The cruise ship had been shunned at port after port for fear it might carry the coronavirus, but when the Westerdam arrived in Cambodia on Thursday, the prime minister greeted its passengers with flowers.

Amid assurances that the ship was disease free, hundreds of elated passengers disembarked. Some went sightseeing, visiting beaches and restaurants and getting massages. Others traveled on to destinations around the world.

One, however, did not make it much farther than the thermal scanners at the Kuala Lumpur airport in Malaysia. The passenger, an American, was stopped on Saturday, and later tested positive for the coronavirus.

On Sunday, with passengers already headed for destinations on at least three continents, health officials were scrambling to determine how big a problem they now have — and how to stop it from getting bigger.

“We anticipated glitches, but I have to tell you I didn’t anticipate one of this magnitude,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

With more than a thousand passengers from the Westerdam headed for home, Dr. Schaffner said, it may be harder than ever to keep the coronavirus outbreak contained to China.

“This could be a turning point,” he said.

It is unclear how well the passengers were screened before they were allowed off the ship. But the best approach to containing a broader spread of the virus from the Westerdam would be to track down all of the passengers and quarantine them for two weeks, experts said.

It won’t be easy.

Dr. Peter Rabinowitz, co-director of the MetaCenter for Pandemic Preparedness and Global Health Security at University of Washington, said the episode would test the limits of contact tracing, the method used to track down people exposed to infection.

“It’s really daunting to control a situation like this now that people have gone all over the world,” Dr. Rabinowitz said.

More than 140 passengers from the ship flew to Malaysia, and all but the American woman who tested positive and her husband were eventually allowed to continue on to their destinations, including the United States, the Netherlands and Australia, officials said. Over 1,000 other passengers took charter flights to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and were in various stages of transit home, the cruise line said.

When the Westerdam set sail from Hong Kong on Feb. 1 for a 14-day cruise, the Holland America Line cruise ship was carrying 1,455 passengers and 802 crew members.

It docked in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, on Feb. 4, but then soon ran into trouble.

With the eyes of the world on Yokohama, Japan, where the virus was spreading among passengers and crew members trapped on another cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, ports on the Westerdam’s itinerary began denying it entry.

And on Friday, President Trump tweeted his thanks to Cambodia for allowing the ship, more than 600 of whose passengers were Americans, to dock.

But by opening his arms to Westerdam, Mr. Hun Sen may have put his own citizens at risk.

As of Sunday, 233 passengers and 747 crew members were still on the ship docked at Sihanoukville, Cambodia, Holland America said. After Malaysia’s announcement that a passenger was infected, the remaining passengers and crew members were restricted to the ship, and buses that had been scheduled to transport them remained parked nearby.

It was unclear whether Cambodia would seek to quarantine passengers who are still in the country, or whether those who had left by plane would face quarantine in their own countries when they arrived.

On Sunday, Malaysia’s deputy prime minister, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, said at a news conference that the American woman confirmed to be infected after she left the ship had tested positive twice for the virus.

The woman, 83, and her husband, 85, also an American citizen, were both hospitalized and in isolation. The husband has also been tested twice for the virus, and the results were negative both times. But he has pneumonia, which is often a sign of the virus that appears before it can be identified through testing.

The global fight against the coronavirus is complicated by the fact that different countries may have different levels of disease surveillance and prevention measures. While the World Health Organization provides guidance, it is up to each country to enforce these standards, including whether to quarantine people who may have been exposed or to stop them from traveling.

The Cambodian government said passengers and crew members on the Westerdam had been screened using protocols from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States before being allowed to disembark.

One passenger said Cambodian health officials had taken everyone’s temperature.

About 20 people who had reported being sick during the trip were also tested for the coronavirus, according to a statement issued Sunday by the United States Embassy in Cambodia. All of them tested negative.

The American woman was not among them. She did not visit the ship’s medical center during the cruise to report any symptoms of illness, Holland America said in a statement on Sunday.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said officials do not yet have enough evidence to determine when the passenger may have been exposed, and where.

