The lizards have curly tails, the lighthouse wears red stripes and commuters never worry about crowded highways-they go by boat.
That`s the way things are in the Abacos, the northernmost group of islands in the Bahamas.
These are islands truly in the stream, far removed from the glitzy Bahamas of Nassau and Freeport.
You won`t find casinos here, nor high-rise hotels. You will find friendly people and a laid-back way of life.
You still can watch a craftsman build a dinghy by hand, using native wood. You can stroll on a beach 7 1/2 miles long and run into fewer than a dozen people. You can dip a line in the lucid waters almost anywhere and bring in a tasty fish.
If that kind of life appeals, you can rent a room or a house for a spell and blend in. Just don`t expect high-style, high-tech living. The people of the Abacos keep things pretty simple.
The main road in Hope Town, for example, is about two sidewalks wide and rarely sees a motor vehicle. Menus often take a down-home tack, offering native food such as papaya, conch, mango chutney and chick peas. (The chef at the Great Abaco Beach Hotel even prepares an excellent pate of wild boar, an animal native to Great Abaco Island.)
As is to be expected in an island environment, the surrounding sea is the center of activity for residents and visitors.
Water activity rules
”If you don`t go on or under the water, you`ll get bored pretty quickly,” said Jim Kerr, publisher of Abaco Life, a quarterly newspaper.
Locals travel regularly between the islands to shop, visit and do business. Peggy Thompson, for instance, who grew up in Orlando but moved to the islands when she married an Abaco native, divides her time between a home on Great Abaco Cay and a business on Elbow Cay.
Visitors, more pleasure-bound, do the same. There are no monster sightseeing buses here. You want an excursion, you go down to the marina and board an Albury`s Ferry Service boat.
Example: From Marsh Harbour, the chief city of the Abacos, you can take a 25-minute ride to Man-O-War Cay, where you can browse among shops, visit a boat builder or watch craftsmen make trendy purses and ditty bags from colorful sailcloth. Reboard the cruiser for a 15-minute voyage to Hope Town, where you can climb the 99 steps of the candy-striped lighthouse for a real bird`s-eye view of the islands, make a stop at the Wyannie Malone Historical Museum to soak up a little local history and have lunch on a patio overlooking the beach before returning to Marsh Harbour. Cost is $16 for adults, $10 for children.
You also can charter a boat, as a group of us did, to make an island-hopping tour.
On our first stop in Hope Town, we stopped to watch boatmaker Wyner Malone at work. Malone, who has built more than 150 crafts in his 35 years of boat-building, was working on a 12-foot wooden dinghy, the traditional sailboat of the Abacos. He explained that he gets all his wood from the islands.
”See that piece?” he said, pointing to the curved bow stem. ”I have to find a tree with a trunk in that shape.”
He uses a hardwood native to the island but admits that suitable trees are getting harder to find. So are customers because most islanders today want outboard-powered boats.
Haul of crayfish
At the Lighthouse Marina in Hope Town, I watched Andrew Russell, a young resident, unload 10 huge plastic bags of crayfish (what Floridians call lobsters), the booty from 1 1/2 weeks of diving.
”I`ll get about $2,000,” Russell said, enough to send him back to school in South Carolina. Not bad for a college student.
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On another browsing expedition on Man-O-War Cay, we came upon Albury`s Sail Shop, where Ann Albury was busy cutting cotton duck sailcloth to sew into bags. Her great-grandfather Edgar started the company and passed it down to his family, but in the 1960s, as boating went from sails to motors, Albury`s turned to making bags out of sailcloth.
”We use 21 colors and make 42 different kinds of bags,” said Albury. She sells about 1,000 a year and manufactures hats and jackets.
Back at our pad, vacation life became an easygoing affair: a session on the beach, soaking up the tropical sun; a session of watching the curly tailed lizards, unique to the Abacos; a run into the nearest town to scout for handcrafted items to take home; a bike ride (we were based on the largest island, Great Abaco); meals al fresco; a nap before dinner.
My wife opted for a fishing excursion. She would have preferred going for the big-billed sails and marlins in the ocean, but it was too rough that day; so she angled for bottom fish in the protected sound. She brought back a dozen yellowtails, borrowed a kitchen and fried them in batter and snacked on them while enjoying the beach view in a balcony chair.
While visiting Hope Town, we visited the historical museum to learn more about the people of the Abacos, who have an unusual heritage: Most are descendants of American Tories-the colonists who were loyal to Britain during the American Revolution.
Loyalists fled
Persecuted by the patriots who wanted independence (many had their homes and money confiscated), these loyalists moved to areas held by the British at that time, such as New York City and Florida.
But when Britain finally yielded to the patriots after the defeat, the loyalists had nowhere to run. Some emigrated to Britain and Canada, others to British-owned islands in the hemisphere.
A significant number came to Abaco Islands, which then were uninhabited. The first boatload, from New York City, arrived in the Abacos in September 1783. They soon were followed by others from New York, Florida and the Carolinas.
Two centuries later, their descendants exhibit the same kind of dogged loyalty. When the Bahamas were seeking independence from Britain in the 1970s, some Abaco residents-loyalists to the core-petitioned the crown to remain a colony under British rule. When that failed, they tried to secede from the new Bahamian nation.
Today, however, Abaco`s people are well settled into the Bahamian mode. You are much more likely to hear talk of recession than secession, and the new breed of ”immigrants” is more likely to want to get away from pressure than from politics.
Gordon Sadler, 26, and his wife, Mary, are one such couple. After achieving notable success in their high-pressure jobs-he was a pension consultant on Wall Street, she a computer expert-the young Connecticut couple took a sabbatical from their jobs to go sailing for a year or so in the Bahamas. They liked the Abacos so much that they bought a small hotel, the Guana Beach Resort, on Great Guana Cay.
”There`s a lot of not-so-visible work in this,” Sadler said wryly.
For more information, contact the Bahamas Tourist Office, 8600 W. Bryn Mawr Ave., Suite 820, Chicago, Ill. 60631; 312-693-1500.