Many years ago, when I was writing for the now dormant website Women Who Live on Rocks, I wrote a blog post about having a new appreciation for my island home. My posts have since disappeared from the website, so I don’t recall the details exactly, but I believe that my appreciation for the Bahamas was revitalized after a 6-week trip to Australia. I loved Australia, it was beautiful in so many ways, and the people welcomed me open-heartedly. But there were a lot of rules, and coming from the land of pirates, it put me on edge.

I’ve always seemed to gravitate toward places on the slightly lawless side of the fence. Not dangerous, but perhaps a bit edgy, and the Bahamas has always been such a place. From the pirate days to shipwrecking, to rum running and drug running, there’s no shortage of inventive people making a living in not-so-honest or officially legal professions. In many “first world” countries, most things work fairly seamlessly, and there’s a level of “fairness” to everything. There are protocols and systems in place for the functionality of daily life, with a sense of uniformity across the board. You get in line and wait your turn, just like everyone else. This means no back-handers to get something done faster.

In places like the Bahamas, it’s all about who you know or how sweet you are to the person behind the plexiglass window with regard to getting things done. This can benefit you at times, and it can really piss you off other times when the person you’re interacting with is in a bad mood and you feel like you’re fighting against all odds to do something simple like register your car.

For years Mark and I have been keeping our eyes out for places in the world where we can retire. We all know how expensive it is to live in the Bahamas, so our dream was to find another semi-piratey locale where we could buy a simple cottage near a decent surf break, with cheap and delicious food on hand. We scoured Latin America in search of someplace where we could begin to divide our time, and in 2021 my search led me to the West Coast of Mexico, to a small town north of Puerto Vallarta. And any of you who have followed my personal travels over the past few years will know that I’ve enjoyed my fair share of tacos since then.

My cousin has been living in the town of Sayulita for the past 18 years with a Mexican partner and their son. She’s been able to afford a fantastic lifestyle keeping two horses, putting her son in private school, and surfing and adventuring regularly. I’ve been learning Spanish my entire life, so I have been drawn to live somewhere Spanish-speaking. Health care is affordable, and the tacos are plenty. Mexico really checked a lot of boxes for us, so I started going on trips to check it out.

Then I turned into one of those people. “Well in Mexico, (fill in the blank) is better…” is what I’d find myself regularly saying to friends when I’d return to the dysfunction and exorbitant cost of living in the Bahamas. In Mexico, the margaritas flowed like wine and the sun shone every day.

I rented a long-term studio apartment. It was absolutely tiny, but it cost me around $400 per month, the equivalent of a fancy night out for two in the Bahamas. I purchased a car, and just like the Bahamas, I found a gray area where I could register my car in my name without holding a residency card. My landlord didn’t speak any English and all my neighbors were Mexican, but I felt so incredibly welcomed into the community. There were amazing grocery stores, restaurants, and even Home Depot, a one-stop shop (unlike the Bahamas where you usually have to hit 3 or 4 stores and may or may not find what you need). I had landed somewhere.

But everywhere has its pros and cons…

There were pros and cons of living in Mexico and after the rose-color wore off a bit, I noticed some of the cons. No, I wasn’t worried about getting kidnapped or murdered. I honestly believe there’s a propaganda campaign against Mexico, because everywhere I spent time felt safer than a lot of places in the US, and their cities are modern and beautiful. But there’s a looming threat of getting sick and with sub-par sanitary practices at many food establishments, Montezuma’s Revenge is a real thing. 10 of the 13 aunts and cousins who visited Mexico while I was there got sick. The other big gripe is putting TP in the garbage bin. The Bahamas for the win on that one, where we can flush our poo paper down the toilet.

A few other cons were that in any safe and beautiful location, property prices are just as high as properties in the Bahamas, so at this point, it isn’t feasible to purchase “cheap land” in Mexico anymore. You also don’t technically own the land when you do buy it. You have to put it into a bank trust, which I am assured is safe and secure, but it just didn’t feel right about not being the official owner. Another win for the Bahamas where foreigners can own titled property. With regard to property prices going up, there’s a LOT of anger and hostility on social media about gentrification, especially in Mexico City and in tourist beach locations like Puerto Vallarta.

Also the garbage. Garbage on our gorgeous beaches in the Bahamas rubs me the wrong way, but garbage in Mexico is at another level, and every morning I’d walk out onto the little dirt road leading into town and find garbage scattered everywhere that the chickens got into during the night. I took it upon myself to pick it up a few times but the problem needed to be solved in other ways that the community wasn’t setting as a priority. The irony was that in Guadalajara, the second largest city in Mexico, the streets were super clean, but it was the what-should-be picturesque beach towns that were the worst. 

Things I did love were “living-water” fill-up stations, access to yoga, health/healing community, hiking and adventures, the affordable cost of health care where doctors, dentists, and specialists are often trained in the US and are English speaking, THE FOOD (cheap and handmade), and finally, Mexicans in general, are absolutely wonderful, warm, welcoming people.

