A comfortable truth

For the Tiamo concept to succeed, the Hartmans knew that the hotel would have to serve as a gateway to extraordinary natural areas. The day before sitting down with Mike and Petagay, I’d boarded a boat with one of the resort’s “nature concierges,” all of whom are bona fide biologists. We motored west, following the Bight deep into the mangrove maze that makes up much of Andros. At a spot called Miller’s Creek, the boat crew tied up to a tree and helped us overboard into kayaks.

The trip was timed to take advantage of the tidal flow, so paddling was mostly a matter of steering down the watery trails or holding steady in the current to more closely examine marine life clustered around the mangrove roots. Ibises, herons and a belted kingfisher winged above the wetland while sea turtles and tarpon periodically broke the calm surface. As clouds passed overhead, they began to glow blue, a mystery until we floated around a bend and came upon a vast shallows that was reflecting its aquamarine tint up into the sky. A trio of Andros’ famed bonefish dug for prey in the flat’s sandy bottom, their silver tails up and wagging. We nosed the kayaks into the skinny water and sat for a long moment taking it all in, talking about how, if we kept going south or west, we wouldn’t run into another human until we hit Cuba.

Earlier, I’d joined a small group of guides and guests heading just east of the resort to see one of the Caribbean’s most amazing natural attractions: The Crack, part of a 93-mile fracture that connects the world’s longest string of blue holes, those bewitching sapphire eyes that stare up from both land and sea all around Andros and serve as watery entrances to its subterranean wonderland of caves.

We waded up an estuarine stream until it widened into a gently sloping pool and then donned our snorkel gear. One by one we dove underwater and swam through a limestone cave that quickly emerged into a briny lake edged in wickedly sharp ironshore. Following our guide, we finned through the shallow water along a low rock wall festooned with tunicates and sponges until we turned a corner and, suddenly, the bottom dropped away into a dark, fathomless slit. Hanging weightless at the lip of this mesmerizing geological feature was the finest in Freudian snorkeling.

Surrounded by both inland and oceanic blue holes with the world’s third-longest reef system just to the east and endless bonefish flats and mangrove forests stretching away to the west, north and south, the site the Hartmans found for Tiamo was indeed a nexus of natural attractions. “When you added in the distinctive local culture of South Andros with its bush medicine, its traditional fishing, its Junkanoo,” says Petagay, “we felt that this spot had such a specialness, a wonderful sense of place.”

Bob Friel The beach at Tiamo

“The real challenge, then,” says Mike, “was how to build and operate a hotel here, how to attract people to this pristine area while preserving that sense of place.”

It’s the burning question throughout the Caribbean these days: How do you build somewhere  for visitors to stay without destroying the features – the beaches, the reefs, the local culture – that they came to experience?

“The traditional way to do construction in a place like this,” says Mike, “is to bring in heavy equipment and conquer nature.” Even within the Out Islands, a collection of islands and cays of unparalleled beauty where all the most popular attractions – diving, snorkeling, fishing, beaching and boating – are nature-based, there are recent examples of poor planning. Struggling to improve the lives of its people by creating jobs throughout the country, the government allowed one offshore developer to chew through an island and gouge out an oversized marina, piercing and spoiling the supply of fresh water that had always fed three villages. Another developer dredged and filled a tiny island’s fragile harbor to build a golf course that will serve clientele primarily from Florida, which is a 20-minute flight away and already has more than 1,000 golf courses. The result of damaging the environment, alienating local people and building nondescript hotel rooms, condos and homes straight out of a Florida subdivision is complete destruction of the unique character and appeal of an exotic destination. And it’s what the Hartmans wanted to avoid at all cost.

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