More Murals

 This is one of my favorites. The prikichi is a beloved local bird. In this mural, its head is painted in saturated colors, but the tail is washed out, almost transparent -- the species itself is fading away, the artist warns, threatened by overdevelopment and invasive boa constrictors eating their eggs. The lovely gentleman raking trash offered to move his pickup truck so I could get an unobstructed photo and apologized that the streets were dirty and not nicer for the visiting tourists. I thanked him but told him to stay, leave the truck and himself in the picture, he was part of the story. Here in this struggling town, even the people with the most menial jobs went about their day to day lives surrounded by rich art, and who's to say that isn't an equal or greater definition of "wealth?"

Part of this carnival dancer's costume is real gold tiles. The flowers in the background pay homage to the Arubian flag: the red hibiscus in the upper left is the red star, the two rows of yellow blossoms across the bottom, and the pale blue background. (Our rental car in the lower left corner for scale -- and what a beautiful way to remember where you've parked!)

Pairs of herons/egrets seems a common theme, and since heron is also Dan's spirit animal we enjoyed every one of them!

This one is called "King of the Streets" and the 3-D effect is incredible; that's a flat shop front. The aloe plant and the hanging bat (for guano) are both historically money makers. 

It is illegal to remove shells of sand from the island, but tourists can give themselves "angel wings" made of seashells in this backdrop.

Closeup of the shells

Not sure about this one. Making origami from a high-denomination bill in the local currency.

This one is meant to be viewed through a red or blue filter. Prophetically, it was made in 2020 and shows how they can't quite get in sync and there's something keeping them apart.

Viewed through the blue filter, you can see her surface and his deeper core...

... and vice-versa through the red filter.

The leatherback turtle goes out into the world, but comes back to the beach where it was born to lay its eggs and create the next generation. So too with island youth, who go to Holland for college. There's been a brain-drain in recent years as many young people choose to remain in Europe, for jobs and at least in part because the exchange is favorable compared to the island.

Another mural honoring locals while they're still living; this gentleman (Hidaro Donker (sp???)) bugged the government to get street lights in town.

Sarah Quito Ofredo is a windsurfing champion; if you look closely her shirt is the ocean. It is said that she's so good she can take her morning coffee on her board with her and drink it and never spill a drop.

San Nicolaas, where "the streets are quiet and the walls are loud"

This city, on the "sunrise" side of the island, is worlds away from the glitzy tourist bubble. In the past, it held an oil refinery (and the red-light district that serviced it) and a major source of wealth. But the refinery closed, the red-light district remained, and the place became synonymous with decay, local and authentic but quite rough around the edges; gray walls and peeling paint. Though, surrounded with gorgeous beaches and turquoise water like the rest of the island.

Around 8 years ago, they got the idea to turn it into a local arts scene. Those sad, gray walls are now bursting with color and energy; concrete benches (think bus stop) are tiled with mosaics representing local fauna and flora. Two new art galleries have opened downtown, restaurants and pubs are serving food and drink and reggae music is heard on the streets. There's still a long way to go but the turnaround energy is palpable. We had seen the murals before as we wandered (though new ones are added every year!) but they were simply "pretty pictures" and we had no way to guess the meanings behind them. So we signed up for a walking tour with Tito Bolivar, the guy whose passion started it all. 

Here's a photo dump containing about a tenth of the insights we received. But if you're on island, really, take the tour. So many stories, and they're adding new art every year.

Random benches. There are many more, including some that weren't made by artists but were a project done by at-risk kids. (Sorry, my pix of that one didn't really come out well. Wanna see it? Take. The. Tour.)

I have literally hundreds of pictures of the murals on the walls. Here's a generous sampling of the ones that I found most compelling. Every one of them has a story. I was told all the stories. I wrote them down as our guide Tito was speaking. I still can't convey the richness of culture we saw, that morning.

"My promise to the island" contains pictures of the wildlife, and in the background, images of the decoration motifs found on traditional houses. There's so much pressure here from overdevelopment.

The other half of the same mural, too long to fit in one shot. The background colors of yellow, orange, and purple represent sunrise; San Nicolaas, on the eastern tip of the island, is nicknamed the sunrise city.

Her name is Alicia von (Romont??? sp??) and she's an artist who has painted some of the murals in town. Tito said that all the murals of people we'd see on the tour represent living people, so that they'd know while they're still alive, how much they were respected by the citizens.

"Please recycle"

(the other end of the recycling mural)

His name is Atto Niro (sp?) and he's a rapper. The artist who painted this, Rashid Lowe, was 16 when he made this mural.

"Dushi Bida" means, "sweet life."

The rest of "dushi bida." Again with the yellow-orange-purple.

The public library is probably my favorite story. Painted by Alicia whose mural I've already shown, at its heart this mural is a protest or a wake-up call. Only 3000 people visited the library the year this mural was conceived. The information within was "chained up," held hostage to the lure of the cellphone. 

more library ... 

... and more ...