After several years of long-term stints, I felt like I had a good solid assessment of what it would be like to live there, and in April 2024 I decided to pack up, sell my car, and let go of my apartment. It was a difficult decision, but it was time. As a kicker on the way out the door, I mailed a box of clothes to my dad that I didn’t have room to pack, and two months later it still hasn’t arrived. On par with the Bahamas on that one. 

I arrived home to dogs, a husband, and a beautiful home that we have been building together for 10 years. Our property is unlike anything we could buy in Mexico, the ocean, in sharp contrast to the deep, pounding Pacific, is calm, clear, and alluring, with ribbons of vibrant colors that change with the passing clouds. I arrived to a new-found appreciation for what I already had. 

I’ve been mulling over this for the past two months and from someone who half-left the Bahamas, I’d like to share a few tidbits of things to consider if you are either planning to move abroad, and/or thinking about leaving the Bahamas.

Language

One of the biggest challenges I faced in Mexico was the language. If you’re considering moving abroad, really and truly consider the language. Unless you’re already semi-fluent in another language, it’s going to be a solid several-year process of practicing daily to get to an intermediate conversational level. I got serious with learning in 2020, pouring hours into grammar, reading, and private tutor lessons, and I still am only barely at B2 level. When it comes to communicating with Mexicans, Mexican Spanish might as well be a whole other language with colloquialisms and slang. Not to mention if you get into particular vocabulary such as the whole world of automobile vocab (registering my car, electrical problems when my car broke down, oil changes, etc).

For years, English-speakers have been flocking to Latin American countries, Portugal, Spain, Indonesia and Thailand, where English might be spoken, but it’s not the main language. What I found in Mexico is that I either had to speak fluent Spanish to make friends with Mexicans, to get things done, or to receive “locals” rates, or I was left to hang out with Americans and Canadians. I can see how easy it is to separate from the local community and formulate places similar to Chinatown or the entire city of Spanish-speaking Miami, becoming isolated from the rest of the country through language. In the Bahamas, I’m often the only American in my social situation, yet English is the common language. I didn’t want to be in Mexico and only hang out with Americans. If I wanted to hang out with Americans, I would go to America.

So one big plus for the Bahamas is that it’s an English-speaking country, something I didn’t truly appreciate until I went to Mexico. However, I always say that if English was my second language, I have no idea how I would understand the Bahamian accent. English is my first language, and I still don’t understand sometimes!

The devil you know

Mark had a point one day, he said “I do everything I can to convince people that it’s a bad idea to develop a remote private island in the Bahamas. If they do decide to, I do my best to keep them out of trouble. I don’t want to end up being one of those foreigners that shows up in a brand-new land (Mexico) and makes stupid mistakes because I’m the newbie on the block.” If you already live in the Bahamas and are dreaming of greener pastures, I can tell you that it’s probably better to continue to nurture the devil you know. If you have connections and ways of getting things done here, however inefficient as they may seem, trust me when I say that going somewhere where you don’t know how things operate is going to be a challenge. Unless you secretly enjoy that kind of thing…

Can you satiate your desire for a change-of-scenery with travel?

I have realized that I need to focus more on getting off the rock. Maybe I don’t need to pack up and move somewhere else at the moment, but if I can take a sabbatical every so often, it might do wonders for my sanity. Most of us need a shake-me-up from our routines and I find that I’m more productive with writing when I am traveling because I’m not thinking about walking and feeding dogs, cooking, and doing laundry. It’s not to say that I don’t still have my eyes on spending part of the year elsewhere (ideally somewhere a bit more climate-civilized than the heat, humidity, and mosquitos of August-October in the Bahamas). But instead of packing up and moving, perhaps traveling abroad, mini-vacations, or even booking into a local hotel or resort for a staycation might be all you need to brush off the cobwebs.

Where are your people at?

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the acknowledgement of the community I have built here in the Bahamas for the past 13 years. We live in a time of uncertainty and the best way to navigate through these times is to have a solid network of people you can depend on. When I landed in Mexico I knew very few people, and my introverted homebody self found it difficult to break into the social scene. I ate most of my meals out on my own, and although I don’t mind my own company, at times it was lonely. Yes, the internet is wonderful for staying connected with loved ones wherever you are in the world, but it just doesn’t compare with connecting person-to-person. I returned to the Bahamas to appreciate that I could call up any number of friends to grab coffee or lunch and know that we could pick up right where we left off. And that’s something you should never take for granted. 

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I returned to the Bahamas after what felt like a Homer’s Odyssey of epic proportions, and I’m glad I did. I have a refreshed appreciation for life in this small island community, and I love that I don’t have to think about the words I need to formulate to ask for help and then hope that I understand the answer. Instead I can have a chat or make a joke with someone when I’m out and about because we both speak English.

For a long time, I haven’t felt like I really belonged anywhere. Other than my family, I don’t feel connected to the cool, temperate climate, and dark dreary winters of the Pacific Northwest anymore, but I never really felt like the Bahamas was truly home either. But now it does. 

There are always going to be things that bother you about a place, nowhere is perfect, and the Bahamas certainly isn’t. It’s about choosing to live somewhere with as many positives on your pros list as possible, and it’s about the people that welcome you back with loving arms when you return from a long journey.

I went away in order to come back and appreciate what I have, and there really is nothing like coming home.