We left Boston for The Bahamas at about 3:00 after staying in Boston at my brother's friend's house. We flew on a Miami Air charter full of Spring Breakers, but the ride was rather normal (no parties on the plane or anything like that).
We arrived in Nassau, The Bahamas at about 7:00 p.m., which is not ideal because there's really nothing besides the humid, breezy air to distinguish your location.
After spending an hour and a half in the slowest immigration line EVER, we exited the airport to find a sea of hundreds of suitcases surrounded by a frantic scene of utter chaos.
The buses were missing. Even worse, delivery of the massive queue of suitcases would no doubt take hours. At this time we decided to skip the STS-arranged shuttle and hire a cab ourselves. We got screwed on the cab fare, but at least we were at the hotel (with our bags) way before everyone else.
And now the fun begins.
Upon arrival at the Nassau Beach Hotel, we received three different instructions on where to check-in, but none were correct. Finally an STS employee corraled us into an orientation, where they promptly hit us up for another $60 to pay for VIP access to clubs and happy hours.
After the orientation broke, we waited for a half-hour for the check-in people to come to the orientation room to check in everyone. They never came. Instead we were moved to a banquet room with two annoyed Bahamian hotel employees who did nothing for fifteen minutes, and then finally began calling names one by one in a totally random order with about 100 annoyed and culturally-shocked people (and their luggage) jammed into one corner of the banquet hall.
After gathering $50 from everyone to cover the cash-only security deposit, one of our names was called so we went to the table and tried to check-in. They didn't have our names, so we needed to go to the front-desk to check-in.
To make a very long story short--two hours later we were shipped off to the Casuarinas Hotel because the idiots at STS and/or the Nassau Beach Hotel overbooked the joint.
Being taken to a strange place in a foreign country is no picnic. You can't help but consider that you're being set up for some type of thievery, especially at first impression of the Casuarinas Hotel. The check-in desk was behind a glass window outside of the empty restaurant. The check-in process was decidedly 19th century. Everyone simply signed his guestbook. The room key was just that: a key--nothing more, nothing less.
We got two rooms at the Casuarinas. Our room's light barely lit the entirety of our room. We had no hot water (not that anyone would take a shower in that place). On the other hand, the phones were the same ones I have at work!
Again, to make another long story short, after considering our options, we loaded our pockets with our important travel documents and as many valuables as we could reasonably fit into our pockets, locked our rooms and headed out for a night on the town. We eventually made it to a club called, Bahama Boom, and had a good time. We got back very late, discovered that the bed linens were actually remarkably clean, and slept off what will go down as one of the more fucked-up (pardon the language!) travel days I've ever experienced!