Nassau Letter

The jitney was bowling along nicely, the sea sparkling alongside the road, the gentle breeze sending merry ripples to the shore. The passengers were a mixture of locals going about their daily business and tourists returning to their hotels after a hard afternoon’s shopping on Bay Street. Occasionally the driver would respond to a call of, “Bus stop,” or a raised hand from a would-be traveller at the roadside.

I was about half way home when the driver slowed and pulled in under the shade of some Casuarina trees at the roadside, where a drinks-vendor was doing a good trade in the warm afternoon. The driver turned to his fares with a cheery, “Give me a minute, folks” and called an order to the vendor. In a short(ish) while, two mountainous strawberry daiquiris were passed through the open window to the driver and his mate, and we proceeded on our way. We passengers grinned at one-another. It could only happen in the Bahamas!

One quickly gets used to this laid-back approach. Why worry, why hurry? Chill out, mon! Tomorrow is another day. And the sea is too green, the sky too blue to fret. Everything happens in its own good time. The important thing is that it does happen. The cheery locals, with beaming white smiles on their broad black faces certainly don’t suffer from high blood-pressure – until they get behind the wheel of a car! Then it’s a different matter. They have to be where they’re going this very minute, and if you’re in the way, you’d better look out!

Bahamians have an enduring love-affair with their vehicles, be they clapped-out rust-buckets or gleaming new limousines, parked outside crumbling wooden shacks. The car is king, but while indicators seem be optional extras, give-way lines are mostly too worn-out to be noticeable and traffic-lights are hung just out of eye-line, road users are not without a certain sense of courtesy. One bip on the horn for “please let me through,” two bips for “thank you.” Someone will usually oblige. Road deaths showed an alarming increase last year and the police are cracking down. But the check-points are usually in the same place on the same day each week……….!

The one place I don’t drive is downtown to Bay Street, the tourist Mecca. The hassle of parking there is not worth the effort when the No 10 jitney stops right at the bottom of my drive every five-minutes or so, and will take me however far I want to go for $1.

The jitneys represent the local transport system. They are not run by a national bus company. On the contrary they are privately owned and leased by their drivers, whose take-home for the day depends on the number of passengers they have carried. On the lucrative stretch past the hotels on Bay Street, it’s not unusual to find the jitney you’re on doubling back in the hope of collecting passengers it may have missed on the first pass.

To ride a jitney is to enjoy a slice of true Bahamian life. Each new passenger to board greets his fellow travellers with a courteous ‘Good morning/afternoon’ or maybe ‘How’re you doin’?’ As you bowl along you are regaled by a local radio station – it might be gospel, Caribbean, reggae, hip-hop or the latest news. On the one occasion I had to complain about the volume, I was asked if I wanted to get off! That’s one of the very few times that I’ve found my driver anything but courteous and obliging. On one occasion, when two tourists found themselves on the wrong jitney, the driver, when asked to drop them as close as possible to the zoo, made a detour to take them all the way before rejoining his prescribed route.

Yes there is crime on the island and, like everywhere else, it’s on the increase and mostly drug- or family-related. In the year and a half we’ve been in Nassau I’ve had no personal experience of it and have found the local people only friendly and helpful. To their cheery greeting, ‘All is well?’ I can honestly say, ‘All is well’