Nanzi or Anansi, the spider is a west African folklore character. Like our Native American Coyote, he's a trickster, achieving his goals by cunning, creativity, and wit. He's also associated with storytelling. He used his cleverness to get the stories originally owned by the sky god Nyame, but later dropped the container that held the stories and they spilled out available to all. (Read the full tale in the wikipedia linked here.)

The goddess Nyame, original holder of the story wisdom in the Nanzi stories

So many murals, so many stories, I'm going to break this post into two. 

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)

Aruba 2024

 This is a bit out of order. Yeah, I know I need to backtrack and write about getting back to our beloved Spanish tall ship work last autumn, but at the same time wanted to write about this one while it's fresh. So, here goes!

Welcome sign downtown near the airport

For the first time since Covid and Dan's disastrous diving experience in February 2020, we were ready to travel again. The beginning of the trip was stressful, magnified by the first air travel we've done since Covid. We checked into an airport hotel the night before. Our room was huge, actually two rooms put together into a king suite, and quiet on the top floor. But I wished I'd researched the online comments more carefully, because it was also about as dirty as I'd ever seen at a name chain hotel brand. I really expected to see roaches living in the relative warmth of the electric outlets, and decided to sleep in my clothes; didn't even want to get undressed to slip between those sheets. And simultaneously less of a treat or "pre-vacation vacation" than we were used to now that we're living on land part time. As is our custom though, we found a Mexican restaurant for a hearty night-before-travel meal. A tiny hole-in-the-wall place with excellent and authentic food. I admit to missing my margarita, though it's just not the same without Dan sharing with me. The hole-in-the-wall aspect foreshadowed our dining this trip; all casual locals places instead of Americanized sit down restaurants. 

The airport was empty when we arrived at 7 AM. We blazed through security, checking our bags, and were directed to the (otherwise empty) TSA Clear lane. No taking off shoes or removing electronics, or 100-ml bottles of liquids in plastic bags;  simultaneously delighted, and remembering this is how it used to be, and what we've had to become accustomed to. The terribly blunt instrument that is the US's security screening (I remember reading that we spend $7 per passenger for screening while the famously stringent El Al spends over $60) The airline had recommended arriving 3 hours early for an international flight, all in we were from curbside to gate in a little over 20 minutes. 

We were among the last groups to board the plane (after chilling at the gate for 3 hours, ha) but this time Southwest's famous no-reserved-seats policy worked in our favor. The first two rows were occupied by couples who had tried the hack of sitting in the window and aisle seats, hoping no travelers would want the single seat in the middle... Wrong! I motioned to one, Dan to the other. Both couples promptly offered to switch seats so they could sit together, leaving Dan and me side-by-side in aisle seats, close enough to hold hands. And we were expecting to need that quick exit when we landed, because I had a bad feeling about our rental car. Too many people in the online Aruba group I belonged to had commented about the rental companies not honoring their reservations and giving the car away if they were even a little bit late. The front-row seats were handy too, as the flight was on the bumpy side.

We landed right on time and did the divide-and-conquer thing: Dan waited to collect both our checked bags while I with my backpack on fairly sprinted out of the terminal and across the street to the car rental place. Sadly, my stress was not misplaced; Dollar overbooked and didn't honor our reservation "but they could find us one with another company although at a higher rate." Ironically it was the same local company that I had tried to book as a backup when I first heard about the problems with rental car availability; but at the time they told me they had nothing available. In the end we got a great car from "Jay's" -- my namesake -- remarkably similar in size, shape, and even a similar gray color to our beloved Mitsubishi Outlander at home, and it had an A license plate and no big stickers with the company name on the door (advertising this is a tourist's car and might have good stuff for stealing). So now, I joked with the counter staff, everyone will think we're locals, and they won't cut us any extra slack in the roundabouts because they'll expect that we know our way around. Anyway we finally got to the resort just in time to check in and head to the beach to watch the sunset and begin to decompress. 

As soon as the sun had set we made tracks for dinner; a nearby place as popular with the locals as with those relatively few tourists who knew about it (though it's been getting "discovered," we learned). There was so much new development in the intervening 4 years that we got semi-lost on the way there in the dark. We've had better, less roller-coaster vacation starts, but it began to settle down. I missed my wind-down rum (no time to buy that before the shops closed, and what they offered at the beach bar was ridiculously overpriced -- literally two drinks cost as much as a whole bottle at the liquor store.

Next morning, feeling much better, we went out for coffee and croissants on the beach bar, now transformed for more dignified use, the deck just steps from the ocean, watched the waves then walked along the water's edge for the length of the bight and back, 2 km, then headed off for mundane errands at a relaxed pace, groceries and a few items to round out the timeshare kitchen. This time our sunset drinks did include rum (mine, at least) and we watched the sun go down and the stars come out and headed back to dinner and eager to explore in the morning.

Sunset on Druif Beach never ever gets old. The trade winds carried a lot of Saharan dust making the sky a brownish orange. 

After a very long travel day and not enough sleep, having someone else prepare a meal of extremely fresh fish was wonderful

A beautiful morning to sit with a cup of coffee ... or two