Dr. Schaffner, the infectious disease expert, said it might have been wiser to test each disembarking passenger instead of a select group because other screening methods — like travel questionnaires and taking temperatures — are fallible.

People eager to get off a ship may not respond entirely truthfully to questioning, and sick people’s temperatures vary during the day, he said, generally being lower in the morning.

When the American passenger first tested positive, both Holland America and Cambodia questioned the result, and requested further testing and confirmation. Malaysia carried out a second round of testing, and said Sunday that it had confirmed that the woman was infected. It remains unclear, however, when she was infected, where or by whom.

Malaysia’s deputy prime minister said that the country would not accept any more passengers from the Westerdam.

Coordination between Malaysia and Cambodia appears to have been minimal. In a letter seeking more information from his Malaysian counterpart on Sunday, the health minister of Cambodia, Mam Bunheng, said he had learned through the news media that the first test of the American woman had been positive.

Attempts to contact Cambodian officials for comment were not immediately successful.

Holland America said in its statement on Sunday that no other passengers or crew members had reported any symptoms and that passengers who had returned home would be contacted by their local health departments.

There were no details on how that would be arranged.

“We are in close coordination with some of the leading health experts from around the world,” said Dr. Grant Tarling, chief medical officer for Holland America Line. “These experts are working with the appropriate national health authorities to investigate and follow up with individuals who may have come in contact with the guest.”

The company said that before the ship departed Hong Kong, the passports of everyone on board were reviewed to make sure that no one had traveled through mainland China in the 14 days before the cruise. But Hong Kong, itself, has been touched by the outbreak.

The company defended the health screening it had conducted during the cruise and on arrival in Cambodia. But it did not respond to a question on whether it had been appropriate to let Westerdam passengers travel to many parts of the world without putting them in quarantine first.

One of them, Christina Kerby, 41, a communications director with BlueShield in California, said she was among a group of passengers who had nasal and throat swabs taken in Phnom Penh on Sunday. Ms. Kerby was supposed to fly to Singapore on Sunday and then on to San Francisco.

“The stress has absolutely taken its toll,” she said by telephone.

Ms. Kerby said that her temperature had been taken two or three times during her stay on the ship, and that passengers were required to fill out health questionnaires detailing whether they had symptoms like cough, fever and diarrhea.

“I can’t really comment on how this was missed, but I did feel very safe and well cared for on the ship,” she said, adding that she believed Holland America “was operating appropriately given the situation.”

Ms. Kerby said she had discussed the risk of going on the cruise with her family. She boarded the ship in Hong Kong and traveled with her 75-year-old mother and her brother.

“We made the decision that it’s not worth passing up the potential to have a lot of fun and see the world just out of fear,” she said. “That’s why I joined, and I think the other passengers have the same feeling.”

Sun Narin contributed reporting from Sihanoukville, Cambodia..

Just a a few-and-a-50 % hour drive from Ecuador’s funds, Quito, the city of Baños de Agua Santa snuggles into a deep valley surrounded by the mountains skirting the Tungurahua volcano. With an elevation of shut to 6,000 ft and a population of all-around 15,000 residents, Baños has a bit of a ski town experience: The town slows down for the duration of the working day whilst travelers are out undertaking activities, and picks up once more in the night when they occur back again for evening meal. It is a magnet for unshaven backpacker styles getting a split from mountaineering the route all over Ecuador’s volcanoes and craters. They generally start off their Baños extension with a week of rest, which then turns into a month’s sojourn, but quickly they obtain a bike and undertake a street pet and, very well, maybe which is why all the foreigners in the cafes of Baños appear to know everybody else’s name. Baños is a cozy residence for a getaway artist.

But I arrived after dark and the town seemed, frankly, depressing. A line of boarded-up clapboard outlets advertising tacky T-shirts lined the road in, and the central plazas ended up occupied only by the occasional doggy. When I checked into my inn, the air in my place felt moist, and the mattress tricky. I experienced heard by means of a very long, winding grapevine that Baños was an outside lover’s paradise, but as I tossed and turned that initial evening I wondered if I experienced arrive all this way for practically nothing.

