bkpix
Contributor
:confused6:OK, where to begin. This was our 2nd trip to Curacao, the first was August 2008 just a month before the hurricane. Stayed at All West Apartments in Westpunt both times. We really like the location of the apartments, great ocean views! West side of the island is where we like to be; out of the way and relaxed. Our trips to town for groceries always had us hurrying to get back to the slower pace.
That brings up something we wished we knew before we went this time, as it had changed from last time there. The grocery store does not provide bags for you to take your food home in like we are used to in the US. They sell them to you for something like 25 cents each. This has probably been mentioned on a post sometime, but I never saw one. It would have been easy enough to bring a few extra plastic bags along had we known. Not a tremendously big deal, but anyone planning a trip in the near future; take some bags with you and avoid the "stupid tourist" looks you will get from the check-out people at the market.
Once again, the best food we had were the meals we prepared at the apartments. There are some resturants around, but we both love to cook and the grills on the patio overlooking the ocean were right there where we didn't have to drive someplace. One of the more popular resturants is only open on the weekends, and while we had planned on going there at least once; we always got lazy and just threw something on the grill and kicked back with a cold one or two.
We did 3 days of boat diving to get to some of the sites you can not reach from shore. Watamula was as amazing as we remembered it, Redhio and Mushroom Forest did not dissapoint. Mostly though we did shore dives. The more we shore dive the more we like it. No schedule to keep other then the one you set for yourself, no hasseling with crowded diveboats. Our favorite dive turned out to be Playa Lagun. We did 4 dives there and all were great. Playa Jeremy was also quite nice. Note that both of those have rather long swim-outs to actually get to the reef. Both of them offered enough to see on the way out that you want to be sure to snorkle out face down to see everything. At Jeremy we saw this
critter
He was just sitting an a big flat rock at about 18 feet so we went down to visit.
Please note, I am just trying to figure how to get photos into a post, so bear with my attempts. It seems that if you click on the photos you can view a larger version of the photo. There must be another way of doing this, but I haven't gotten that far yet. Help would be appreciated if someone can tell me a better way of doing this.
At Lagun we usually spotted this Green Turtle
it was always very shallow and we mostly got close up to it on our way back in from the dives.
On almost every dive we saw at least one of these:
on the boat dives the DM's would try to kill them, but I didn"t have a long enough weapon to avoid those stinging barbs so I just took their photos and went on my way. There is an article in one of the new dive magazines about what people think should be done about the Loinfish, some say kill them whenever you see them, others say let nature run it's course. I think getting in the middle of that is best left for others.
Went out to the San Juan area for the shore dives out there. Shon Mosa was our favorite dive last trip. Sadly their locations made them prime for damage from the hurricane. Lots of rubble and debris everywhere. Very sad, we saw Frogfish and Seahorses there last year, but not a one this time. In fact, didn't see any anywhere this trip, maybe the Lion Fish are eating them.
All in all we had a great trip and plan on going back again some time.
To view more of my photos from this and other trips click on the number next where it says photos under my avatar and it will take you to my photo pages. The first 8 are from this most recent trip, the next batch (I'm not sure how many) are from August 2009 in Roatan, and the batch before those are from our first trip to Curacao.
That brings up something we wished we knew before we went this time, as it had changed from last time there. The grocery store does not provide bags for you to take your food home in like we are used to in the US. They sell them to you for something like 25 cents each. This has probably been mentioned on a post sometime, but I never saw one. It would have been easy enough to bring a few extra plastic bags along had we known. Not a tremendously big deal, but anyone planning a trip in the near future; take some bags with you and avoid the "stupid tourist" looks you will get from the check-out people at the market.
Once again, the best food we had were the meals we prepared at the apartments. There are some resturants around, but we both love to cook and the grills on the patio overlooking the ocean were right there where we didn't have to drive someplace. One of the more popular resturants is only open on the weekends, and while we had planned on going there at least once; we always got lazy and just threw something on the grill and kicked back with a cold one or two.
We did 3 days of boat diving to get to some of the sites you can not reach from shore. Watamula was as amazing as we remembered it, Redhio and Mushroom Forest did not dissapoint. Mostly though we did shore dives. The more we shore dive the more we like it. No schedule to keep other then the one you set for yourself, no hasseling with crowded diveboats. Our favorite dive turned out to be Playa Lagun. We did 4 dives there and all were great. Playa Jeremy was also quite nice. Note that both of those have rather long swim-outs to actually get to the reef. Both of them offered enough to see on the way out that you want to be sure to snorkle out face down to see everything. At Jeremy we saw this
critter
He was just sitting an a big flat rock at about 18 feet so we went down to visit.
Please note, I am just trying to figure how to get photos into a post, so bear with my attempts. It seems that if you click on the photos you can view a larger version of the photo. There must be another way of doing this, but I haven't gotten that far yet. Help would be appreciated if someone can tell me a better way of doing this.
At Lagun we usually spotted this Green Turtle
it was always very shallow and we mostly got close up to it on our way back in from the dives. On almost every dive we saw at least one of these:
on the boat dives the DM's would try to kill them, but I didn"t have a long enough weapon to avoid those stinging barbs so I just took their photos and went on my way. There is an article in one of the new dive magazines about what people think should be done about the Loinfish, some say kill them whenever you see them, others say let nature run it's course. I think getting in the middle of that is best left for others.Went out to the San Juan area for the shore dives out there. Shon Mosa was our favorite dive last trip. Sadly their locations made them prime for damage from the hurricane. Lots of rubble and debris everywhere. Very sad, we saw Frogfish and Seahorses there last year, but not a one this time. In fact, didn't see any anywhere this trip, maybe the Lion Fish are eating them.
All in all we had a great trip and plan on going back again some time.
To view more of my photos from this and other trips click on the number next where it says photos under my avatar and it will take you to my photo pages. The first 8 are from this most recent trip, the next batch (I'm not sure how many) are from August 2009 in Roatan, and the batch before those are from our first trip to Curacao.
