Country road, take me home......

Last Sunday we had a plan. I’m always in favour of keeping a plan flexible and this time flexibility was definitely necessary. The plan was to get on the 9 o’clock bus straight to the Westpoint. There it went ‘wrong’ already. The famous Emmabridge was open (which means it’s gone completely and you have to use the ferry to get across the Annabay to get to the busstation) so we missed our bus. No problem, we don’t have to wait 2 hours for the next one, we just get on the one to Banda Abou, which is on the way, we have a look around there and then get on the right bus to the end of the island. So, at 10 o’clock we got on the bus, enjoyed the landscape and the wind in our hair and…….missed our stop. We were already on our way back to Willemstad ! No worries, we are flexible; There are signs here for beaches, we’ll get out and go there. Let’s see, where are we? At San Nicolas. Ow, that is a long walk still ahead. That’s fine, we don’t mind walking, we have water and it’s still early. So, we start walking down the dirt road, following that one car track that we don’t understand how it got there, because there is a barrier. We walk, enjoy the amazing scenery, walk and listen to the birds singing and we walk through the forest, almost forgetting we are in the Caribbean and we walk. One hour later we arrive at the first beach, which isn’t really a beach but just a lot of pebbles and washed on coral next to amazing blue, with coral filled water. We struggle to find a way into the ocean but we manage, because we are hot and desperately need to cool down.

After a short break and 2 sips of our water (we have to be careful, there is still a lot of walking to do) we continue to the next beach, Playa Hulu. On arrival we see the car which tracks we have been following and we get rewarded by a beautiful, though small white beach completely to ourselves. I lay down my towel on the one bit of beach without rocks, close my eyes, dream off and……get completely soaked !! The one couple that is there got picked up by a boat, which causes waves, a mini-high tide. My towel is soaking wet and covered in sand. But it’s okay, it’s a beautiful day and I am flexible. For a brief moment I consider asking the scuba diver that came out of the water, completely unannounced, for a ride (it turned out it was his car we have been following), but decide it’s more of a challenge to walk a bit more, and maybe we can catch a boat ride later on.

We climbed up the steps and just continued our walk towards the Blue Room, when one of my flipflop breaks. O boy, now what? I try to walk a bit barefooted, but there are too many stones and thorns, so I go on with one broken flipflop. When we arrive at the Blue Room our hope of catching a ride with the watertaxi is gone, because again there is no beach. There is a high cliff and maybe we could follow those two boys and jump down, but how would we get back up? So, no Blue Room for us, just a short stop and a look down and on we go to the next point of interest. There I struggle to get down the rocks with one broken flipflop just to get a picture of Peter on a big rock in the middle of rough water coming in and out. I wait till the water gets to the highest point and then……I get soaked, again !! But this time with my camera in my hands. It’s a miracle it’s still working.

Well, luckily it’s just a little bit longer before we get to the for last beach, but I still manage to get soaked, for the third time, before we get there. It starts to rain. It’s strange to arrive at a black beach, with a lot of people (where did they come from?) in the pouring rain. It’s cold and for the first time I see something that you could call waves. We run into the water and it’s like running into a bathtub. The water is nice and warm. But when we get out, everything is wet. Our clothes, our towels so we are very happy to arrive, after ‘crawling’ over a muddy tiny path, at Captain Goodlife. It’s 16.00 o’clock now and we are hungry and most of all thirsty. We eat, we drink, we talk and we get a job offered (well Peter does) by Captain Goodlife. It’s a shame Peter already accepted a job with our landlord, because this job sounds like a dream: cooking, driving the boat, scuba diving, painting, serving drinks and meals, including use of a car and/or motorbike all at this sweet little house at Santa Cruz beach. Well, he might still consider it.
Finally, we get a ride from a 15 year old to the bus stop, there we get a ride offered by 2 inhabitants of the island who think the bus doesn’t come there anymore and we get, for the very first time since we got here, freezing cold when we still have to wait for our bus when they drop of us of somewhere along the road.

This day went completely wrong, when actually it didn’t. It went exactly right