Steve and Cathy's Blog

The ship arrives at 10am Saturday.  The weather is, of course, beautiful.  We had “slept in” until 7am.  Well, Steve did.  Cathy was up at 6, so she went up to Waves on Deck 9 for a cappuccino while I get my act together.  We ate breakfast in the main dining room, sort of planning our day.  Our tour didn’t leave until 1:15pm, so we had the morning to do whatever.  We decided to go into the city of Oranjestad for a couple of hours.

The main street of the city, not far from the ship, is a series of high-end duty free shops.  You name a high-end whatever, and I mean whatever, and we promise that there is a shop full of that product in the heart of the capital city.  There is even a two-story mall full of more shops.  Apparently this is a big, lucrative business here in Aruba.  As Cathy and I are not in the market for $10,000 watches or $3,000 handbags, we just wandered around looking for a place to buy postcards to send our grandchildren.

Side note: postcards are very passé.  Many of the souvy shops don’t have any, and those that do don’t have the postage.  This is going to be a challenge for us, because we want to send postcards.  Kids love to get mail.  It’s such more fun that getting an email, and the stamps are very interesting as well.  Hopefully our grandchildren will collect them, because they do make a nice mini-travelogue.

Finally we found our $1.00 postcards (no stamps), resisted the urges to buy a diamond bracelet and Rolex watch for ourselves, and started back to the ship around 11:30.  But right on the main street was a cute sign for a second-story restaurant called Iguana Joe’s.  Time for our first meal on foreign soil.  It was shaded, open to and overlooked the hustle and bustle of Oranjestad.  It was delightful. Cathy had fish tacos and Steve jerk chicken skewers.  The spicing was fantastic, but needed a couple of bottles of Balashi beer (“Premium Beer Brewed in Aruba”) to keep it at bay.

Back to the ship for some very quick quiet time, then off to our first excursion: Natural Wonders of Aruba.  In a bit of first-time luck, this three-hour tour was not particularly popular today as there were only around twelve of us.  This gave everyone a chance to sit toward the front off the bus and pepper the driver/guide Ryan with all kinds of questions.  This very entertaining young Aruban gave us a great afternoon.

First stop was the Butterfly Farm, where a delightful young lady named Marjorie taught us more about butterflies in thirty minutes than any of us had ever considered learning.  There were many species of butterflies, some of them with a wing span of at least five inches.  She talked extensively about Monarch butterflies, probably because that was the only species most of us North Americans were familiar with, including the fact that they make up to five trips back and forth between Canada/The U.S. and Mexico and other Central American locations.  Amazing.

The next stop was the Aruba Aloe Balm Inc. factory and store.  The place smelled fantastic.  The guide demonstrated what part of the plant was used for the cosmetic preparations that they made and the entire production process.  Interesting fact: aloe had previously been grown for the part of the plant that has a very assertive laxative effect on humans, but other chemicals took its place.  It was then that the soothing, medicinal nature of another part of the plant gained popularity.  Of course we were ushered to the store after the tour, where we could buy all manner of products that the company made.

We then drove to the northern side of the Island.  It would seem that all of the Caribbean islands have two distinct sides, one facing the Atlantic Ocean and the other the Caribbean Sea.  The latter has much rougher surf, and the land tends to reflect that.  That side of the island is usually much less inhabited, and often the vegetation is different than the Caribbean side.

One of the reasons for the difference is the wind.  Friends that had visited Aruba spoke of the constant wind, and indeed it is strong and constant – out of the northeast most of the year, which is how it was that Columbus ended up in the Caribbean instead of farther north where the U.S. mainland is.

Our third stop was the Natural Bridge.  Well, it was the Natural Bridge until 2005 when it collapsed.  Now it is the Natural Pile of Volcanic Rock with a smaller natural bridge beside it.  But the tour buses still come, and we all dutifully get off and admire the smaller “Little Natural Bridge” and take a break.

That put us quite a ways from Oranjestad, so we wandered back along the north coast and then down through the island to the city while Ryan regaled us with tons of information about Aruba.  They gained independence from the Dutch in 1986, but are still affiliated with Holland in various ways.  Holland represents the island in international diplomacy, provides national defense (interestingly, along with the U.S. Coast Guard).

Historically, the Arawak indians from Venezuela and Colombia first settled the island (along with Curacao and Bonaire) to escape from a much more bellicose tribe many hundreds of not thousands of years before Europeans showed up.  First of them were the Spanish, who were looking for gold, diamonds, and other precious metals and minerals.  Finding none, they never really developed the islands, and the Dutch were successful in driving them off.  Actually, it wasn’t the Dutch government.  It was the Dutch West Indies Company, a private company with its own military and a license, if you will, from the Dutch government that allowed them to exploit the place, which they certainly did.

This post could be five times the length if I wanted to go into all the historical information we received (Oh God, Steve. Please, No!).  I’ll stop here.

Just a few more observations: Aruba is a desert.  But Aruba has 350 days of sunshine each year.  They do have an oil refinery (owned by the Aruba government and leased to Venezuela) as part of the economy and the aloe is a plant that is grown and harvested, but they figured out before other Netherland Antilles islands that the real gold is us.  By that I mean us tourists.  We have yet to meet anyone who has visited that doesn’t love the place.  Beautiful beaches, perfect weather, friendly people in a safe and welcoming environment. 85% of the employment is in the hospitality industry.

Okay, so after our tour we head back to the ship.  Another awesome dinner.  The ship departs for Curacao (90 miles away) around 10pm.  We are fast asleep by then.