Curacao Pictures

In November, we took a long weekend trip to Curacao. Everyone posted in the Caribbean has visions of island-hopping and then discovers that airfares are ludicrously expensive. It is cheaper to go to Miami (4 hours away) than it is to go anywhere else including Grenada which is just a 30 minute flight and hardly farther away than Tobago.

At the same time this is likely our only time living in the Southern Caribbean so we paid the price and bought tickets on LIAT - a regional carrier that I have had TSA officials tell me not to take. It is the only way to get to Curacao. It is notoriously unreliable so we both warned our bosses that while we expected to be back on Monday, we were flying LIAT and might be a day or two late. Thankfully we were only an hour late going there - because they forget to file the flight plan and an hour late coming home - because the pilots wanted to have lunch (all of the passengers could see the pilots eating while we waited at the gate.)

Curacao was really pretty. It's naturally dry and much less lush than Trinidad but as a Dutch colony it has really cute architecture. Curacao also just changed status from some affiliate of the Netherlands to being its own country except that the Netherlands is still in charge of their defense and foreign policy and other things. I did not entirely understand it but many Caribbean islands likewise has weird relationships to other countries - some like Trinidad and Tobago are entirely independent whereas those born on Martinique are considered French citizens.


This is a picture of boats that sail up from Venezuela each day to create a farmers market. You can see some of the dutch-style buildings in the background.


Here's Dan in one of the buildings at the really excellent slavery museum. He looks happy but the exhibits were in fact really moving and tragic.


About a third of this very small island is a national park. We loved that both guns and slingshots were prohibited. The park was FULL of lizards - the roads were covered with literally thousands of them and while they scampered as the car rolled along it was still rather disconcerting.

Next to the National Park was a restored plantation - there are several hundred plantation buildings in the Dutch style still on the island.



Most of the lizards were only a foot or so long but this iguana was probably 3 feet.

The two halves of the capital city are connected by a floating pedestrian bridge. When boats want to pass the bridge rotates 90 degrees. You can see the pretty colored buildings in the background.

Dan and more nice buildings. Yes, it was very sunny there.
We also visited the oldest synagoge in the western hemisphere. It had sand floors (see under my fet) which we initially thought were because it's an island and this emphasizes the beachiness but in fact the sand floors are to represent the exodus and the time in desert.

This is Dan outside of the synagoge in the courtyard where there is no sand.


Proof that in Curacao you can get more colors than just blue...