Day 8: Willemstad Curacao

Good Friday, April 2nd

With a day of rest and a good night's sleep behind us, we both woke up before six o'clock, got dressed and went up on deck to watch us dock at Willemstead. The city is really colorful and different than any of the other Caribbean ports we'd seen. It is arranged around St. Anna's Bay and all of the houses are painted in different pastel shades.

After watching the docking we walked down to the buffet and had breakfast. Then we made a quick trip back to our room and headed off the ship to explore the town at around 8:30.

Our first stop was, you guessed it, a Fort. The fort on the west side of St. Anna's Bay, the portion of the city named Otrobanda, is called Fort Rif. However, the only thing fort-like about it are the walls. Inside it's been turned into a modern shopping center with scores of restaurants, bars and shops. We climbed to the top of the wall and walked around it, just to get a feel for the view up and down the coast. Then we took off for the city.

The two halves of the city are connected by a pontoon bridge for foot traffic (named Queen Emma's bridge) and a really high arched bridge (Queen Julianna) for motor traffic. At least ten times a day the pontoon bridge swings out of the way so that boat traffic can get through into the main portion of St. Anna's bay.

We crossed the pontoon bridge and started walking through the eastern of Punda portion of the town. The first thing we saw was the floating market. These are boats who pull up to the wharf on the north side of down and sell local produce. There was a lot of tropical fruits as well as large bananas and other produce that I didn't recognize.

There weren't a lot of crowds (locals or tourists), probably because it was a holiday. Many of the shops in the tourist core of downtown were closed for Good Friday, and the rest were closing early at 2:00 pm. There were even fewer people when we went out of the city.

Neither of us especially wanted to look through the tourist shops so we started walking out of town following one of the arms of St. Anna's Bay and then one of the main streets. We first passed a Pentecostal storefront church. We looked inside and saw that there was only one person in the seats. While we were standing there, a woman walked up and invited us to the Good Friday service that started in a few minutes. However, the service was in Spanish, so we didn't go in. We passed a Methodist church, which seemed to be full, but the service was already going, and a Catholic church which didn't have anything happening.

As we kept walking the houses got smaller and less well tended, but were still painted pastel colors. We walked by a graveyard but couldn't get in. After about two miles, the houses petered out and it looked like we were entering a rural and industrial area. (There are a lot of oil wells and oil tanks all over the island. The island is only 35 miles off of the coast of Venezuela, so I assume that they are tapping the same deposits).

Once we ran out of houses we turned right and kept going until we got to the ocean. The entire south-east coast of Curacao is an underwater marine park, but the beach is almost non existent. There is also no public access per-se. According to my guidebook, you can go into the resorts lining this section of the island and pay to snorkel there.

We didn't do that, but as we walked back toward town, we found several abandoned houses and we were able to get to the beach by walking through their property. The houses that are not abandoned are all just pristine. I imagine that it costs a lot to restore some of these old places. (Many of them are UNESCO World Heratige buildings, so you probably can't tear them down and put up a modern building.)

When we got back to the center of town we walked around the other fort, Fort Amsterdam. This is still very much in use as a governmental and police building. It doesn't look at all like an old fort; its walls have all been painted a nice pastel yellow.

After the fort, we walked though the tourist section of Punda and then crossed the pontoon bridge once again. We stopped in a cafe on Howard Johnson's square (right in front of the Howard Johnson's Hotel and Casino) and rested our feet for a bit. While we were sitting there, a yacht needed to get into the inner harbor, so they moved the pontoon bridge, which was kind of interesting.

After catching our breath and resting our feet, we decided to walk in the opposite direction and explore Otrobanda. This is not a tourist section of town. We walked down the main street looking in the shops and taking pictures of the buildings.

Eventually we came to a Christian college and another Catholic cathedral. Inside, in one corner of the curch there were about 25 old women holding a Good Friday service. We listened for a few minutes but really couldn't understand anything.

After leaving the church we found another large cemetery, filled entirely with crypts. I think maybe they don't do underground burials because the ground is rock, but I don't know. We certainly weren't at sea-level, like New Orleans.

Across from the cemetery was a supermarket and we went in and bought some Diet Coke for our stateroom. Because this wasn't in a tourist area, they really didn't know what to do with our American money (and we hadn't changed any into Florins). The supermarket was run by a Chinese family and their young son tried to figure out the conversion rate. Finally the mom just said "they're about a dollar" and so we handed over four ones.

By now it was almost twelve-thirty and we'd been walking for almost four hours and we were both hot and sweaty. When be got back on board we went to the buffet and drank ice-tea after ice-tea. Then we had a little lunch and went to our cabin for reading and a nap.

Next stop, Aruba and some more snorkeling.