Tour of Cat Island

Monday, we rented a car (or rather the resort had a rental car delivered to us) for a drive of Cat Island. One of our destinations was the Hermitage, the highest point in the Bahamas. I'll do a separate post about that.

These are typical homes of the island.

This was the view we had as we drove around. The road didn't parallel the coast; I suppose it's expensive to maintain sea walls. Plus there is only one road that runs the length of the island. There are some small dirt roads, but even then, not many. Most of the small dirt roads are really long driveways.
There were also a good many abandoned buildings.
And, we saw a few displays like this one. I guess it's items washed ashore.
We found The Bat Cave.
Islanders sometimes seek shelter here in case of a hurricane.
It looked pretty creepy to me; I didn't venture very far in. (Plus we stirred up a rat on the outside; who knows what's inside.) Dave went a bit further and said it smelled unpleasant.
This was looking across the road from the Bat Cave. You'd think you'd search for something a bit farther from the ocean in case of hurricane.

Our rental car. A Nissan.
The nice antenna. We later noticed several of these on cars on the island and in Nassau.

A cool colored boat. With a little Photoshop help to take out the powerlines, this could be a neat picture. A word about power. The island is powered by diesel generators. You'd think someone could come up with a hydroelectric means of generating power from the ocean.

The credit union on the island.
A bit of road near a sea wall.
There are two airports on Cat Island; this is the waiting area of the larger on in New Bight.
It's larger because Customs is here.
Dave had to cool off and wash his feet after hiking to the Hermitage. It's interesting to see pine trees at the sea shore.
The island day care.

We had lunch at the Coconut Bar and Restaurant. It was not a great lunch. The conch and fries were too greasy--the oil was not hot enough. The locals attribute it to the lady who runs it being from Jamaica. She was known for her jerk chicken, but it wasn't ready. I really didn't want conch and fries, but that's what she said she had. I hated to walk out. So, we had not-great conch and fries. I suppose it's even worse because Saturday night in Arthur's Town we had excellent conch.

Beautiful trees with bright orange blossoms. Can't remember the name. Seems like it started with a "p".

Then, there's "The Little Dirt Road." The owners of the resort had a great map of the island with points of interest marked. The Little Dirt Road was one; it goes to the beach on the Atlantic coast and the opportunity to find shells and sea glass was supposed to be greater due to it's remoteness. So, we turned onto The Little Dirt Road. (There was a painted plywood sign marking it. I hate that we didn't take a picture. It started out as a dirt road like this.

Then it got more and more narrow. There were steep, rocky inclines that were washed out a bit due to recent rains.
There was this spooky place along the way. The travel notes said to go past this area that looks like it has been cleared for farming. I don't know what you'd farm with the dead trees. I'm not sure what the story is with the white trash bags tied in the trees. I began to think we'd stumble upon some illegal or voodoo activity and be kidnapped or something. You could tell we were only car to travel the little dirt road since the rains. I considered asking Dave to turn back a few times, but where would we turn around? Finally after 20 minutes, we arrived at the beach.It was littered with seaweed, conch shells, washed up trash, and lots and lots of shells.

I guess this pile of conch shells is from folks who catch the conch and sell it on the island.
After walking around for a while, we headed back. I checked the odometer to see how far we traveled. Four km in 20 minutes. Damn that metric stuff. Our speedometer was metric, too. But the speed limits were posted in miles per hour. Really? How am I supposed to do those conversions? I think that Dave's 100K race was about 62 miles, so I used that as my point of reference. And, we decided that there probably wasn't a radar gun on the island to be used to issue a speeding ticket. Plus, we weren't driving that fast because we were soaking in the sights.

This is a picture of the town square in Arthur's Town.
And, this is the police station.
We stopped and paid $6.25 a gallon to fill the car back to halfway. We put 4 gallons in it; again, I wish I made a picture of the "filling station." There are lots of little things that I really would liked to have made a picture of, but I was trying to be respectful. I'm sure the islanders might not take kindly to me snapping pictures of every little thing. Anyway, the gas station was one pump between the road and the ocean. A lady unlocked it for us and might have made change from her bra. I wasn't paying super close attention (and at press time, Dave is unavailable for consultation).

I dropped Dave off at Orange Creek and had my hand at driving on the left side of the dirt road for 2 miles back to the resort. I didn't meet a soul. Prior to this, I neglected to mention, we had to drive on the left side of the road. Thankfully, despite the metric speedometer and odometer, the car had the steering wheel on the "American side." You know, the gas gauge was standard for America with 1/2 marked versus .5; you'd think there would be some continuity. But I guess fractions are universal--especially 1/2. But the hash marks were in 1/4's and 1/8's. Oh well. Dave did a great job driving on the left. I only had to remind him once, when we emerged from the little dirt road to "keep left."

We had a great time driving around the island. A few hours was really all we needed.