Bahamas Out Island News

At 2,300 square miles, Andros is vast in comparison to other Bahamian Islands - but also largely empty.

ANDROS, Bahamas - I never knew there were five or six shades of turquoise and just as many of aquamarine before 1 paddled these quiet shallows. When a cloud passes off and my kayak slips into sunlight, it's as if someone threw a switch and the water lights up - a whole new level of turquoise, and just ahead, a whole new hue of palest aquamarine.

This ethereal palette flows among all the Bahamian islands. But on Andros, an island of immense wilderness expanses, you can be alone with it.

At 2,300 square miles, Andros is vast in comparison to other Bahamian islands but also largely empty. The 9,000 locals live mostly in tiny settlements -loose scatterings of brightly-colored cinder block houses along the road - along the 100-mile eastern coastline.
   
Topography doesn't encourage much else: the island's midsection is densely forest, giving way in the west to endless watery flats. Tidal cuts separate the more populated north from the mellow, lightly-touched south. The few resorts are small, relaxed, and geared toward low-impact ecotourism - an approach encouraged by the government, although a larger, government-backed resort is in the planning stages for North Andros. Keeping the long coastal reef healthy and the world-famous bonefish plentiful are primary concerns.

Close Encounters
Paddling my kayak down a wide, curving channel, I see a big sea turtle doing his turtlething - his head up for a breath, then up for another breath, and another, then gone. Just the same way I would breathe-breathebreathe if I were getting ready to dive and stay down.

He looked incredibly serious and reptilian, and the vision ofhim transports me to the Mesozoic era, when turtles exactly like him swam through flats exactly like these. 1 watch the low, tangled mangroves drifting past and they look just as prehistoric, their roots like spidery legs splayed into the silky white clay.

I feel equally outside-oftime when I walk in Andros' woodlands. The trails wind through twisty trees festooned with bromeliads and orchids. Hummingbirds zip from blossom to blossom. The landscape is littered with sinkholes big enough to swallow a car.

Nature's Secrets
Barbara Moore, an Androsian intimate with this forest, guides me through the maze. Like other local guides involved with ecotourism here, she is eager to share the natural secrets of this unique place. She's a student of her grandmother's art, the local bush medicine,and as she goes she points out plants this one for stomach upset, that one a muscle relaxant, this other an aphrodisiac.

Barbara's eldest child is 30, but she barely looks that old herself; she has a big smile and long, bronze-tipped dreadlocks that sway as she hops over the rocks and holes. She explains how she turned, reluctantly, to a traditional remedy when she was having a problem with one of her pregnancies; it worked, she says, and her eyes light up with mischief as she adds, "I don't know if was the tea ... or if it was because I believed." She laughs, and scoots along the trail.

Blue Holes
I duck and sidestep through dense trees, then suddenly draw up short on a cliff edge and peer down into a black, bottomless lake. A yellow-crowned heron, perched on a branch below, startles and takes flight, its great wings whispering over the glassy water. Andros has over 200 such "blue holes" on land and underwater. Larger flooded sinkholes exist in other places, but Andros is said to have the only tidal blue hole system in the world, first explored by Jacques Cousteau in the 1970s.

Stumbling on a blue hole in the woods is a delight, but underwater blue holes are even better, I find as snorkeling in one of the wide tidal cuts over an expanse of white sand and turtle grass. But what's this? The surface below dips downhill; swaying corals appear, populated with shimmering damselfish and angels and parrotfish. There are clouds of them, neon and iridescent, looping around the finger corals, sea fans and brain corals - lavender, yellow, misty blue - that are everywhere now.

And then, quite by surprise because I'm so distracted by everything, I'm drifting over a yawning cave that goes down down down into watery darkness. The brilliant fish spiral into its depths, darting to its walls, tucking under ledges. I take a couple of quick breaths - like a turtle - and dive, there I am, in the mouth of the blue hole, looking up to swaying sea fans and sea plumes and cushiony corals and spiky corals and schooling, spinning, psychedelic fish. And the cave goes down, below me, forever.

I'd like to be a real amphibian, but I need air. I pop up and break through crystal water into Bahamian sunlight, blow out my snorkel, and inhale the day.