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CURACAO - An Introduction
(Thanks to Mark and Suzy at The Dive Bus and
Jesper our new Danish pal for the use of some of their photos on this
part of the web site as at this stage we still had no camera following
the theft in Costa Rica)
(Andy)
You know for sure that the routine that we call life has changed beyond
all recognition when your shoe selection is made up entirely of
flip-flops, you haven’t worn socks for almost a year, a hot water shower
is something that you now call a luxury, the car you drive is a 15 year
old Suzuki and you are no longer pale blue but sport a healthy year
round sun tan. On the same side of the coin, you are living in the
Caribbean, the weather is hot, life is relaxed and stress free, you have
the choice of beaches, happy hours, restaurants, pub quizzes,
water-sports and diving to keep you occupied at the weekend and you
could BBQ out doors every night (if you wanted to!).
Life has indeed changed! We are now in Curacao, part
of the Netherlands Antilles and located in the southern Caribbean just
40 miles off the coast of Venezuela. Our journey here was a unique
experience travelling all through Central America and then plane hopping
from Panama into Colombia and then direct to Curacao. The memories are
still so vivid in our minds refreshed each day by the colours and sights
of the some artefacts, photographs and wall hangings which now decorate
our rented house here on the island.
We arrived on the island at the
end of May 2006 and were met at the airport by Mark and Suzy, our new
employers and proud owners of the funky and cool ‘The Dive Bus’. This
was the first time we had met having only had corresponded by email
following their recruitment Ad on the PADI web site. Clearly things
could have gone either way (on both parts!!) but all of us seemed to hit
it off immediately and we owe them both a debt of gratitude for helping
us get settled into the island and keeping us on the right track with
essentials such as where to look for accommodation, cars, supermarkets
as well as more important things like where the best bars and
restaurants are.
The island is about 30 miles
long and only 2 at it’s thinnest. Population census as you would expect
varies but averages around 300,000. The locals speak Papiamento, a
strange brew of Spanish, Dutch, French, English and Creole – all a
result of the various colonial influences who have had a presence in
this part of the world for the last 500 years. They also however speak,
Dutch, English and Spanish. A humbling fact when you go the supermarket
and the checkout girl can talk to you in any one of them! Year round
temperature averages about 30C, the sun sets no later than at 7:30PM and
an hour earlier in the winter. Rainy season is supposed to run from
November to March although this year we seem to be being spared of the
norm – apparently El Nino is to blame? Main tourist season is in the
summer time and mostly Dutchies coming over for 2 weeks in the sun. The
winter season sees an influx of Americans from the cruise ships which
swell the main part of town by anything between 1000 – 3000 sun burnt
torsos each day, sporting the latest American Caribbean ‘fashion’, the
worst sun visors you’ve ever seen. If only we charged by the kilo
(that’s 2.2lbs for our cousins across The Pond), then we’d be a whole
lot better off financially.
Here's some shots of what it looks like, beaches
and general sights......
SIGHTS:
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Colourful Houses, Punda
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Punda Canal Front
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"Coronation Street"
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The Local Corner Shops are called 'Snacks'
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View across Punda from the bridge
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The other side of the bridge and the huge Oil refinery
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The Queen Mary II, one of the few ports it can actually dock at!
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Adios Amigos!
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The old fort at Caracas Baai
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A very rugged and jagged landscape
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See!
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Local wildlife
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Land House Ascencion
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Old jazz and blues boys jamming
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Ah pretty.....
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Sea Blow Hole up at West Point
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The sea torn North Side
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Wind Turbines on the North Side
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Church at St Willibrodus (or Really Broad Ass)
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Pelican at Porto Mari
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and friends.....
