" which is not final but which is like 11K. We dick around some more. I want to go to the fucking beach. We get a more-final final offer which is 9.9K. Offers are only good for the day they're made, that's printed on the offer paper. They keep wanting to know who the person with the money is. La is the only one who makes the "income limit" that they screen for. I have the money but there's no fucking way I am ever going to buy a condo in the Bahamas and anyway I won't pass a credit check b/c not a high enough credit score. Trys and Beth are too young for their metrics. So, eventually, they let us go. We get four bottles of Bacardi (small bottles, not big ones but not "hotel minibar" size either) and four tshirts advertising Island Seas Resort. The tshirts are see-through, again shooting themselves in the foot with insufficient follow-through on the marketing. And we get half off a Tourist Activity of Our Choice. We choose snorkeling even though none of us has ever snorkeled. Snorkeling was scheduled for the following day (Saturday) in the afternoon.
And that was the marketing thing.
It being about lunchtime, we went to Port Lucaya (shops, food, beach across the street) for lunch and beach. Lunch was at The Prop Club, which made the best pina colada I had while I was at GBI. Food was good, but not the desserts. (Get a second pina colada instead.) I didn't have a decent dessert the whole time I was there.
At the beach, we were hit by some of the beachly enterpreneur types. This is an occupational hazard of beachgoing. They take no for an answer, so don't stress over it too badly. Some enterpreneurs hawk ankle jewelry and other sorts of jewelry (which I do not wear) and some sell tshirts and some offer you banana boat rides and some offer to braid your hair with beads in it. La and I opted for the braiding with beads. I have straight, fine brown (and grey) hair to my waist. It's baby fine and slippery. It knots in the breeze if you look at it. I got the good braiding lady... she was lightning fast and the braids stayed in and looked good until I took them out. It cost twenty-five bucks to get my hair braided back to my ears, kind of. (I have pictures which will make it to flickr in a day or two.) While the braiding lady worked on my hair, La and I talked to her about how the braid industry works. It turns out that the government licenses sections of the beach to a given braid lady. There are licenses to be a braid lady. There are standards and quality control and all kinds of shit. It's all very organized.
The only downside to having your hair braided is that you have to remember to sunscreen your head to keep the parts between braids from burning. Otherwise it's quite comfortable and really keeps your hair out of your eyes. Also, it's unfun to disassemble. I'm doing that at the moment, in between spates of typing. (The tasteful brown beads from the hair braids will be my souvenir of the trip to the Bahamas. Gonna make 'em into a keychain.) Anyway, to my never-had-cornrows lexience, I recommend getting cornrows as part of your Bahamas experience. It's kind of neat and they braid like ninety miles an hour so it doesn't take long.
The beaches are beautiful white sand, firm near the water, soft and powdery not-near-the-water. There were not a whole lot of shells where we were, but we were not at all the beaches on the island. The water continued that amazing blue color that looked very swimming pool. It totally isn't fake. There were not a lot of waves where we were (Port Lucaya, the Island Seas beach, and the Gold Rock Beach out by the park with the caves). We did not feel it was crowded at Port Lucaya, but a taxi driver dude said that spring break ran for three weeks and was mostly over by the time we got there. Our hotel was running about 25% occupancy, we thought. It did not seem at all full.
Following beach, we did dinner at the Latin Fusion place, which was good but expensive (all the food was kind of pricey -- it has to be shipped in b/c there's very little native agriculture. Also, apparently the dirt doesn't grow things for shit.) and not sufficiently tex-mex for my tastes. And then we had a fruity drink and went home. We tried the hotel bar for fruity drinks. They did not succeed at the pina colada. :( I didn't finish it.
On Saturday, we went out to breakfast at The AfterDeck, in Port Lucaya. They did an OK breakfast, but again with the massively leisurely service. *sigh* We took a banana boat (red shark, really) ride on the beach. It's a big inflatable thing with handholds and a long tow rope. An enterpreneur person rides a personal watercraft and tows the banana boat thing along with all ya'll holding on to it. That was actually pretty fun in an about to die sort of way. We all had life jackets, though, so death was, in truth, not that likely. After that, we went to the snorkeling place.
