Review: Lucayan National Park, Grand Bahama Island

Before booking my trip to Grand Bahama Island, I already knew of a few places I wanted to visit on the island, one of those places was the Lucayan National Park, a beautiful 40 acre reserve filled with winding trails through the dense tropical forest filled with rare flowers, tropical trees, and caves. It just sounded like something I knew I would enjoy.

I wanted to visit the park not only for the awesome trials through the forest, but also I knew that directly across the Grand Bahama Highway was Gold Rock Beach, this beach is famous for being the beach were parts of Pirates of the Caribbean were filmed. I figured on our visit to Lucayan National Park, we'd also stomp across the highway to the beach.

Taxi!!!!

We had our hotel call us a taxi, which came to a staggering $40.00 there and back. Basically $80.00 round trip from Viva Wyndham which is only 25 miles away from the park. The price seemed like a scam seeing how a taxi ride from Freeport airport only came to $20, and that was the same distance, only in the opposite direction.

At any rate though, we went with it, because there was no way I was not going to go to the park.

Arrival:

Um...I was scared. Seriously I was. Our taxi driver on the way told us that it would only cost $3.00 to get into the park and that it is a very popular destination. She seemed excited for us when we arrived because no one was there. Not a soul. She told us we got lucky because now we could get in for free!

Yikes! I'd rather spend $30, and have at least security there, or at least some armed person in a uniform. Hell, anyone would be fine by me. Yet here we were in the middle of the (what seemed to be) jungle, off of a very vacant highway with not a soul to be found.

I had no phone on me, so we arranged for the cab to come back in 5 hours to pick us up. The cabbie told us to be careful and not to wander too far into Ben's Cave, because the cave was huge and a few tourists have wandered in only to never come back out.

Oh Lord!