Today is our first port day – Oranjestad on the Island of Aruba. (The correct pronunciation is Oranj – a – stad). After a brief stop at a butterfly farm, we started our day with a 3+ hour bus ride around the island. Our driver and guide, Melvin, was great. He named his son Xander (only certain people will appreciate that). We drove on to a place called Ayo with its unusual rock outcroppings and petroglyphs, then on to Natural Bridge on the coast. An interesting feature there: the Natural Bridge actually collapsed in 2005. It happened in the middle of the night; otherwise many people may have been injured. A popular thing to do here is ATV riding. There's hundreds of them! There was some great wave crashing here, too!
We learned some interesting things about Aruba:
The island is basically a desert. Once you get away from the hotels and beaches, you'll find scrub cactus everywhere.
There is no source of water! Back in the 50's, the government built a huge desalinization plant which now provides all the potable water for the island.
The only thing that Aruba exports is Aloe products
Most businesses are owned by Chinese; “all” the jewelry stores are Indian. (So we were told)
The weather is the same all year. The only season is “spring break”!
We returned to the ship about 1:00. After lunch, we headed back out to explore the town. Its a long, hot walk! The main streets are all souvenir shops and vendors. We did find our magnet! We stopped for a cold drink at Iguana Joe's.
There are four cruise ships here today. (Holland, Norwegian, Celebrity. The “Freewinds” is owned by the Church of Scientology). That's over 10,000 tourists in town! As I write this at 10PM, we can see two more cruise ships at anchor waiting for us to leave.
Back to the ship time for dinner. We had a nice meal in the Dining Room with a couple of snowbirds from Boston and Florida. They had cruised everywhere, literally. Like so many people we encounter, they loved “cruising”.
We'll be shoving off about midnight and by morning we'll be in Willemstad, Curacao, for another day of island exploring.
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| Natural Bridge collapsed |
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