Well. that didn’t go too well. Blogposts have been written in my mind, but never for real. And photos did not get taken. Oh well. Let’s try again.

We had a wonderful, long weekend (Pentecost is Sunday and Monday here). It was hot and sunny and we spent a lot of time outside. I worked in the garden a bit, mostly pulling weeds.
And we went on a drive around our own little country. It’s funny how we had a hard time to pick up doing that after enjoying it so much on Curaçao.
But it was great when we finally did. We even went some places we’ve never been before and still it wasn’t too far from home (about half an hour). Then, when we came home, we had a lovely little barbecue with two of the girls. Now if I only could remember to take pictures of things like that again… 😉

I do have these two:

Watching ships go by at the Maas (Rotterdam)

Took a ferry to cross the Lek

Hi there! (just assuming someone is actually still following this blog).
So, I’ve been MIA for about two months. Why? Let’s just say life got in the way. Again. As always. And there was some silly chemical imbalance thing happening in my brain, causing depression. Again. But I’m getting there and I’m sort of eager to pick up some of the things I love doing so much, but just couldn’t work up the energy for. Starting with blogging and photography.
I have been overthinking my blog and what to do with it way too much, and finally decided to just blog just like I did before. It seems I’m always looking for my blogging style and my blogging voice, but maybe I just need to relax and post about the things I like when I feel like it.

Anyway. This is what started me wanting to blog again. My garden is starting to work it’s miracles (even though I didn’t really do much in it) and my fingers were itching to get out the camera and document it.

I have lots of lavender this year. This part of the garden (a narrow strip next to the house and driveway) did not exactly turn out like the neat little line of plants I thought it would be, it’s going wild. And I love it.

Marigolds. Also one of my favorites. I think I want to sow more.

Borage (I think)

Leeks. Lots of them. Last year they survived winter (not that we had a real one) and we ate them in April. Got to love fresh food from the garden in early spring. So I’m trying to do that again.

This is an experiment: three sister planting. Beans, corn and zucchini . They are supposed to work very well together. We’ll see how that goes…

My planner says “jetlag” in big letters this week. I put it in two months ago, when I was smart enough to realize that I should prevent myself from planning too much these days. I made Theo put it in his (digital) planner too. It’s so easy to just go ahead and fill those days up, but that would only cause stress.

When we arrived home Sunday, it seemed to go very well. I took a one hour nap and then I felt up and runnning. I unpacked, put away the clean clothes and did a few loads of laundry. On Monday I watered the plants, got some groceries, mopped the floor and did some other cleaning. Not because M. (our youngest daughter who still lives at home) didn’t do a good job keeping it clean, but because I wanted to. To feel like it was my home again. Since it did feel a little weird to be here again.

Most of our routines fell back in place immediately though. Including our drinking too much coffee. Both Theo and I have a tendency to walk to the kitchen and get a cuppa without even thinking about it. Luckily our luxerious self grinding coffee-with-one-push-on-the-button-maker is not working so well anymore and beyond repair (used so much over the years). We are finishing the beans we have and then we go back to a traditional coffee maker. That will prevent us from getting back to our usual 12+ (20?) cups a day. On Curacao we went back to four and that’s a whole lot healthier.

Other things are harder to get used to again. The whole country is beaming about the warm weather, but I’m wearing thick sweaters and a winter coat all buttoned up when I go out. The last few weeks we thought it was chilly when it was about 78 degrees outside and even this extremely warm spring doesn’t get close to that.

Even though Sunday and Monday I got the idea we were so rested that I was only having a minor jetlog, on Tuesday it hit. Hard. I couldn’t get up and I felt sick. Dizzy. Sore throat. Maybe hay fever. Or just a cold? I don’t know, but it lasted all day and I gave in to it. I just clicked around on the internet (but was too dizzy to comment) and read a book. Today I did do something (like writing this), but I still don’t feel very well. I think I’m taking the rest of the day off again, since you can’t do much with a brain that just doesn’t work. And I’m too dizzy to do anything off the couch.

Luckily I knew this beforehand and wrote “jetlag” above this week in my planner in February. So I don’t haven anything to do this week. Ha!

It’s Wednesday and I still haven’t put sorted the mail or did anything about the book keeping that I couldn’t do from a distance (I kept up with it digitally, but I have to print and number and sort stuff the old-fashioned way to). Tonight we’re picking up E. who’s coming home from Durham for Easter and who I’m quite sure will bring a suitcase full of laundry. And I have to write a newsletter about my books and this blogpost, both in English and Dutch. That’s all listed neatly below “jetlag”. Not to mention all the lists in my mind. The garden for instance. Oh my!

