Small Plane from Miami to Inagua

The strip runs east to west at the bottom of the island, 7,014 feet of asphalt with the settlement at one end. That is several times what a small plane needs, which is why a wheeled aircraft can make this crossing at all. The terminal is one building with customs and immigration inside it, which shapes this whole route: Matthew Town Airport is a port of entry, and the town docks alongside it. You clear where you land. Expect the formalities to take minutes rather than an hour. The crew has filed everything before departure and the desk keeps daytime hours, so an early slot is worth more than a late one. Say at the enquiry if anyone travels on a passport other than a United States one, worth flagging before the day.

Matthew Town is the island's main settlement and it sits beside the airport: a small grid of streets, the harbour and the government dock, and the lighthouse on the rise above it. There is no resort strip here and no crowd at the apron, and that is not a drawback, it is the reason the arrival is calm. Nothing else on Great Inagua is walking distance, so a vehicle is the difference between seeing the island and seeing the town. A car or a guide can be waiting when you land through ground transport.

The national park covers 287 square miles, close to half of Great Inagua, and has been protected since 1965. It holds the largest breeding colony of West Indian flamingos in the world: around 70,000 birds by the count of the Bahamas National Trust, which manages it. The birds are why most first-time visitors come. The island carries a list of roughly 140 species and is known as the birdwatching capital of the Bahamas. The Bahama parrot survives on two islands in the country and the Inagua woodstar, a hummingbird, is found nowhere else. The park is inland and a long way from the apron, so it is a planned day, not an afternoon, which is why parties on this route stay at least a night. The island page covers the park itself and anything you want arranged before you land is set up with the flight.

The salt operation covers something in the order of 300,000 acres and is one of the largest solar salt works in North America. Sun and wind do the work: sea water is let into shallow ponds and left to evaporate, and the ponds are what gives this end of the island its colour from the air. The ponds are also the reason the flamingos are here. The brine shrimp that live in them are what the birds feed on, so the industry and the colony are one system rather than two things that happen to share an island. Tours of the works run, and between them and the park they are what most visitors actually spend their days on. It is also why there is freight on this runway at all, which is a different service on the same asphalt: see island logistics.

The lighthouse dates from 1870, stands 113 feet and threw its light around seventeen miles out. It was worked by hand for more than a century, which is unusual enough that it is the thing people photograph here. It is minutes from the town and the climb is the view: the salt ponds inland, the harbour below and, on a clear day, Cuba. The eastern tip of it lies about 55 miles from this island, which is a fair way of explaining where in the world Great Inagua actually sits.

Union Creek Reserve is a protected tidal creek of nearly 5,000 acres on the north coast, used as a green turtle research site since the 1970s by a team working out of Florida. It is a drive and a boat rather than a stop, so it belongs in a plan made before you fly rather than on the morning. Guests who want it in the trip say so at the enquiry, and the Inagua destination page covers the reserve and the rest of the coast properly.

This is the part of the trip a runway changes most. Load on a small aircraft is a weight question rather than a bag count and a wheeled airframe has more of it to give than floats do. Spotting scopes, tripods, camera bodies, dive tanks, rods, a cooler for the boat: all of it travels, within the payload for the aircraft on the day. Birders and divers are half the enquiries on this route and they arrive with equipment, so say what is coming at the enquiry rather than at the ramp and see the baggage guidance for how the trade between passengers and weight actually works. Anything larger than luggage is a different service on the same runway and that is island logistics rather than a charter with extra bags.

Inagua sits at the far end of the chain, so it works as one end of a longer trip rather than a single hop, and clearing in here is what makes that easy: once you are through the desk at Matthew Town, every leg after it is domestic. The same airframe carries on north and west to Staniel Cay and the Exumas, Andros, Nassau, Harbour Island or Grand Bahama. That is what turns one island into island hopping or a wider Bahamas day. Little Inagua, five miles north-east and uninhabited, has no strip at all, so anything on or around it switches aircraft rather than cancelling the plan. The packaged version of the trip is the Inagua getaway and the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.