Then, the subsequent morning, I opened the curtains on my modest home. A lengthy, white waterfall was pouring down the mountain in front of my window, a stone’s throw away, roaring to the base and generating the exact comforting sound that people today choose on their sound machines. In the vicinity of the base of the waterfall, a steaming pool was by now occupied by early morning bathers. And surrounding them was the multi-shaded environmentally friendly of forest, from which an occasional chook simply call would emit. The damp air now felt lively and balanced. It’s possible I’d adhere all-around right after all. Maybe even for an extra day or two.

The town is well-known for its heart-pounding thrills — zip line rides and paraglide flights and bungee jumps — but also for its therapeutic publish-adventure solutions in the kind of muscle mass-soothing thermal baths, saunas and indigenous herbal teas. So on my to start with morning, immediately after a delightful very hot chocolate of Ecuadorean cacao at Aromi Cafe y Chocolate, I created my way to just one of the tour businesses in city, GeoTours, and signed up for a smattering of pursuits, not confident particularly what was in retail outlet for me.

Then, as if we hadn’t performed more than enough, we hiked up the facet of Tungurahua, until we attained La Casa del Árbol — the “Treehouse” — a odd wonderland that’s popular with the Instagram set many thanks, in distinct, to the “Swing at the Conclude of the Entire world,” a big swing hanging from the treehouse that sends daring website visitors seemingly out above the facet of the cliff. As the sunlight set, experience emboldened by the fresh new air of Baños, I hopped on the swing myself, and was pushed out around the edge of the mountain till, following lots of screaming, the swing-pusher finally heeded my pleas to prevent.

At the El Refugio spa, I started my go to with a beguiling but fulfilling working experience: a meditative walk along a forest route that bundled specified stops where by I was instructed to scream out any pent-up anger, and cry out any welled-up tears. Screaming into the jungle seemed uncomfortable and jarring to me at 1st, but I desired to be a great activity. Right after I started out, even though, a primal variety of joy welled up inside me, as I discharged my frustrations. Probably the folks at El Refugio understood what they were being performing soon after all.

In Baños, many of the leading sights expense just $1 or $2, like the large swing at La Casa del Arbol or the Pailón del Diablo waterfall. Excursions and journey outings differ in charge at GeoTours, most fifty percent-day tours operate between $30 and $60, depending on the exercise and group sizing, and custom made tours can be arranged with advance observe.

Do not leave Baños with no possessing a warm chocolate of organic Ecuadorean cacao beans. You can get that and extra at the lovely Aromi Cafe y Chocolate (breakfast for two, $12). For non-Latin solutions and wonderful brunches, consider Honey Espresso & Tea (lunch for two, $15), a fantastic place for individuals-seeing on the plaza. For a meal of steak and fondue, the excellent antidote to a tough day’s adventuring, consider Swiss Bistro (meal for two, $50). And if you want to see wherever the locals go, head to Dulce Carbon, wherever the smoke from the barbecue will draw you in from blocks absent (evening meal for two, $25).

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Snowboarding in Europe can price a very penny, particularly if you continue to be at marquee resorts. Happily, the Alps are residence to hundreds of ski-centric lodging, many with finances-pleasant cost tags.

Below, specialists supply up lesser acknowledged but similarly charming locations in Italy, France, Switzerland and Austria, with lodging recommendations and approximate nightly charges. Quite a few are household-operate accommodations, offering “half-board” pricing that includes both equally breakfast and evening meal. And remember, touring midweek and during off-peak times is generally the way to nab the most cost-effective lodging.

Switzerland

Cervinia, in its place of Zermatt

In Zermatt, at the foot of the amazing Matterhorn Mountain, you will uncover an idyllic village, fantastic-eating solutions and some of the longest runs in the Alps. You are going to also obtain sky-significant costs. A rental chalet or a five-star lodge, like Cervo Zermatt, could quickly operate you $1,212 a night.

