Of the three stops we knew we would be making, I’d never heard of Bonaire and only vaguely knew of Curaçao. (I certainly could not have found it on a map.) The name “Aruba” was by far the most familiar to me. Aruba is a beach-goer’s paradise. It offers miles and miles of white-sand beaches and sunny hours to be whiled away. Mark and I are not beach people.
The Aruba excursions offered by Princess didn’t strike a chord with us—many had beach time appended to them—so we decided early on that we would just walk around Oranjestad (the capital) to see what we could see. I guess we’re just naïve travelers who expected to find ourselves in a quaint town that we could walk through—a kind of tropical Short North, which is the art district in Columbus—with art galleries and bakeries and cafés and some reasonable shopping. What we found instead was a faux-authentic smattering of high-end shops selling Rolex, Louis Vuitton, and jewelry galore beside tourist shops packed with T-shirts and shot glasses—all surrounded by a fair bit of slum. We did go out and walk for a little bit. As we were walking along, we encountered a shipmate, Candice, who was pushing her daughter, Callie, in a stroller but was otherwise alone and looking for the nearest beach. She was having trouble finding it and was a little nervous walking by herself, so we accompanied her for about a half hour until we reached the beach she was looking for. People had told her it was 10 minutes away. After we left Candice, we headed back toward town, but the sun was very strong, and Mark got overheated and wanted to return to the ship after about an hour.
I’m a little more adventurous, so I stayed out a couple hours more and wandered through the poorer areas of town taking pictures. There’s not much more to report about the two or three square miles around Aruba’s port, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t give the island another shot. I think I’d just be more prepared next time and would put together a more concrete itinerary than just walking around the port. Here are some of my photos.
Here are a few shots in, around, and from the tourist area adjacent to the port.
And some of just the natural beauty of the island.
In my wandering, I saw some other interesting sites that most tourists probably don’t discover.
Then there was this guy, who just made us laugh. His body—screened by the fence—is about as big as his head.
And I’m sure there are a thousand pictures of people with this sculpture promoting a local steakhouse, if I remember correctly. We had to add our own to the collection.
We’ve been meeting some interesting and fun people on the cruise, and though I’ve not really talked about them, I did want to mention a man named Bud (because I didn’t really get the chance to talk with her much, I’ve forgotten his wife’s name). Bud sat next to me at dinner on the evening we left Aruba. He and his wife were probably in their 70s. He has a full head of white hair cut short but not military-short and the kind of open, easy-to-laugh face that invites conversation. I can tell that he and his wife are favorites among their grandkids. They’re both incredibly sweet and genuinely seem to enjoy life. Bud is the president of his county-wide amateur photography group, and we got to talking just briefly about photography. Why this is particularly interesting in the context of Aruba is that because they can’t get enough time on an excursion for him to really take the kind of photographs he likes to take, he and his wife have for years been eschewing sponsored excursions altogether. Instead, they research ahead of time the locales they want to see (using TripAdvisor now, which seems to be much more useful than I ever thought; it’s been mentioned by several people on this trip) and rent a car. They drive themselves wherever they want to go and spend a long as they want setting up shots. I think that sounds great, and I’m going to suggest to Mark that we do a little more of that ourselves. It’s nice to take an excursion here or there—like the one we did in Bonaire and that I’ll talk about in the next post (yes, it’s over; I’m writing this on our first day at sea on our way home)—but we could have had so much more fun in Aruba, and though the cave trip in Curaçao was interesting, it had definite drawbacks, and we probably would have enjoyed it more if we’d visited it on our own as part of an itinerary we had selected.