Bahamas

Why Here for Your Honeymoon

The Bahamas is the rare honeymoon destination where you can be sipping a Sky Juice on a pink-sand beach three hours after leaving JFK. The archipelago stretches across 100,000 square miles of the Atlantic — 700 islands, 2,400 cays, and only 16 of them inhabited — which means the gap between Nassau's casino-fueled buzz and the empty white crescents of Eleuthera or the Exumas is enormous, even though they share a flag and a currency. Most couples never venture past Paradise Island, and that's a missed opportunity: the Out Islands are where the country reveals itself. Harbour Island's three-mile Pink Sands Beach genuinely glows rose at sunrise, the result of crushed foraminifera shells mixing with white coral. Eleuthera is 110 miles long and barely two miles wide, with the Atlantic crashing on one shore and the Caribbean lapping the other — the Glass Window Bridge lets you see both at once. The Exumas are the postcard: 365 cays scattered across impossibly clear shallows, home to the famous swimming pigs of Big Major Cay, the underwater cave system Thunderball Grotto (where the Bond film was shot), and iguana-covered islands you can have entirely to yourself. Andros, the largest and least visited, is a bonefishing pilgrimage site riddled with blue holes. Beyond the beaches, the culture is distinctly Bahamian: Junkanoo parades explode through the streets on Boxing Day and New Year's, conch is the national obsession (fritters, salad, cracked, in chowder), and rake-and-scrape music has a rhythm you won't hear anywhere else.