For a considerably less expensive way to access Zermatt, Dan Sherman, main marketing officer of ski.com, implies being on the Italian side of the Matterhorn in the Breuil-Cervinia ski spot.

“Since Cervinia is lift-joined to Zermatt, skiers can just journey to the major of the Plateau Rosa via the Prepare Maison gondola and then transfer to the Plateau Rosa cable motor vehicle and ski down to Zermatt on the exact ski go,” he stated.

Chris Epskamp, European director of the ski-centered site Powderhounds, agrees that Cervinia is a price tag-efficient way to ski Zermatt. He added that some of Europe’s finest off-piste, totally free-trip ski terrain is also in this area.

“Canazei is a excellent base to tackle the Sellaronda circuit, the iconic 40-kilometer circular ski route all over the Sella mountain array,” he claimed, including that high quality lodging can be uncovered at Resort La Perla ($155) or Lodge Astoria ($286).

A beloved of the intercontinental glitterati and royalty (Princess Diana famously taught her sons to ski right here), Lech am Arlberg wears its ritziness like a glittering tiara. Homes like Hotel Almhof Schneider ($1,1240) and Severins ($1,094) dazzle with five-star facilities.

As the story goes, a single fateful night in the late 1960s, Jimi Hendrix, best acknowledged for changing the songs environment with his guitar enjoying, set cost-free two ring-necked parakeets on Carnaby Road and that is why thousands of the nonnative birds haunt London’s parks to this working day.

“Absolute rubbish,” Christian Lloyd, a musicologist at Queens University, reported in an interview. “It’s the form of thing men and women want to be legitimate, but it is just not correct.”

Mr. Lloyd would know. His investigation, alongside with relics that Hendrix supporters would drool more than, like his broken Fender Stratocaster from a 1969 Royal Albert Hall general performance, is on screen at Handel & Hendrix in London, a home-turned-museum committed to the two musical giants who at the time lived there: Hendrix and the German composer George Frideric Handel.

Parakeets may possibly not be component of Hendrix’s legacy in London, but he nonetheless remaining his mark. The a number of months he spent there, spread during the remaining five several years of his lifestyle, have been pivotal in his meteoric rise. It was also where by the nomadic performer found the closest thing to “a genuine dwelling,” as he set it, and the place his lifestyle was tragically slice short at the age of 27.

Along with surviving landmarks from his time in the metropolis, London also retains more than enough of what appealed to him personally to make for a correct Jimi Hendrix knowledge, 50 a long time because the musician final termed it home.

The principle of house was a complicated one for Johnny Allen Hendrix, born in Seattle in 1942. He was despatched to dwell with his grandmother in Canada when he was 6 and his mother and father divorced two a long time later. His mother died of alcohol-similar injuries when he was 15. Following a yr in California with the United States Army at age 18, he uncovered his genuine calling in 1962 as a touring musician.

By the time he finished up New York in September 1966, undertaking in small cafes beneath the name “Jimmy James,” he experienced produced a “fugitive type of mentality,” in accordance to Mr. Lloyd.

This is the place Chas Chandler, who experienced recently give up the Animals and wished to begin a new vocation as a manager, was blown away by what he observed and asked Hendrix if he’d come with him to London.

On his to start with night in London, he fulfilled Kathy Etchingham, a previous D.J. and a familiar experience about the city’s flourishing rock scene, and hence began what would be the most significant romantic romantic relationship of his everyday living. They would sooner or later move into an apartment owned by Ringo Starr at 34 Montagu Square in December 1966.

“During our initial weeks collectively we did a very little searching and sightseeing and I launched him to good friends. Due to the fact we didn’t have a great deal cash we went all over the place on the Underground,” Ms. Etchingham wrote in her guide “Through Gypsy Eyes.” Hendrix had hardly ever been outside of North The us right before, and like any other very first-time visitor to London, he was drawn to sights like Buckingham Palace and the Homes of Parliament.

“He performed Chislehurst Caves, which is basically a cave. God is aware what the seem was like in there,” Mr. Lloyd stated. Other bands that done below consist of the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Yardbirds.

