Full beaches and an empty resort

It looked like a ghost town, but I could see it was meant to be resort. There were rooms, apartments, balconies. There were not windows or doors. Actually there was nothing that showed any sign of being used. Theo thought it was built in the seventies and never finished. I fantasized abut the thirties, being one of the very first hotels here* , popular in those days, but since forgotten and deserted. I am a very visual person, so I almost saw it, including the appropriate clothing style and cute little children playing on the strange little square that I realized to be a midget golf area.

We ended up here on our usual weekend “let’s-see-where-we-end-up-drives”. Actually, it started as a drive to the beach. But not to Blue Bay again. Despite, or maybe because, it being one of our favorite beaches, we’d been there last week and in the weeks before. We found we were getting boring and predictable. So we decided to go to a beach that we’d never been to before.
We checked the list in the newspaper (since that indicates if there are rental chairs, restaurants and such) and the map and decided to go to Daaibooi.

It was a great beach. But also very, very popular. And nobody had been planting lots of palm trees there like they did in Blue Bay (we heard one of the people responsible brag about it and he had a right to, that must have been a lot of work), so there wasn’t any shadow. The sun was too hot, so we decided to try the next beach. Playa PortoMari. Very nice too. Same problem.

So off we went again. That was the moment we decided to make it a “let’s-see-where-we-end-up-drive” and finish that with a swim at the Knip (our other favorite beach, down in the west). But we never do as we say, so we took that swim at Boca Santa Cruz, the next beach. This one we liked a lot. It was big, but full of fun people. The sea was rather shallow, so it was nice and even warmer than usual. The only problem was the amount of sea weed at the side we were swimming. I have a funny kind of phobia for that. I thought I’d outgrown it (it started in my early teens) but I touched a bit of weed and screamed, giving Theo a scare. I have to do something about that, but not now. Theo tried to make it into a joke, but I panicked every time he tried to pull me into the weed. Oh well, most of the beaches here are nice and sea weed free.

We dried ourselves off a bit, but didn’t bother to change (no dressing rooms, so it would have been messing about behind a towel). Sitting on our beach towels to prevent the car seats from getting wet, things were working out just fine. Or that’s what I thought. After a few hours my black dress had white marks all over from the salt water drying out. Never had that problem before, so I’m wondering if that beach had saltier water. Which can’t be true, since this is an island so it’s all the same sea. But still.

After our swim we drove an unknown little road up to the spooky resort near Santa Martha Bay. It did trigger our fantasy and I liked that a lot. But we were home I checked internet and the facts aren’t too funny. The resort went broke in 2009 and only a few months later it was robbed of everything that was more or less detachable. So sad. It really looked like it had been deserted for decades. And it’s one of the most beautiful spots on the island, so I hope someone will invest in it and restore it to it’s former beauty.

We tried to find some more beautiful little roads and found some. We still didn’t find the one near the coast that we’d been looking for before. It should end somewhere near the airport, so we drove to Hato to see if we could find it there. We didn’t, but we had a little “when in Rome” moment which is always fun. There were lots of cars parked down the road and people standing there to watch the KLM airplane (the biggest plane landing here – a 747) leave. So we got out too and watch it go off, back to Amsterdam. And realized we had only two weeks left here and then we would be on it. And then realized most people only come here for two weeks, so we still have a lot of time. Sort of.

* I was completely wrong, tourism here started a lot later