In Curacao but not feeling blue.
Bamboozle
Jamie and Lucy Telfer
Sat 15 Aug 2009 21:41
12:04.688N 068:51.488W
Although we spent as much time as we could in, or
mainly under, the water (we dived almost every day for over three
weeks) we did also find time to explore some of the sights of Bonaire on
land. I decided to take Lucy on a scenic cycle tour in search of the
islands famous flamingos. It turned into a bit more of a expedition
than I had planned as it would seem that the maker of the local tourist map had
either never visited Bonaire or had (to say the least) a bit of a problem
with his scale. Having embarked on what was marked as a 7 or 8km loop we
soon figured out that the round trip was going to be a lot more like
35km. Like mad dogs (and Englishmen) we had set off at midday in the
blazing heat armed only with sandwiches and a couple of
litres of water. It was only just enough, and if it was not for these supplies
our sun-bleached bones might still be littering the windswept windward coast
road.
From Bonaire it was just a short 35 mile hop
on to Curacao (the C of the ABC islands) where we are now anchored in Spanish
Water, a wonderfully protected anchorage, with a large residential
population of cruising boats. It is a much bigger island and the capital
city Willemstad is a colourful world heritage site that looks
rather like Amsterdam has been repainted and moved to the
tropics. Sadly we are only making a brief stay here to collect a few
spares and plan to head off in the next few days along the coast
towards Cartagena in Colombia. We have been working hard on our
very iffy Spanish but do not even feel slightly ready for our first radio
conversation with the Columbian Coastguard.
"Buenos dias. Me illamo
Bamboozle!"
Lucy smiling before she discovered how far we had
to cycle
Pretending I am still enjoying myself while
suffering from heat exhaustion
and a sore bum!
Mountains of salt along our
route. The water in the pans turns a weird purple colour as
the salt concentration rises
during the process.
At last "Flamingos!" spotted on the port
bow.
We joined Michael & Barbara from Astarte for
the walking tour of historic Kralendijk......
We suspect we might be the first people ever to
take this self guided tour which conveniently
coincided with happy hour in several of the bars along the route. What we
discovered on
the tour is that not much historic has ever
happened in Kralendijk but that it has some nice
pubs!
Willemstad .....are we really still in the
Caribbean?
The unique floating bridge that pivots open on
these floats to allow shipping through into
the main harbour
A happy skipper servicing the generator. I
wasn't smiling quite so much 6 hours later while
still trying track down and fix a small
saltwater leak on the cooling system!