From there, the Tap on The Line pub is a short wander away, around the Kew Gardens tube station.

A different pub for Hendrix enthusiasts is The Ship on Wardour Road, close to where by the Marquee Club as soon as was. It remains a well-known songs-small business hangout. “He would stroll in there and understand it promptly,” Mr. Lloyd claimed of Hendrix, had he showed up there currently.

At first glance, the turquoise velvet curtains (originally ordered from John Lewis on close by Oxford Street), crimson Persian rugs, Bohemian knickknacks and piles of classic vinyl surface to be the precise artifacts, but pretty much all of the things in the area are replicas. Hendrix asked for that most of his possessions be wrecked following the couple had divided for great later on in 1969.

Upscale Mayfair may well have seemed like an odd region for a counterculture rock star to dwell, but it drew numerous field styles, situated near to quite a few golf equipment and studios. Venues that however exist include things like The Courtroom (formerly Bag O’Nails) and The Scotch of St. James on Mason’s Lawn, where Hendrix and other people of London’s rock elite done and socialized, such as associates of the Beatles and the Who. Whilst The Court docket is for associates only, the blue plaque commemorating Hendrix’s first general performance there outside the house the building can be considered by any individual.

“I’m terrified of vegetating.” Hendrix claimed. “I have to move on. I dig Britain, but I haven’t truly obtained a household everywhere. The Earth’s my property.”

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Getting there would make all the variance. When our correspondents are on the floor — or underground or on the ice or at sea — they, and you, can get up shut to the tale, often uncomfortably so, uncovering vital information that no phone job interview could ever seize.

This implies touring to some of the world’s most significantly-flung and hazardous locations, from an Islamic Point out camp in Syria, to the jungles of Thailand where armed rosewood smugglers roam, to an Afghan arena where the vicious fighting canine pose the the very least of the hazards.

Residing there issues, far too. When our correspondents expend a long time as residents of the locations they protect, they uncover cultural truths about a state that only bit by bit reveal themselves. The Germans love to go rapidly and, as we’ll see, to get bare. The Senegalese will never miss a exercise session. The Lebanese may not like each other, but they adore basketball. In China, a parade can mean an eviction.

Invest sufficient time in a put and even humble objects and day to day animals can reveal outsize insights about a country’s mood and manners. Clay pots in Myanmar. Bagels in Montreal. A quirky ’60s convertible in Britain. A rooster in France. Snakes in Canada.

When covering India’s climatic extremes, a healthcare emergency intervened, and the tale turned not only about monsoons, but also about Indian culture, the human head and most cancers.

“I was taken for lifeless by a mortuary crew, who toe-tagged me with the pursuing ID: ‘Unknown Caucasian male, age 47 and a fifty percent,’” our reporter wrote. “Nothing could have cheered me up far more. It was only days until my 70th birthday.”

—By Rod Nordland

As South Korea’s birthrate plummets, rural faculties are emptying. To fill its school rooms, 1 school opened its doorways to females who have for yearned for many years to discover to browse and generate.

“Writing letters to my children, that’s what I dreamed of the most,” stated a single of the college students, who vary in age from 56 to 80.

—By Choe Sang-Hun images and video clip by Chang W. Lee

—By Ernesto Londoño

—By Ellen Barry photographs and video clip by Dmitry Kostyukov

—By Jason Horowitz photographs and video by Gianni Cipriano

—By Declan Walsh photographs by Bryan Denton

—By Patrick Kingsley images by Laetitia Vancon

—By Damien Cave images by David Maurice Smith

—By Katrin Bennhold photographs by Lena Mucha

—By Andrew Higgins images by Lam Yik Fei

—By Motoko Abundant images by Chang W. Lee

—By Marc Santora photos by Andrea Mantovani

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this image of Christmas: a village nestled in a snowy valley, candlelit windows glowing against a night sky. I’m not sure where it came from. Growing up in sunny Southern California, my family strung lights on the palm trees in our yard and went to the beach on Christmas Eve. Most kids know about Santa’s sleigh, but I believed he traveled on a magic speedboat.