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Wildlife birdies
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BEACHES:
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Director's Bay
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Grote Knip
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Grote Knip
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Klein Knip
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Klein Knip
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Caribbean Sea Sports
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Playa Forti
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Playa Kanoa
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Playa Sonesta
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Porto Mari
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Porto Mari
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and another of Porto Mari
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Royal Resorts
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We’ve been on the island now for around 8 months,
almost the same length of time as we were in Egypt and now 18 months
since we left Edinburgh - wow how time has flown!! Like anywhere else we
have met the predictable challenges that any one faces when moving into
a new place. Firstly finding somewhere to live – right place, location,
2 bedrooms (so family and friends can visit) and of course price. Having
finally found somewhere we soon came to realise that the landlord was an
extremely cautious fellow, moving at a glacial pace not only to agree
that he actually wanted to let out the house to us, but to then get the
lease documentation drawn up and of course translated from Dutch into
English for us. Issues like employment and lack of any official
residency documentation on our part further complicated the process.
Anyway, after what seemed like an eternity we eventually signed up for a
12 month stay. While that may seem like a sensible thing to do, at that
point we’d only been here for 2 weeks, were still getting to know the
island and getting used to it. Let me explain.
Curacao is in the Caribbean, but
it isn’t your typical image of a picture postcard Caribbean. Don’t get
me wrong, it has some beautiful spots, as you will have seen from the
photos - white sandy beaches, some even with palm trees, top notch
hotels, new cars, expensive luxury houses and a selection of sail boats,
yachts and gin palaces, but it’s landscape is more Mexican than
Caribbean, quite arid and thick with cactus and thorny bushes. It does
get very green and lush in the rainy season and has the benefit of being
just outside the southern rim of the hurricane belt although when it
rains here it absolutely lashes down, turning streets and roads into
small rivers for the relatively short time the heavens have opened, to
be replaced mostly by blue skies and humidity inducing sun.
OUR NEW HOUSE:
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Our living room...
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..and the other window.
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The view from the veranda.....
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...and a storm on it'sway!
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Sadie early morning aerobics?
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Next door's dog Queenie as a puppy
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....and snoozing.....
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....and now with broken leg......
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....and resting in hammock!
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Her pal Bonkers!
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Fruity Cactus
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It’s difficult to describe what makes the island a
step or two away from our idea of paradise. Perhaps it’s the lack of a
single heart or centre to it, everything is spread out around the island
so the vibrancy and buzz that you get from a town centre is lost. A
consequence of this is that you also have to drive everywhere, walking
is hard due to the heat, and public transport is unpredictable and never
goes where you want to. We’d also been warned that there’s also a slight
but understandable hint of some reverse racism here, mostly aimed at
Dutch nationals from the locals. To date this hasn’t really apparent to
us despite both our colouring and now quite impressive suntans J, we are
often mistaken for Dutchies. Bureaucracy reigns too, especially when it
comes to do with anything with cars – tax, insurance and MOT, although
MOT is a rather loosely used term for the pathetic ‘test’ cars have to
go through every 2 years.
The pace of change here is slow,
despite the sprouting of new house builds and estates in many parts of
the island, mostly aimed at the more affluent Dutch as holiday homes and
US and Canadian citizens who are only a short flight away.
Service in banks, shops and
restaurants can also sometimes be something of a forgotten memory and
when you do get some it is dished up with a degree of apathy as if you
are a nuisance to their daily routine. We have to keep reminding
ourselves that we are on an island after all without busy cities, heavy
traffic and rush hours and pace of life is altogether slower here (we
have affectionately come to call it ‘Island time’!). We do moan however
when it takes us 15 minutes to drive to work rather than the usual 10. A
degree of perspective is often necessary to remind you where you are.
Being white here does have one
slight advantage though, the immigration and tourist visa laws here are
much more relaxed for Europeans and US/Canadians with more focus being
given to Venezuelans, Columbians, Haitians and Puerto Ricans. Having
said that our visa runs out in mid February and we need to decide what
to do next.
So what have we been up to? Well
we have obviously been too busy to update the website, but here’s a
selection of our more memorable times from the last 8 months….
