The Bahamas

The Bahamas is not one destination — it is 700 of them, strung across 100,000 square miles of the clearest water in the Atlantic Ocean. Nassau and Paradise Island are the front door: Atlantis's coral-pink towers rising from the sea, the colonial grid of downtown Nassau (the oldest continuously occupied British colonial town in the Western Hemisphere), Cable Beach's resort strip, and the duty-free shopping of Bay Street. It is the version of the Bahamas that 80% of visitors experience, and it delivers on the promise of tropical infrastructure, warm Bahamian hospitality, and easy logistics from the US east coast.

The Exumas are where the Bahamas stops being a destination and starts being an experience. A chain of 365 cays — one for each day of the year, according to the naming tradition — running southeast from Nassau into increasingly remote, increasingly turquoise water. Big Major Cay (Pig Beach) is the one everyone photographs: semi-wild pigs that swim out to meet boats in a sheltered cay accessible only by boat from Staniel Cay or by private charter. The pigs have been there since at least the 1990s (origin story disputed; probably dumped by a passing ship) and they wade chest-deep in water the colour of a swimming pool advertisement. Thunderball Grotto, 10 minutes by dinghy from Staniel Cay Yacht Club, is a water-filled limestone cave used as a filming location for two Bond films — snorkel in through the underwater entrance and emerge inside a cathedral of light.

The Out Islands are the Bahamas for travellers who have already done Nassau. Eleuthera's pink sand beaches are legitimately pink — the sand is mixed with crushed coral and shell fragments that turn it rose-coloured in certain light. Glass Window Bridge is the narrowest point of land in the Bahamas — 30 metres separates the deep blue Atlantic from the turquoise Bahamian Sound, with the road running between them. Harbour Island (Briland), reached by water taxi from North Eleuthera, is a golf-cart island with some of the most beautiful pastel-painted clapboard architecture in the Caribbean and a 3-mile pink sand beach that surpasses anything in Nassau's vicinity.

Dean's Blue Hole on Long Island is 663 feet deep — the second deepest known blue hole in the world and a freediving site of international pilgrimage. The William's Town area around it looks like a coral flat from a dream. Kamalame Cay off Andros is a genuinely private-island experience — 96 acres, 25 suites, and a house reef that is one of the best shore-based diving sites in the Caribbean.

The Bahamas rewards effort inversely proportional to proximity to Nassau. The further you go, the fewer people you find, and the more extraordinary the water becomes.