As an adult, I’ve searched for that old-fashioned Christmas, one of snow-tipped Yuletide cheer, sleigh rides, sugarplums and freshly cut pine trees trimmed with handcrafted ornaments. Though I visited the Christmas markets in European capitals like London, Paris and Vienna, I never really found it. Yes, the fairy lights twinkled, the sweet scent of mulled wine drifted, and sometimes snow crunched under my heels. Yes, the market stalls displayed an array of glittering ornaments for the tree and home. Yet upon closer inspection, the decorations were flimsy, their designs repeating from vendor to vendor as if they shared the same supplier: an industrial factory in a distant land.

Was my vision of Christmas a relic of fairy tales? Or could it still exist in a country that celebrates the Christmas tree with a traditional folk song, “O Tannenbaum”? When I recently reconnected with a high school friend who had moved to Germany, I asked her about German Christmas markets, expecting her to extol the storybook wonders of Nuremberg or Dresden. Instead, she described a place I’d never heard of: the “Christmas ornament town” of Seiffen in the Erzgebirge, or Ore Mountains, a rural part of Saxony so devoted to holiday décor that Germans call it the “home of Christmas.”

Could this be the artisanal Christmas idyll I’d been dreaming of? To find out, I spent a few days in mid-October in this far eastern region of the former German Democratic Republic near the Czech border, immersing myself in the Erzgebirge’s traditional folk art.

Today the region is famous among collectors around the world for its handcrafted wooden Christmas ornaments, including nutcrackers, pyramids that spin in the heat of candles, and smoking men (wooden incense holders carved as miners and other figurines). Many Erzgebirge Christmas decorations honor the region’s mining history. (Mining is so important here that in July UNESCO named the region a World Heritage site in recognition of its mining activity from the 12th to the 20th centuries.) As mining production began to wane in the 17th century, residents turned to woodworking and toy-making.

Happily for my untrained eye, I found a guide in Susann Blaschke, the online manager of Wendt and Kühn, a family-owned producer of Erzgebirge figurines. Founded in 1915 by two women, Grete Wendt and Margarete Kühn — “they were unusual for the time,” Ms. Blashcke said— today the company is in its third generation of Wendt family owners.

Before I left the shop, Ms. Blaschke described some of the other crafts traditionally produced in the Erzgebirge. A few I knew: candle arches, nutcrackers and the Christmas pyramids, those small, delicate, tiered wooden carousels that are lit with candles and topped with a propeller that turns in the heat of the flames. But when she tried to describe the small wooden animals and figures called ring-turned toys (in German, Reifentiere), we both conceded linguistic defeat.

Ring-turned toys were invented in Seiffen around 1800. “It was a special technique to cheaply produce wooden animals,” said Konrad Auerbach, the director of the Erzgebirge Toy Museum in Seiffen. We were standing in the museum’s main gallery surrounded by displays of antique ring-turned animals. Seiffen became one of the continent’s leading toy producers, fueled in part by the Erzgebirge’s relative proximity to Nuremberg, then “the center of the European toy trade.” Dr. Auerbach said.

He had a point. By this time I had seen enough Seiffen ornaments to know they were meant to be admired, not grabbed by small fingers. Still, during my midweek visit, I also noticed how warmly the town welcomed families. Several workshops offer activities for kids, like creating an Advent wreath, or painting a toy train. Shops like the Handwerksmarkt sell craft supplies to make your own Christmas pyramid, or carve and paint a set of ring-turned animals. And I spotted many families of German tourists — they appeared to be mostly grandparents and grandchildren — exploring the toy village together.

In fact, I found a lot of irresistible creations in Seiffen. I could have spent many hours at the workshops of Volkskunst or Richard Glässer, where the public is invited (for free at the former; with a modest fee of two euros at the latter) to observe the artisans as they glue small figures onto Christmas pyramids, for example, or meticulously paint nutcracker belts. And I could have spent many euros at the local galleries, especially Dregeno, the town’s cooperative of Erzgebirge arts and crafts, which sells the work of more than 120 artisans.