May to August
Well for the first three months we both worked for Mark and Suzy at The
Dive Bus, teaching diving and taking customers on day diving trips as
well as helping to run the operation and do whatever was needed to keep
us operational. While not both full time, Andy has also been helping out
at another dive operation based at the Marriot Hotel, called Caribbean
Sea Sports. The two operations couldn’t be more different – The Dive Bus
small and minimalist with full emphasis on smaller dive groups, shore
diving and an end to end personal touch. The Marriot is obviously much
larger and they specialise in boat diving and have the capability of
accommodating larger numbers of divers, or is that larger divers?
Remember that most of the guests in the Marriot are Americans!
THE DIVE BUS AND FRIENDS:
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The Dive Bus Hut from the pier
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The 'Office'
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Andy without Suit and Tie
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...and at work!
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Sadie at work at The dive Bus
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and teaching two new students.
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A pair of dive instructors
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Jesper and Andy (Andy's the one on the right!)
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Jesper and Mark at work
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Mark wearing tightly fitting hood - not a good look
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Suzy at work
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Restaurant owner Siggy with lobsters
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Fish Scales
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This is how we get to the dive sites
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Local Hooligans
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..and more Scallies...
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and again!
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Getting back to work was a little bit of a shock to
the system having been travelling for the past three months. The income
was clearly welcome although it is totally minimal when compared to what
we had been used to in Edinburgh. The financial and material lessons
certainly have been good ones as it makes you realise how relatively
little you need to both survive and have a fairly comfortable lifestyle.
We still spend all we get, there’s just less of it!
Since arriving in May we pretty
much focused on work and earning some cash. It’s was amazing how quickly
we forgot that we were in the Caribbean and a warm sunny climate when at
first all we seemed to do was work, get up early finish when it was
almost dark and do little at the weekend except sleep, go to the
supermarket, clean the house and catch up on the other chores such as
banking paying bills and doing the washing. It just goes to show that
despite where you live these things still need to get done regardless of
the play ground which is just on your doorstep. We did however manage to
have days on the beach, diving and snorkelling accompanied by a cool box
full of the local beer, Polar from Venezuela, and snacks to keep us
going. There were also enough happy hours to keep us occupied with our
favourite being Mambo Beach on a Sunday afternoon where the whole island
seems to congregate to chill out to an essential and increasingly less
background soundtrack of Euro pop – well it is a Dutch colony after all!
There were also plenty of BBQs, themed parties (our new friends share
our love of fancy dress!) nights out with friends and a good range of
restaurants to go to (there’s even an Indian here!) I guess we need to
remind ourselves that we’re doing this for the lifestyle change, and
picturing a cold and rainy Edinburgh, long work hours and often a
stressful working environment helped to keep life sweet.
We also had some future events
to look forward to, and keep ourselves focused and to avoid making a
premature exit from the island. We had, a trip to Florida to renew our
tourist visas, Sheena and Richie, our friends from Edinburgh coming out
to see us, as well as my Dad Ian and my sister Joyce and at Christmas
time Sadie’s Dad, Jim and wife Loretta. As we came to later learn, it
took the first of these visits to make us appreciate the island more and
to get out and see what was out there. A welcome and essential course of
events the story of which will soon unfold.
August
(Sadie)
..…was a pivotal month for us as our tourist visas ran out and we
had to leave the country in order to renew them. This left us with a
dilemma as we weren’t sure a) where to go and b) whether or not we would
be let back in…even the most laid back immigration official was sure to
question if it really took 6 months to train to be dive instructors (our
‘official’ reason for staying on the island – a work permit takes way
too long and is too expensive to be worth bothering with!).
We finally plumped for Miami as
it was the cheapest flight we could find and more importantly a shopping
Mecca. Curacao’s idea of high fashion is a chain of clothes stores
called Rasonable Clothing – no, not a spelling mistake, but it just
about sums the shop up!
