Kayak Paddle

 In general we had planned this trip to be a low-key one instead of our usual frenetic timing to catch Carnival and the party atmosphere. This time around, we wanted to chill, and dig a little deeper into history, culture, and ecology. We wanted to explore on our own, but also had a few tours and excursions planned.

First up was a sunset kayak paddle, and maybe if we were lucky we'd catch some bioluminescence. I still remembered the first night we'd ever camped out on the island; the waves that broke on the beach were edged with sapphire sparkles. Turned out there was too much moonlight during our paddle to see the bioluminescence, but ... moonlight too bright? What a delightful problem to have! 

No pix from the moonlit portion of the trip, but here are a few from the sunset portion.

Sunset from the water with the old (pier? bridge?) supports in the background

Just relaxing and letting the current carry us; we had to paddle hard upstream to make it back

Love these juxtapositions, cruise ship and rough structure

Dan thought it reminiscent of Stonehenge; I saw something vaguely Asian ...

 Our guide, Shanon, was born and grew up in this area of the island. He regaled us with stories as we floated. We passed fishermen offloading their catch; a few happy and proud cutting big fillets; and several who he said had left at dawn and came home with barely enough fish for their family's dinner with nothing left over to sell even to offset the cost of their day's fuel, and the latter scenario becoming more common. We paddled past a part of the lagoon edged with mangrove trees and talked about how they protected the coastline from erosion while their tangled roots provided a safe nursery for tiny fish to grow. We learned that in addition to the red, white, and black mangroves we were familiar with from our time in the Virgin Islands and Florida Keys, Aruba boasts a fourth kind, the native and iconic fofoti tree, now threatened by development pressure and climate change. He told us that the Papiamento language was a blend of words derived from Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and native Arawak words, which we'd known, but not that there was a pattern to it, that for example the native names survived most in the names of places, plants, and animals (makes total sense when you think about it; those would have been the most important things to those first settlers). He pointed out the exception to this naming rule, a bird that looked to me to be a relative of a frigate bird. The scissorlike wing shape identified it as "skerchi." Little baitfish are "piskechi," pisca=fish(I'm guessing Latin derivation, same root word as pescetarian which is how we describe our diet); and -echi I'm guessing is a diminutive ending? In Spanish you can add -ito to a word to accomplish the same thing; in Yiddish it's -eleh; do all languages do this? Made me wonder if my favorite snack, pastechi, is the diminutive of pastry? (Which musing leads nicely into ...)

The other cool thing we got from him, was a lead on a really good place to get snacks. Locals tend more toward takeout ("takeaway") food than sit-down restaurants, we learned. And also these places are a lot cheaper while still being excellent. I'd been looking forward to pastechi, basically, turnovers stuffed with melted cheese, or shredded salt cod, or spiced cooked chicken, or any other number of tasty things. (Does every culture have some form of hand pies?) These were obviously made right on site -- the shop's name was pressed into the dough. They were as big as my hand, hot, filling and delicious. We both ate our fill and got change back from our $10 bill.

Pastechi! "Prikibos" is the name of the cafe, from a beloved local bird, and at the bottom edge you can see the letter K indicating that this one is filled with keshi (cheese)