The people on the islands of the Caribbean are rich and poor. Many of the people that we saw in Nassau, in the Bahamas, seemed to be well-to-do. Right off the boat we were close to police stations, to courts (including the Supreme Court), to judicial offices and judges’ parking spaces. There is an air of professionalism and sobriety here. Outside the immediate port area, which is like a shopping mall in the U.S., there are relatively poor people, just trying to sell stuff — prepared food, fruit, and so forth. And lots of guys offering horse-and-buggy rides or taxi rides to various locations, or individualized tours. (In the photo below you see one fellow offering such a guided tour of Queen Victoria’s Staircase, in Nassau, to my wife Edith.)
In one location (Amber Cove, Dominican Republic) we visited a cultural center which showed us how the delicious Dominican coffee and rum were made traditionally — by hand. We sampled both, and brought ground coffee back to the States. It is clear that the people of the islands depend on tourism to survive, and on the big cash crops.
Coffee-grinding by hand (which I tried out while dancing with others around a mortar, and the islanders sang rhythmically) is an attempt to preserve the old ways (largely for the tourists). Meanwhile, big corporations are using electricity to do the same job much more economically. (Yes, that’s me on the left, or above, in the flowered shirt, taken from a video recorded by Edith.)
The ships are big. That’s me to the right (or below); my ship, Holland America’s Nieuwstatendam, is the smaller one on the right. It had about two thousand passengers, and 975 crew. We traveled between January 18 and 25, 2025.
The cruise ships dominate these islands physically as well as financially. In some places, not far from the beaches or piers, you find failed attempts to capture tourist dollars, like shuttered shops, seaside developments abandoned, and stone walls and rusted fences collapsed.
In contrast, the Bahamas island owned by the Holland America cruise ship line, Half Moon Cay, is very well run, and there is no sign of decay or commercial failure. In fact, the Carnival line (which has bought Holland America) is building its own dock on the island, and there is other construction going on as well. This is effectively a “company town,” with employees coming for short stays from all over the place to keep the machine running as smoothly on land as it does on the seas. The downside of success for the customers of the cruise lines is that the attractions in some cases are very crowded. Our guide on one excursion said that two thousand people passed through a tropical pool on the day that we visited it; needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of space.
I have dozens of other good images, but I know that you’re going to find them overwhelming if I just pile them on here. So write me ([email protected]) if you want to see more, and I’ll put up a gallery through which you can wade :-).
The next blog post will have photos of clouds and flowers, and some of people on the beach or on the quay, most of them shot with my Lensbaby lenses (Spark and Velvet 56). This is the “artsy” stuff that I love.