Obviously its’s the bad habits that you get back on track with the easiest. Like the coffee. And stress. I’m hardly home and already I’m making too long lists again of things that can wait. But that’s not what I want. I’m living in, or actually between, two worlds right now and I really want to take the best of both. And the relaxed way of life that is so normal there and so rare here is one of the best things about the Caribean.

So I’m reminding myself of our landlord and his best friend. They often came to pick up the motor that was stored next to our apartment. They hand a little boat that they took out to sea often. I don’t know if they ever caught something, but that wasn’t the point.

Every time they took the motor, they said the same: “We’re going to throw away some stress. One has to do that regularly, that’s good for you.”
They are so right!

(pictures from our last day on the island. More pictures here – I’m planning to translate these “plogs” and move them to this blog, but that will have to wait a little while 😉 – see above.)

“No woman, no cry”, the band at the Renaissance square played last Saturday night. The male singer agreed with my husband and said it meant “without women you don’t have to cry”, but luckily the woman knew the real meaning: “don’t cry, woman”.

I did cry. Just for a moment. Because of the song, that somehow always touches me. And because I knew that exactly a week later we’d be in an airplane on our way home. And because I realized I will have keep leaving in the future. And that would mean a lot of crying, since that’s how it goes for me. Two months ago it was hard to say goodbye to the girls and my parents and the cat and the house and the garden. And now that it’s almost over, I’m happy to go and see everybody and everything, but also so sad to leave. And this will probably continue (if there are no financial and health issues) the coming years. Constantly saying goodbye.

Luckily Theo told me to look at it differently. It’s not leaving one thing, it’s going back to the other. He’s right. It’s been only two months since I last saw my girls and my parents (and cat, house and garden). Not years. And I don’t have to wait too long until we go back to Curaçao either.

One would think we’ve spent that last weekend on the beach, since we can’t do that for a while. But we never do what you’d think. We’re rather rested by now, so we went to find some adventure again.

We started by visiting an open house at Blue Bay Resort. We wanted to find out what it would mean if we bought a piece of land there. Not very adventurous, no. But we got a golfcart to drive around in and that was quite the experience when we went down a steep hill and found out the brakes weren’t too good. It was a relieve to get into our rental car again.

Since Blue Bay isn’t really what we’re looking for, we drove to Grote Berg again. Grote Berg means Big Mountain and that’s a good name since it’s a neighbourhood built on a hill. We’ve been there before and we like it very much. People have been warning us about airplanes coming over, but there isn’t that much air traffic on the island and most planes are rather small. One of those came over and we didn’t even hear it. I think the wind blows the sound away or something like that. We think we’d like to rent a house there though, before jumping into buying something.

I was searching for lot numbers and prices at Grote Berg in the real estate booklet when I saw some very cheap lots somewhere else, where we’d never been. That’s enough reason to try and find it. It wasn’t easy, but it was a nice drive on small, new-to-us roads. But when we finally found it, we were done with it immediately. Not only it was right in the middle of nowhere, but it also smelled like there was an illegal trash dump there. I don’t even want to think about cleaning that up.

It was kind of shocking, so we drove to Westpunt to breathe some sea wind. And then decided to go for a swim on Noordpunt, which isn’t as far apart as it sounds.

Playa Kalki is a really nice beach. At first sight it looks small and it seams very rocky, but if you walk down and a bit further there is more. And sand. Also there are toilets and a little bar and chairs, which is good if you’re not a local and can’t bring chairs, sun screens and big cool boxes.

After our swim we drove back to town and had a chicken shoarma at our usual adress in the Riffort. And then we got down to the square where we enjoyed some live music the week before too. Another band this time, but these did a great job too (especially on reggae). We drank some coffee and some wine. And I stopped crying, since that’s no way to spent our last week. I’m really going to enjoy these last few days!

p.s. rather few pictures, I know. It just didn’t work out Saturday. I did take a lot of pictures on Sunday, but I’m posting them somewhere else. In Holland “plogging” is a big thing now. It’s basically documenting your day in rather raw looking pictures. I have been thinking about translating it and posting it here, but I’m not sure I have time for that. So for now, if you’d like to see what I’ve been up to, you can go here and just look at the pictures. Or maybe try the horrible google translator 😉

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

Saturday night, from the Riffort. Unrelated to the story above, but I love the pastel skies and the full moon in this picture.

