No slowdown in spending among the wealthy on this Bahamian island

Word that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce had been seen on the marina of this tiny speck (5 square miles) of an island for a vacation was met with bemusement by the tourists who had gathered to watch the magnificent sunset at the bar, and with dismay by locals, worried that their little speck of paradise was turning into the next Saint Barts.

"I hear she's staying right up the street," a woman sitting alone at the bar told us. She was cheerfully downing perfectly chilled prosecco in a champagne flute.   

The locals seemed unimpressed.

"It's the two percenters who are coming, and the ultra-rich," one shopkeeper told us, noting that business had been brisk among the wealthier Americans, Canadians and Brits that are the backbone of the economy here.   

Maybe too brisk.  

"We have 20 billionaires on this island alone. The traffic is getting to be unbearable," she said, eyeing me suspiciously.  

I straightened up and tried looking like a two percenter, but I wasn't sure what they looked like.

Traffic? What traffic? I looked out the window of her shop. Most people were driving around in golf carts. With a population of only 1,800, Harbour Island and its one and only town, Dunmore Town, makes Saint Barts (population 11,000) look like midtown Manhattan.

The woman herself, she explained, had moved to Eleuthera, a 10-minute water taxi ride away, where the hoi polloi rarely come, apparently.

All of which begs the question: Why on earth would anyone, let alone Taylor Swift and a bunch of billionaires, come to this tiny speck?  

Why are there so many huge yachts sitting in Valentines Marina?

Harbour Island is barely an island. It's an island off an island, in this case Eleuthera, some 60 miles northeast of Nassau. You can't fly in. You have to