Big money and bigger ideas have propelled this island-nation's return to vogue. Adam Sachs samples the Bahamas' new high style, and charts a course to its enduring charms

My taxi from the airport slowed to a stop on an empty stretch of road on an empty-feeling island under a bright, barren sky. The driver pointed toward some jungly bush that he thought hid a path. In the hot sun, I walked through a sea grape thicket to a weather-beaten wooden gate, opened it, and found Nettie, who seemed to be expecting me.

"You're Adam," she declared. "I was sure you were going to be an old man!" I smiled youthfully and put my bag down, not entirely sure what kind of place I'd wandered into: The room that served as the lobby was half-outdoors and surrounded by green, a ground-floor tree house. Nettie wrapped her powerful arms around me. And squeezed. This was a fine welcome—probably not the kind they teach you in hotel school, but then her place is justly named Nettie's Different of Abaco. With its rambling wooden structures set in a wild marsh overrun with ducks and flamingos and good cheer, this is no ordinary beach resort. And the Bahamas, it occurred to me for the hundredth happy time in several days, is a different kind of island getaway.

I know what some of you are thinking. The Bahamas? Pink flamingo postcards. Bodies crowded on beaches like french fries under a heat lamp. The canned merriment of the all-inclusive resort. And who wouldn't worry when, upon clearing customs at Nassau International Airport, he's handed a rum-spiked Bahama Mama cocktail before he even makes it to baggage claim. But there's more to this country than conch fritters and casino towers the color of Pepto-Bismol. Walk your Bahama Mama across the airport to the domestic departures wing. Look up at the wall-sized map near the gate (note the singular). See the number and variety of landforms and the ample blue spaces between. Short on people, this scattered island cosmos is spread across a hundred thousand square miles of ocean—an area twice the size of England. The Bahamas is many places. Pick one.

Leaving Nassau for one of the Out Islands, the flight is always the same. The ride is spent as on a glass-bottom boat, staring down in wonder. All the way to the horizon are islands too small to carry that appellation, in water a hundred different hues. The Spaniards who arrived here five hundred years ago named this place baja mar for its shallow waters. They didn't have the perspective offered by a low-flying Bahamasair turboprop. Out the smudged window, the view is unearthly: nubbly atolls, dark, bottomless wells on the ocean floor, sandbars afloat in still pools of jade, a coral limestone moonscape cut through with blue lava. The trip doesn't take long. The plane—which sounds like a lawn mower caught on something—settles on a sun-scorched airstrip. Everyone else getting off knows everyone getting on.

This is how I'd arrived at Abaco's Marsh Harbour, a dusty little town that is, incredibly, the country's third largest. About four thousand people inhabit the place, many of them Conchy Joes (as white Bahamians are sometimes called). There was just one taxi driver at the airport. As he drove me south toward Nettie's, at Casuarina Point, I asked what the fare would be. "Sixty-five dollars," he answered flatly. We drove on for a while in silence.