Santa Martha Bay

Santa Martha Bay

Leaving. Without us. For now.

“No, no, I’m awake”, I ensured Theo when he asked if I was sleeping. But a few minutes later I realized time did pass really fast. I remembered seeing on my phone that it was almost three and now I overheard people saying it was half past five. So maybe I did doze off a little while. Or maybe longer. Not very smart. Although we started out in the shadow, I was in the sun now. Luckily my skin has gotten used to the sun after five weeks. It just got a bit darker.

No adventures this weekend. We spent Sunday lying on the beach. The only thing mentionable that happened was that one of the ships passing turned out to be a submarine. But it didn’t do anything spectaculair. Which is a shame, cause I would have loved to see it diving or coming up.

Saturday we did a bit of driving around. I found an house in a real estate magazine that was quite affordable. As in really, really affordable. And though we’re nowhere close to actually buying something here, we were curious to see where this house would be and how it would look. In Holland real estate is listed with the full address, but here it isn’t. There was just a neighborhood. And since we don’t really know how to determine where one neighborhood ends and the other one begins, we weren’t sure which streets to look at. We just started where the name of the neighborhood was on the map and circled around from there. We saw lots of nice houses, but never found the one.

There were nice, well maintained houses and old, neglected houses. Those houses we renovated in our minds. We always do that. Can’t help it. We do think renovating houses  will be a lot easier here than at home. No rotting foundations and you could easily do without a roof for a while. To be honest, I don’t really care about those things. I think about the important stuff, like what color to paint the walls (inside and out), porch furniture and planting palm trees (at least two, since we have to hang a hammock) in the garden.

I insisted we made a detour to visit another house that I knew was for sale for even less. It was listed with a street name, so it was easier to find. I reminded myself that it already was for sale in October (I saw it listed back then too) and there was hardly any land (for Curaçao standards). Also it had a “seperate bathroom” which sounded like it had an outhouse and I wasn’t sure it even was connected to the sewer system. But still.

Despite knowing this, I pictured something that others just couldn’t see the possibilities off. But we would. A cute authentic little cottage, on a nice little spot outside of town. A cozy porch in the front and a cute little garden that would fit those two palm trees. Something like that.

But this little house was a little bit too authentic and it was on an authentic street, in the middle of the city. Our car just fit through it. There was no porch. From the front door you just jumped into traffic. That wasn’t going fast, since it just can’t. Since this part of the city is on a hill, the back of the house faced a mud wall. I couldn’t see the separate bathroom, but that would have fitted behind the house. My palm trees didn’t.

The listing said it was a “well maintained wooden structure”, but I think it has been for sale for a long time. The paint fell off when you just looked at it. It was the best maintained house in the street, but that didn’t really help. The price was that of a secondhand caravan, but that didn’t make up for the fact that in this house we missed the most important part of living here: being outside almost all day. I couldn’t even dream up a way to make it better. Although…maybe if you’d buy and tear down the awful looking structure beside it… no, not even then.

After all that driving around, looking, thinking and renovating we were really tired. That’s why I wanted to go to the beach on Sunday. Nothing else. Just lie down. And I guess that’s why, for just a little while, I may have been asleep…

“We’ll meet again in heaven.” The man nodded knowingly and we couldn’t do anything else but agree. This was not the moment to discuss believes.
Mentioning heaven seemed fitting too. He was an angel of sorts to us. Not the biblical type, but the kind of people that seem to appear out of nowhere to help you.

It really wasn’t the plan to go and see the Gran Marcha. I said it before, we both don’t really like waiting and holding places and stuff like that. But we were trying to reach the West and when we run into road blocks along the Carnaval route for the fifth time we decided it was time to give up. “If you can’t beat them, join them.” So we were waiting and trying to hold our place at the front.

“You have to drink lots of water”, a girl handing out gum advised us after begging my husband for a cigaret (she got one, smokers have some special social rules, I guess). We knew.
Luckily there was a booth selling water, since we didn’t come prepared. It wasn’t the lack of water that made me feel sick after a while. I get that when I haven’t eaten much and have to stand and wait for a long time. And of course the heat and the burning sun didn’t really help. But I refused to give up, so I drank some more water and chewed some gum.

