So here I am again, in the middle of another beautiful nowhere -- this time on an outer island of the Bahamas. It’s primitive and beautiful and hot. The proprietor of a fishing lodge tells me that when electricity came to this island in 1989, all the people came out and stood under the street light as though it were a shower; I feel I’ve come to Macondo, the Caribbean village in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Eight Bahama Mamas, travel journalists with red hibiscus stuck in our hair, hit the road--and the air and the sea, in progressively smaller planes and boats -- in search of bonefish. And bonefishermen. (There are, theoretically, bonefisherwomen, but I didn't find any.) The plan was to fly from Nassau to Andros, the largest and least populated of the Bahamian islands and the world's capital of bonefishing, to cover the International Bonefishing Tournament held every November, and to learn how to bonefish. (This is laughable since bonefishing is one of the most difficult kinds of fly-fishing, which in itself is nearly off the technique meter.)

Bonefish, for those as uninformed as I was, are medium-sized fish, "gray ghosts," that lurk in the shallow turquoise waters of the Bahamas, followed by the sharks that prey on them. ("Get back in the boat!") The small, flat-bottomed speedboats have a high platform for a "guide" who spots the fish by seeing its shadow and will then call out some absurd directive, like, "11 o'clock, 40 feet." The angler will then cast, using a delicate (and very costly) rod and a very thin line (easily snapped) with a hand-tied fly at the end -- the most basic is one that looks like a shrimp (the bonefish's fave food). Many of the Americans and Europeans and Australians who come to these legendary lodges to bonefish are retired surgeons -- partly because they're rich and this is an expensive sport, but also because surgeons can really tie flies.

The Girls were willing, and we came with various lame credentials: The tall, blonde photojournalist had been the model for the L. L. Bean fly-fishing catalog; the editor of a New York magazine claimed to have seen A River Runs Through It; I had caught a sea robin when I was 11 years old (at least there's a photo of me holding it up -- I have no recollection of this event).

When travel journalists get together, there are inevitably story-swaps, usually in hotel lobbies (where, in this case, the Time magazine was 10 months old). These are very low-maintenance women (nobody brought a hair dryer, nobody slept late), and they have ridden bikes across vast distances and worked for Doctors Without Borders and documented hurricane damage. One of the inevitable topics for people who spend a lot of time in exotic places is food-poisoning and there was a lively game called "Places I've Puked," with stories about Tanzania and Bermuda (my contribution was Grenada).

It's always fun to discover somebody else's obsession, but there was much more to this adventure in paradise than bonefishing.

The Land:

Andros is not the glossy Nassau of travel brochures; fishing (lobsters, sponges, grouper) is the main industry. Grand Bahama (only 33 minutes from Miami) has both touristic glamour in Freeport and miles of deserted, pristine beaches -- with water so warm and clean that it seems from another time, not just another place. We crawled through bat caves where pirates supposedly had hidden treasures; we kayaked through mangrove forests, and climbed down to "blue holes" -- immensely deep circles of water surrounded by stone: fresh water on top with heavier salt water below, fed by tunnels from the sea miles away. (Cousteau explored some of these.) People come here for "jungle diving." There are fishing villages with cinderblock houses painted bright Caribbean colors -- pink, orange, royal blue, green -- and rusted-out cars. The burial ground had six graves with hand-lettered and misspelled headstones.

The Creatures:

Well, fish, of course. And porpoises and turtles and conchs -- their huge shells are everywhere. There are hateful bugs (they all bite and all defy 100-percent deet), adorable tiny lizards with curly tails, orange butterflies and vultures that swoop alarmingly overhead.

The People:

Everybody's friendly; everybody waves as if they know you. The accents are hard to understand, and everybody is either "Mon," or "Baby" or "Darlin'," and the smiles are irresistible and the welcome feels sincere. There was "The Bread Lady" (we never saw her, but our guide emerged from her house in the woods with five warm loaves). There were "The Basket Ladies" -- Seminole Indians who fled Florida during the Seminole Wars long ago, and who practice their ancient and splendid craft deep in the forest. Captain Nelson and his "ferry" capably transported himself, his plump wife, the eight of us and all our luggage in a tiny "gofast boat" to the other end of the island -- a half-hour's ride on open seas. Kids fish with homemade crab boxes off a pier. A legendary fisherman picked up a rusty saw and a table knife and, impromptu, played a fabulous accompaniment to recorded reggae at his bonefishing lodge.

We danced to Bahamian music, we drank Bahamian rum, we ate johnny cake and conch (salad and cracked and fried and stewed -- we were all pretty conched out by the end). And so home again, tanned and happy.