USA to The Bahamas, March 2022

I had not left home for almost 5 months since October. There was a plan to go to Sudan in December 2021 and it spectacularly failed. I easily got a Sudanese visa that looked like a good omen for the trip. In order to visit the Sudanese consulate in person, I bought a ticket with a stopover in Washington, D.C. when returning to Colorado from Europe. The usual procedure is to submit the documents and to wait for the passport with a visa in the mail. Leaving my passport with someone always makes me nervous. I begged the consulate receptionist to expedite the process. She promised to help. I paid $154 cash and my visa was ready within 2 hours. I even had plenty of time before my flight to Denver.

Then things took a turn for the worse. A military coup in Sudan caused a temporary closure of its consulates. In our group of 6, only me and another person had visas. We needed at least 4 people to travel together as tourists. Just days before the trip, the consulates reopened and the rest of the group received Sudanese visas. I breathed a sigh of relief. We were going despite the coup.

In the morning of my departure date, I opened an email with a Covid test result that I did on the previous day. It said there in red that the test result was positive. I did not believe my eyes. How could that be possible? I traveled so much and I did these tests so often that I stopped worrying about the results. They were always negative and besides, I had no Covid symptoms. The test result turned out to be a false positive. I retested, twice. My husband and my contacts did that too. All tests came back negative and nobody had any symptoms but the plane left without me. It was too late to do anything about the test result and to change the ticket. The group went to Sudan while I was quarantined at home. My positive test result was reported to the county authorities and despite a negative test right after that, I was required to stay indoors for 2 weeks anyway.

Losing an opportunity to see Sudan was devastating. On top of that, winter blues were affecting me. I wanted to be in a warm place. Then came the war – on the 24^th of February, Russia attacked Ukraine. The news got gloomier with every day. I spent all time glued to some kind of screen – TV, computer or smartphone. Concentrating on anything else became impossible. I stopped working as a phone interpreter – my mind was distracted and I did a bad job. I woke up at 3 a.m. to read news updates. Kiev was holding up against all odds. I went back to sleep but photos of the bombed-out Ukrainian houses stayed with me. Depression was settling in. It could not go on like this much longer. I had to get out – to break the crust again and to breathe the air of the road.

A few days before the war broke up, I was browsing different travel sites and came across an extremely cheap one-way ticket from Denver to Nassau. It was 12.5K miles plus $6.50 tax on American. The Bahamas sounded like a good destination for March and I had not been there yet. I could not miss this opportunity and bought the ticket.

Going to The Bahamas during the pandemic required jumping through many hoops – registration on www.travel.gov.bs, submitting travel documents aka a passport scan, creating a trip, uploading a negative Covid test result, paying $40 for a health visa and finally, applying for approval to travel – all in this specific order.

The whole process was time-constrained. A lot of it had to be squashed into the last 48 hours before the flight. I applied for a health visa on Sunday, the response from Bahamas Ministry of Health came on Monday evening. They obviously had a person who reviewed my paperwork. It was not an auto approval like some countries do that. My flight to Nassau was at 6.30 a.m. on Tuesday. I was biting my nails all Monday being unsure if I should finish packing for the trip or it would be a similar experience to the plan to go to Sudan that fell through.

My accommodation in Nassau was a private apartment. I was supposed to pay directly to the owner whose name was Sonia. She was very patient with me and agreed to wait for the payment until I got authorization to travel. Sonia also booked a pickup at the airport for me that was cheaper than a regular taxi.

I duly went to bed on Monday night and could not sleep. Got up at 2.30 a.m. to catch the bus to the airport. Of course, Colorado was saying ‘goodbye’ to me with the temperature below freezing. I could not get out of it fast enough.

Several hours later, I arrived into a different world of sunshine, humidity and happy vacationers who perhaps heard that there is a country called Ukraine but would not be able to find it on the map.

My apartment was more like a condo with a small backyard. It was in a typical Bahamian neighborhood, close to the beach where the locals go to for a swim and within a walking distance from downtown – exactly how I like it. Sonia’s neighbor gave me a lift to the area where the restaurants were. The meal was fish with rice and beans, a rather large portion. I asked for a box to take half of it with me. That would be my dinner because I planned to stay in the condo for the rest of the day and to go to bed early to catch on my sleep.

I was confidently walking back to the condo until I came to a place that I could not recognize. I am directionally challenged. I was born without an internal compass and I can get lost in the area where I have been living for the past 20 years. Frequent traveling improved my ability to navigate but apparently not enough.

The condo was at the dead end of a small street, one out of many that crisscrossed the neighborhood. I realized that I did not have the exact address and vaguely remembered how the house looked from outside. Asking for help was useless because I could not explain where I needed to go. Google Maps was confused as much as I and it was unable to pinpoint my location. Darkness fell quickly which made orientation more difficult. Frustrated, I threw the box with my meal leftovers into a large dumpster where a stray cat was searching for something to eat. The box did not come with a bag and I grew tired of carrying it in my hand. The box landed in front of the cat and opened on the impact. The frightened cat jumped but the infamous cat’s curiosity made him investigate the box contents. Well, at least the cat was going to have a good dinner.

Then I had an idea. Instead of looking for the condo, I should ask Google to take me to something close it. I recalled seeing some country club nearby. Google easily located the club and displayed the map on my phone. I wanted to kick myself after that because I walked past the condo several times. I just needed to make one more turn to get to it.

It was a relief to get to the condo, finally. I ate a snack that I brought with me in the backpack, wrote in my diary and called it a day.

Nassau, The Bahamas