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Oranjestad, Aruba

We got to spend this morning in Aruba. We headed out early: in fact we were the first ones from the ship to get out of the port (an official with the port had to unlock the gate for us). We started out walking around the touristy part of Oranjestad, the capitol. There are a lot of Dutch colonial style buildings, all brightly painted. The government is making a concerted effort to fix up this area, which has large areas that clearly have not been kept up for a while. They’re also putting in a trolley system which apparently is going to be free to use.

After walking around for a while we found a local tour guide named Paul who drove us around much of the northwestern portion of the island. The first stop we made was at the Ayo and Casibari rock formations. There are a number of large boulders, the largest of which you can climb, giving some great views. The stairs to get down were quite steep, but manageable. After that we went to the California lighthouse, named for a titanic-era steamship that crashed nearby. There’s a nice-looking Italian restaurant up by the lighthouse that has an amazing view…I’m sure it’s a go-to place for dinner. We went by the big resort area with nice, but crowded, beaches. According to our tour guide, Paul, it is a local tradition to camp on the beach over Easter weekend (they have a long holiday weekend from Friday through Monday) and there were tons of tents on the sand. For future reference, Paul says the best beach in Aruba is Eagle Beach.

Aruba is nice and definitely has some quaint areas, but we don’t plan on coming back. Most of it’s tourist industry is large casino resorts with American restaurant chains.

We had to be back on the ship by lunchtime, so it was a bit of a whirlwind. It was a warm day and the area we’ve been sitting in was just to muggy so we changed to a spot I just found last night…the back of the ship on our deck has a covered but open area. We had the place to ourselves for most of the afternoon. No loud music, no inane conversations nearby. Very nice.

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