Thick emerald waves broke over a quarter-mile-long sandbar, blocking our way. A few hundred yards east, whitecaps crashed across Exuma Sound — a 6,000-foot-deep abyss of rolling swells and powerful trade winds that would likely flip our tiny sailboats. Beyond the sandbar, we could see the tranquil flats of the Exuma Bank and the protected beach where we hoped to camp the first night of the trip. We just had to get around the bar before dark.

A shadow flashed under the hull — a four-foot-wide stingray searching for food in the ebbing tide. Two needlefish jetted from the water and nearly landed in the cockpit. The water was so clear, it was like looking through a glass-bottom boat at coral heads, patches of sea grass and conchs passing by on the ocean floor.

Zach Tucker sailed the second boat in our armada alongside. He was relatively new to sailing but had proved a natural at the helm. We each carried three friends from Brooklyn, along with enough food, water and rum to last a week in the Bahamas’ Exuma Islands. This was my second trip through the islands on the 21-foot “expedition sailboats” that Out Island Explorers rents from its base on Great Exuma Island. After searching for a Bahamas vacation free from the confines of a cruise ship, all-inclusive resort or even traditional sailboat charter — where the staff goes to great lengths to shield guests from the raw natural beauty of the islands — I’d found Out Island’s sail-camping journeys and set out to explore the Caribbean-pine fringed cays, deserted beaches, backwater fishing villages and pristine coral reefs of the Exumas.

We opted for the unguided package on this trip — guided trips are possible as well — that would include long days of navigating by map and compass around windswept atolls, longer nights sitting around a campfire, spearfishing dinner, sleeping in tents on the beach and generally living a Robinson Crusoe existence, minus the cannibals, captives and (hopefully) mutineers.

As the sun disappeared over the flats and light drained from the sky, I signaled to Zach to tack his boat toward Harvey’s Cay so we could get around the sandbar. Celebratory cocktails were stashed. A few life jackets appeared in the cockpit. Then, just as a half moon lifted off the water, a dark blue channel cutting through the sandbar appeared. The wind held long enough for the boats to slip through, and a half-hour later we were sailing a rhumb line for the beach.

Cocktails re-emerged. A pool of silvery moonlight gathered around the boats. The silhouette of Zach’s sails looked like black shears jutting up from the ocean. There were no lighted pathways or cabanas onshore, no host preparing sashimi, or D.J.s spinning tunes. There was only our wide-eyed group of friends, two coolers of ice, a heap of frozen food we’d brought from the States, camping gear and a portable radio to play Bahamian rake-and-scrape hits on whatever radio station we could tune in.

Of hurricanes and shallow seas

“It was country as unspoiled as when Columbus came to this coast,” Ernest Hemingway wrote in “Islands in the Stream,” about living on Bimini Island in the Bahamas in the 1930s. A local on Little Farmer’s Cay explained the pristine nature of the islands another way. “Anything you build will eventually get swept away,” he said, pointing to the ruins of four cabanas he owned that were destroyed by a hurricane years before.

Last September, many months after our trip, Hurricane Dorian would do just that, blazing a path of destruction across the Abacos and Grand Bahama. The Exumas — a north-south string of some 365 sand-fringed cays between Nassau and Long Island — were largely spared.

One afternoon we visited Terry Bain — the owner of the cabanas that had been washed away in a hurricane, and maker of the best piña coladas in the Bahamas — at his Ocean Cabin Restaurant & Bar on Little Farmer’s Cay. We were halfway through the trip, and he resupplied us with water, ice, rice, rum, cigars, cooking oil and a dozen tomatoes that his wife, Ernestine, wrapped individually in paper towels. That night we made camp on a half-mile-long beach across the bay on Big Farmer’s Cay, stringing up solar Christmas lights in the palm trees and watching ballyhoo and jacks jump along the shoreline, their silvery scales reflecting flashes of moonlight.

Porter Fox is the editor of Nowhere, a journal of literary travel writing, and the author of “Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border.”