It helped a bit and I enjoyed the beautiful wagons and the colorful costumes. I didn’t enjoy the loud music. Don’t think I’m overreacting. They had about fifteen big speakers stacked at the back of a truck. Blasting at full strength. That’s a lot of decibels. And each group had an installation like that. That made thirty of them.
But after the tenth we left that nice spot in front.
I was having cold sweats for a while now and when I felt a chill creeping up my legs and spine I knew I had to leave before it reached my head. Or else I would be the next stupid tourist fainting. Local people don’t stand in the sun for carnaval (or anything else). They hire booths to sit in, or they bring chairs and a parasols. I knew that, but even if we had prepared to watch the carnaval I wouldn’t have had chairs or parasols to bring.

I sat down at the first shadowed spot we found. I could smell it wasn’t the cleanest of spots, but I didn’t care. Sitting down, in the shadow, was the only thing I could think about. I didn’t have a clue how to reach the car, since we had to walk quite far for it, up a rather steep hill. Theo told me later that he had been thinking about trying to get me to the last road block, leaving me there and go alone to get the car.

But then he came. Our angel in disguise. Our savior. He was a bit drunk, but still. He asked if we wanted to see the carnaval. In the shadow, on a chair. I couldn’t care less about the carnaval, but the rest… yes, please! So we went with him, just a little bit down the road. He gave me a chair and got another one for Theo. He pointed out we could still see the carnaval if we looked past the people in the booth in front of us. Then he gave Theo a cold beer and I drank the rest of our water.

When he saw I was still trembling he got up again and got us “sopi iguana”. Lizard soup. Yes. Something you really got to try sometime, but preferably not when you’re feeling dizzy and sick. But I reminded myself that I hadn’t eaten for five hours and just tried not to look at the piece of lizard (clearly visible and still wrapped in it’s skin) floating in my cup. Much to my surprise it wasn’t too bad. Actually, I liked it. It was “hopi bon” as I tried to explain to the man when I didn’t want a second cup. I really had enough, but he thought I preferred a different soup. I didn’t.

In that wobbly little chair, resting in the shadow I was able to watch the rest of the carnaval and enjoyed it very much. Our benefactor kept offering husband and me cold beers. We mostly refused and than he drank them himself. He told us a lot about himself and asked about us. Then he forgot most of that and told and asked again. Which wasn’t really a problem because we couldn’t understand half of what he was saying and I think he understood even less of what we said. But he was nice and caring and helpful and he said goodbye to us as if we were old friends.

I do hope though that we see him again earlier than that. Cause that would mean he made it home safely despite all those beers that we didn’t drink…

I’ve been wondering what to blog about this week. I know it sounds fascinating to live on Curaçao for two months, but the truth is… kind of boring actually.
Our week goes something like this: Monday: work, Tuesday: work, Wednesday: work, Thursday: work, Friday: work, Friday Evening: celebrate the weekend, Saturday: beach, Sunday: beach. It’s wonderful, but not really blogging material.

One thing I did notice looking at my pictures of the past few days is the amount of color. That’s really a Curaçao thing to me. The colors here are so intense and bright. The sky is bright blue and the ocean can even be brighter than that. The sunset is an intense yellow orange, the trees and plants are all green and there are bright red, white and pink flowers everywhere. And if you hear a flock of birds coming over there’s a good chance they are bright green.

There’s even more color at the beach. The one we visit often has yellow and pink chairs. The people on them have beach towels in every existing color. Ours are a bit boring though. Mine is black with thin colored stripes and my husband’s is plain black. Not our choice really, it was a business gift we got once. A box of stuff pretending to be more than it was, all in black and silver. The towel is the only thing we kept, since it’s really big and it doesn’t stain easily (which is great if you go and sit on beaches that are not the white and sandy ones).

At the Wet&Wild bar I first enjoyed the beautiful sunset, but when it was gone, I turned my attention to the colorful people around me. At Wet&Wild there’s a majority of young people, but it’s often the older that spark my interest. Like a man sporting a beautiful silver beard, doing a bit of mambo with his wife that most younger people  (including myself, even though I’m not really young anymore) jumping around there couldn’t match even if they wanted too.

The boy in the red trousers was a lot younger. My eyes were first drawn to him because of those trousers. Most of the men there aren’t wearing long trousers (it’s a beach club after all) and if they do… not red. But then he started dancing and I couldn’t stop watching. Have you ever seen the Rowan Atkinson Sketch about what to do on a first date? The part about dancing goes like this: “some move too little” – Atkinson moving his chin only. “Some move too much”. Uh… Well, how to describe that? Just really, too much. Like the guy in the red trousers. Lucky for him it wasn’t his first date. He had a cute girl that joined him happily. For a while. Then she got tired and he just kept dancing on his own. He was enjoying himself so much that it was fun to watch.

