Saturday - January 08, 2005
It Never Rains in Curacao
Our tour guide told us that it only rains heavily in Curacao once every two or three years, and the locals love it when it does because the island is so arid. Well, guess what? We must be truly blessed, because I think they are getting half their annual rainfall of 16 inches today!
We attended the shipboard lecture on Curacao yesterday, and looked at some wonderful slides showing the capitol town of Willemstad in all her colorful glory under blue skies and puffy while clouds. This island is a member of the Dutch Antilles, so the buildings here are all built in the colonial Dutch style and are painted in very bright colors, such as vibrant yellows, blues, and greens, with red-tiled roofs. A large channel with a pontoon bridge across bisects the town into the old and new parts. When the bridge swings to the side to allow the oil tankers, cruise ships, and sailing boats through, locals and visitors cross the canal on small ferries. There is a floating market, a couple of forts, and a synagogue that dates back to the 1600s that visitors can tour. Great, we thought! This place has all the makings of a great day in port. And the Captain announced yesterday that instead of leaving at 5 pm, we'll stay until 11. Wonderful. We'll tour the town, do our guided underwater tour of the bay, and then have dinner in a nice restaurant before we depart.
Mike set the alarm so he could get up early to see our arrival from the Sun Deck. I stayed in bed. It was overcast, but never mind, it was fun to see how they docked the ship by pushing it in sideways with tugs and to see a P&O ship sail past to one of the other docks.
We have breakfast and then tootle down to 5 deck to disembark, only to be met with a heavy shower. But never mind, Mike goes back for our umbrellas, and by the time he returns, it has stopped. Off we go, across the pontoon bridge to explore. We wander down a couple of colorful streets lined with shops selling jewellry, perfume, and electronics. So we decide to head over to the synagogue, only it is Saturday and it is closed to visitors. Never mind, it is almost time to head over to the meeting point for our tour. But just as we get to the pontoon bridge, they close it to allow a ship through. Never mind, we'll take the ferry. So back we trot to the ferry and wait for it to decide it has enough passengers that it can leave. Just as we get to the other side, the skies open up and it really starts to rain. We race through big puddles to get to the meeting point, and it still isn't letting up at all.
Never mind, we'll be on the bus until we get to the Aquatic site where we board a semi-submersible boat that lets us see the sea life around us through big glass windows as we motor along the sea ledge. We saw three or four different kinds of corral and a number of different types of fish - Sargeant-Major fish, various Parrot fish, Yellow-tailed Snapper, etc. At one point, our guide put on her diving gear and went outside to feed the fish, and that certainly attracted them to us. We didn't see quite the variety that we saw off the Great Barrier Reef when we did a similar excursion from Heron Island, but it was still quite enjoyable. And what better place to be when it is raining than under the water!
A couple of hours later, we return to the ship and get soaked running about a hundred yards to the gangway. Now I'm minding all this rain and quite literally throw in the towel. We change our clothes and amuse ourselves on the ship before going ashore again later to see if we can find a nice place to have dinner. The simple answer to that question is "No". The town was closed up tighter than a drum, even though it was Saturday night, and there was hardly anyone about. After walking around town for about a half hour, we find a couple of restaurants that are open, but don't see anything that is more appealing that dinner in our Princess Grill on board ship, so we decide to head back. Just as we approach the pontoon bridge, we see that is about to swing open again, so this time we hot foot it over there and have to jump to make it on before the guard closes the gate. And that means hot footing it all the way across the bridge so that we get to the other side before it swings open as well, which we do with another small jump.
We later heard that Curacao shops had closed earlier in the day because of flooding, so it could be that they never bothered to open up again and that was why the town was so dead. So our view of Curacao as being a place we wouldn't hurry back to may be colored by the fact that we definitely didn't see it at its best.