I thought the snorkeling was going to be lame. The water you can see on the beach, the bottom is just entirely sand and there's not a damn thing at all to see. It's totally sand. White sand. Boring white sand. But for snorkeling, you get on a boat and they drive you out a bit, where the water is still clear but it looks like there's mud and shit or something on the bottom. There's patterns, anyway, but it doesn't look like much. So you get your pfd and your fins and your snorkel and mask. You get basic instructions on how to snorkel (it is not difficult). And then you hop your ass in the water. It's colder than hell and the mask mashes your nose and it's weird and you sound all Darth Vader with the breathing.
And then you stick your fucking face in the water and it's like being in god damned Finding Nemo. Really. It looks just like that. Okay, no sea anemones that I saw but there were purple fan things and there were monkey tail things that swayed in the breeze and there were sergeant major fish and I saw the Dorie fish from Nemo and I saw a barracuda and I saw blue fish and green fish and so fucking MANY fish. Seriously a lot of fish. Millions of fish. It was like an aquarium only without the glass. There were fish everywhere, just past the reach of your arms. And they were all so pretty, just kind of swimming around and not scared. There were corals. Parrotfish. Yellowtails. Black with little purple trim fish. FUCKING MILLIONS OF PRETTY FISH. Seriously, this is an excellent deal. The water (our tour dude said) is about ten, twelve feet deep and it's clear to the bottom and you can see all the fish and you can swim around with your fins and stuff and the fish don't much run (swim?) away and seriously, if "go snorkeling" is even remotely on the list of things you think you might like to do at the Bahamas, go for it. It's an excellent deal at twice the price.
We did that for an hour. I did like fifty minutes because I was freezing to death for real, could not feel my fingers at all. My lips were blue. But it was amazing. So. Go Snorkeling. IT DOES NOT SUCK. Also ask your boat dude about the fish, odds are good he knows a fair amount on the subject.
Then we went to dinner, at Zorba's, a greek eatery at Port Lucaya. Zorba's (owned by greeks) had the best waitstaff we saw the whole time we were there... and it still wasn't to USian standards of, y'know, your local Denny's or similar. Food was good, but pricey. We had baklava for dessert, one piece for three people. (La doesn't eat honey.) It was sticky but good.
Home again. Next morning we got up and breakfasted at the hotel cafe. It was breakfast but nothing special and again at the speed of snails. Jeez, folks, we have Stuff to Do, here. We went to Port Lucaya for some shopping (the horse people buy stuff for everyone back home when they are on vacation) and met up with the dude who was pitching banana boat rides yesterday -- the wind was up and they couldn't do banana boat rides or anything else on the beach, so he offered to find us a driver so that we could do something else. We opted to go look at the cave park on the end of the island and also check out that beach.
The park is kind of rustic but it has a good walkable trail and some nice exhibit explainings about the caves and stuff. It's comparable to our state parks. Across the street, there is a boardwalk trail over the mangroves (this is on the way to the beach) and you can look down into the water and see the fish there. They weren't as bright as the reef fish but they were still interesting. If we'd had more time, we could have looked for birds, but we wanted the beach. (It's called Gold Rock Beach and apparently they filmed parts of PoTC2 there.) When we got there, it was high tide and there wasn't much beach to start. However, when the tide started to go out, the beach showed up all of a sudden, it being extremely flat and not sloped at all. There was NOBODY AT ALL at the beach. It was empty except for us and like five other people. It was quiet. Nothing was painted "beach" colors. Nobody was blaring music over crappy speakers. There was the ocean and the sand and blown-over trees bleached white and that was pretty much it. It was amazing. Because the beach was so flat, the tide going out made beautiful patterns in the sand. I hope my pictures of that come out.
We rode the minivan back to our hotel, got our luggage, and went aboard the boat. We rode the boat to Port Everglades, took a cab back to the unsleepable airport, flew back to BWI, drove home to here. My cats were glad to see me.
And that was my trip to Grand Bahama Island.
