Travel enough and you’ll come across your share of shady places. I’ve been in a bar in Mexico where the roaches scurrying across the table are bigger than the beer bottles and you have to be drunker than you’ve ever been to stomach it. I’ve been chased by a group of would-be muggers through the narrow streets of the French Quarter long before Hurricane Katrina. I’ve been in Texas border towns where you wonder if the Constitution still applies. Heck, I’ve just walked around South Beach late at night - by far the seediest tourist spot of all.

South Beach can make Mexico (where the supposed seediness is usually vastly overblown and often downright untrue) look like Disney World.

Still in all my travels, I’ve never been approached on the street in the middle of the day and offered drugs. Until I visited the Bahamas.

There, strolling through the streets of downtown Nassau, near where the unbelievably massive cruise ships dock (including Disney cruises), a guy called out to tourists who passed close by, “Coke or heroin, free samples.”

Now, I admit I don’t have TravelGolf.com Tim McDonald’s speed-popping construction work experience (or his beating up surfers experience for that matter), but who’s taking “free samples” of cocaine or heroin from some street pusher? Especially the same week that Heath Ledger may have wittingly or unwittingly did himself in on drugs.

And aren’t free samples supposed to be limited to stuff like dishwashing detergent?

Ah, the Bahamas.

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