Sunday we were at the beach early, but we left early too. That turned out to be a good choice. That night I noticed I had a bit of a sunburn going on, but I wasn’t too red. Cause that’s a nice color, but not on my skin.

We drove from the beach to Banda Abou, the rural part of the island and looked at houses. They come in all sorts of colors here. Yellow, green, blue. Or flamingo pink. I like that too, but I prefer it on the bird, not on a house. For the houses I like green and yellow the most.

After lots of detours we arrived back in Willemstad. We had a little drink in the Riffort and of course climbed up to enjoy the view and the strong wind. We were on our way back to the car when we realized there were policemen standing at the roundabout. And that parts of the road were blocked.
Then I remembered the Children’s Carnaval was that day. We kind of wanted to see that, but ever since I worked for a newspaper, trying to find a good spot and waiting for some event to happen just doesn’t feel like fun anymore. And my husband doesn’t like planning in advance or waiting for whatever, so we decided not to go. I read somewhere it ended at the Riffort, but I assumed it would be long over, since it was after six and it started at three.

That showed. Oh, those tired little faces. Three hours walking and dancing in these temperatures. I can only imagine how tired they must have been. But the really tried to put on a little show for the people watching at the end of the route (that would be us – and lots of others).

I find myself writing about colors today and oh my, the carnaval is full of color. I don’t know much about Dutch carnaval (we’re from “the north” and carnaval is a “southern” thing in our little country) but this was exactly what I imagined South American carnaval to be. My camera couldn’t take it all in (I only had the pocket camera with me, the battery was almost empty and the sun was setting), so the pictures don’t really do it justice, but it was so a lot of fun to watch. So colorful!

My husband’s Valentine gift for me this year was two of the things I can never have enough of: time spent together and a bit of adventure.

“You choose where we go”, he said.
I didn’t have a clue, so “Just go west”, I said, knowing there is nature and free beaches in that direction. I didn’t feel like going into town. That much I knew.

So we drove out of town, to the west. I remembered reading somewhere that there is a little road down the north coast from Ascençion back into town. Since we hardly know the north coast (all the beaches are on the south coast), we thought that would be fun.

Of course we took the wrong turn. But we didn’t mind. Getting lost feels like vacation to us, especially if it doesn’t really matter where we end up. We never found the road I meant, but we did find ourselves back on the main road after a nice detour.

When we passed Shete Boka, my husband said: “That’s where we’re going!” We’ve passed the National Park often, but we never visited.
We got a little map and followed the first trail (on foot) to the first Boka. It was a little hike through a forest of Mangroves. I love how these trees grow themselves into knots. Beneath the trees you could here gekko’s running away for us.

Just when we were wondering if we were going in the right direction (towards the see), the forest stopped and we were between large rocks, that we think were very old coral. And behind that, we found the ocean.
It’s clear why there aren’t any beaches here. These waves are so powerful. And so beautiful too. We can watch the ocean for hours. Well, we did for half an hour.

Than we hiked back through the knotty forest and took the car to drive to another boka. The lady at the entrance said there would be turtles there.

We drove over dirt roads, took – of course –  a few wrong turns, despite the clear directions and finally found Boka Pistol. It’s hard to describe how beautiful it’s there (but luckily I do have pictures and even video below this post). The water is pushed into the boka (inlet?) so hard that it’s blowing up again really, really high.

We saw a turtle there. Swimming in those waves. It must have been a massive one, if we could spot him from afar. He held his head up just a few moments and then he dived…

The map said the dirt road stopped here, but it didn’t, so we followed it to the next boca. There have to be at least seven (though my tour giuide says the’re even more). We saw big blowing waves as far as we could see…
We took the bumpy dirt road back, almost ended up going straight up the mountain instead of around it (feels like vacation too, we did that once at the Mont Blanc) and parked the car again to hike another trail to a cave.

This was a cave completely carved out by the water. I felt scared to go in there first, since there was a warning to wear fitting shoes. My slippers fit very well, but I guess that’s not what they meant. Luckily it wasn’t too bad.
It was still scary, knowing that big rock above, the rumbling sound of the wind and the waves. But I’m so glad I’ve seen it. The power of nature. You’ve got to be reminded of that every once in a while, I believe.

We hopped into the car and went west again. We found a sign pointing to “North Point”. We’d never been there too. And we’ve still never been, cause we got lost again. We did find Watamula. Didn’t know what that was, so we decided to go see it (you know, vacation, adventure).