So before we knew it we were
waiting in line to be ‘welcomed’ ahem, into the good ole U S of A by a
real live (just about) version of Mr Burns from the Simpson’s. He had to
be the oldest, slowest and grumpiest immigration official we have ever
seen which gave me the giggles when he asked me to smile for the camera
and I noticed the sign behind his head which pledged for each visitor to
welcomed cordially to America and wished a good visit.
Once in we headed straight for
the Clay Hotel in Miami’s South beach which was the cheapest
accommodation we could find. It’s a charming little hotel/hostel with a
great bar underneath it and is always packed full. As we arrived it
started pouring with rain, so there was nothing to do but get drunk and
sleep off the jet lag J
The rest of the week seemed to
follow a very similar pattern with our days consisting of shopping,
eating and drinking all in fairly equal portions. My credit card has
never seen such a hammering in such a short space of time! After a few
days we rented a car and were stoked to find out we had been upgraded to
a Jeep the size of which was the equivalent of a Hummer, so we drove to
Fort Lauderdale like Lord and Lady Muck and guess what – shopped some
more in the biggest retail park I have ever seen – more like Disney
without the rides!
After that we decided to head
down to the Florida Keys naively thinking it would be a nice drive with
some beautiful beaches along the way. After a couple of hours of being
stuck in Miami’s congestion we finally reached Key Largo the first of
the Key towns and started looking for the beaches. When we realised we
had driven right through the town without so much as a sniff of sand or
sea we stopped at a hotel to ask for information.
The desk clerk smirked and said
‘you haven’t researched this trip have you?’ when we admitted we hadn’t
got so much as a map he told us there are no beaches in the keys – it’s
just miles of long islands linked by roads and bridges. When we asked
what else there was to do he said ‘the diving’s fantastic!’ I nearly
cried – it was NOT what we wanted to do on our ‘holidays’.
So guess what – we went and got
drunk instead! We found a fantastic little locals bar with it’s own
private dock full of wildlife (human and the bird variety!) After a
while we got chatting with a local guy who happened to also be a dive
instructor and a large group of his mates, and one mojito lead to
another. Before we knew it, it was 3 am and we were pissed as farts.
When we went to pay for our bill (which must have been huge) the barmaid
said the guy (who I’m ashamed to say I can’t even remember his name I
was so drunk) had paid it for us!!! He wouldn’t hear of letting us pay
even a cent, and just said that we would do the same thing for someone
else one day – he obviously didn’t get the fact that we were from
Scotland! J So anyway Chas, Chad, Chuck – whatever your name was – nice
one mate!
The next day wouldn’t you know
it we had to fly back to Curacao – why does that always happen when we
have raging hangovers?
Our next worry was whether or
not we would actually get back into the country, especially as we had a
whole houseful of stuff and a car to sell before we could leave. We
needn’t have worried though – true to island style the official didn’t
give us a second glance (it’s amazing what a British passport does for
you) and I couldn’t believe my ears when Andy started questioning the
poor man on how long we could stay this time as I dragged him away…
SOME PHOTOS OF SOME STRANGE NIGHTS:
1. PIRATES PARTY......
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Andy Pirate (and yes it did come off eventually!)
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Sadie, the straw goes in your mouth!
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Dive Master Graham
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Hez with bird
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Jesper
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Mark
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Suzy
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Quick, light the fuses!
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Obviously drunk and yes that's an England flag
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Jesper again
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AARRGGGH!!!!
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The beer makes your head shrink!
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or not......
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Pirates Pissed Up
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Pieces of Eight
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Davey Jones can't find his locker.....
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2. NIGHT OUT WITH FRIENDS.....
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A good time was had by all!!!!
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Not a good look Mark
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L-R: Andy, Sadie, Mark, Nigsy, Graham & Bez (Suzy took photo)
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smiles.....
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NEXT UP..................many welcome visitors from back home, more
parties and some diving photos.......
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