Watamula was a platform of ancient coral, leading to another beautiful part of the coast. There was another couple walking there (I think to find a romantic spot together) and the man told us to walk just a little bit further. When we did, he said: “They say this is where Korsow (Curaçao) breaths.” And he pointed to a hole in the rock. It did look like that. Like a whale coming up for air. And it sounded like breathing too. So beautiful.

If I have any doubts about this island, one of them was that I thought it didn’t have a lot of real nature. The beaches were fun, but I missed… well, this.

My sense for adventure was kind of satisfied now. We took some more roads just because we never did before and then decided we were thirsty. We had some drinks at a snack (a small diner where locals go for food and drinks) and when we saw three Americans eating chicken, my husband decided he wanted something to eat too.
The menu was in papiamento, so we had to guess what to choose. I knew the dish at the top was goat, but my husband wasn’t feeling adventurous enough to try that. Galina is chicken, but they had both stoba (which is stew – I knew that) and hasa (that was a new word for me). The Americans were standing next to us now, because they wanted more ketchup (oh, Americans and their ketchup…) so my husband asked which one of the two galina dishes they had.
“We just asked for chicken”, the guy said. Oh, well. That’s a way of handling things too. My husband also took the easy way and ordered “what he has”. Which turned out to be fried chicken. Galina hasa. It was good (I took a litle bite).

It was late in the afternoon by now. We drove home slowly. And then we drove past our temporary home, because we didn’t want this day to end yet. So we went to the very new Beach Boulevard, where we knew were lots of bars and restaurants. I know, so different from all that beautiful nature, but for us that feels like vacation too.

We had a drink at the Wet & Wild Beachclub, which isn’t by far as wild as the name suggests and wet clothes are not appreciated. We watched the sun make a crazy move and landing itself on a ship (see picture at the bottom of the post) and then went looking for a restaurant. That wasn’t easy since in most restaurantsevery table was booked for Valentines diners. Luckily the nice people at El Mexicano found room for us. We ate a “combinaçion” of Mexican dishes and decided that, despite an earlier disappointment, we actually did like Mexican food. It was great.

After diner we walked by the seaside, watched the stars from the beach chairs and decided to have one more drink. Wet & Wild was the only place that had some fun going on, so that’s where we went. The nice 80’s background music had been replaced by ‘90’s dance music. We’re not fans (we were teenagers in the ‘80’s), but here, at the beach it didn’t bother us much. If I’d have had one more drink I might even have danced a little. Luckily I didn’t, because despite my comments on young girls dancing like they swallowed a broom stick (move those hips, girls!), I don’t think it looks good when an overweight 42-year-old tries to move like she did 25 years ago*.

Still, it was a nice ending to a good and adventurous Valentines Day.

*I actually did a bit of dancing a few days later, but maybe it’s better to keep that story untold. I’d like to state that my hips still can do the moves though 😉

knotted tree (mangrove)

Boka Kalki

Boka Kalki

Boka Pistol

Boka Pistol

clearly (the sign states that waves can be very powerful and dangerous here)

Another boka

Boka Tabla

in the cave

dirt roads near Watamula

Watamula

Korsow breathes here…

sun aboard

My husband braked and turned the car around.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“No clouds”, he pointed.
“Yes!”, I cheered and I jumped out of the car as soon as he parked it.

I think I have to explain. Judging by the amount of sunsets I have been posting over the years, one might expect I have seen a real one a few times. You know, the sun sinking into the sea like a big firy ball.
But I haven’t. We’ve been waiting on the beach of Kuta, Bali, we hiked to the lighthouse of Maspalomas, Gran Canaria, we sat at Westpoint, Curaçao and we watched from our own North Sea Beach. But always, always, there were clouds covering those last few moments. Not that we didn’t enjoy those sunsets, but I really wanted to see one of those fireballs-into-the-sea ones.

Last Sunday we were driving around and found a little road that we never saw before. It led to a small beach and we looked around a bit. The sun started setting and I – of course –  took some pictures.

“Do you want to wait till it’s fully set?” my husband asked and I said: “No, there are clouds again on the horizon, so the best part is already over.”

Cause that’s how it goes. You’re waiting for that one, beautiful moment and you find it’s already gone. Also, this little road, even though cars were allowed there, was full of people walking and jogging and I was afraid it would be hard to drive back in the dark.

So we drove our bumpy way back and turned into the road connecting to the main road. Until my husband suddenly turned the car and we saw the sun sinking beneath the horizon for the very first time.
Later I realized I could have filmed it, since it took only minutes. But I never thought of that. I do have a lot of pictures…