Diving in Curacao, Netherland Antilles

When we first decided to go to the Caribbean, we were only planning on spending two weeks in Bonaire. After crunching all the numbers, we realized by flying through Curacao and taking advantage of a promotion called “Curacao Now”, we could add another week to our trip for around a hundred dollars. Yes, I said one hundred dollars for a week on a tropical island. It turns out that Bonaire is more popular with North American tourists than Curacao, so the tourism board decided to lure some divers over with free hotel days, car rental days and a $400 airfare credit. This promotion combined with the fact that airlines tickets from Denver to Curacao were over $500 cheaper than Denver to Bonaire made it a no brainer to turn our 2 week vacation into a 3 week vacation. Are we ever glad we did.

We originally thought we would just snorkel on Curacao and save the diving for Bonaire. However, that plan went out the window the second day there when we saw Playa Lagun and it’s beautiful dive site. The combination of the blue Caribbean Sea and the lure of cheap and easy shore dives hooked us. Discover Diving offers full equipment rentals inlcuding one tank of air for $20/day. Each additional tank is $6. We couldn’t resist and each did five dives on Curacao. We were absolutely blown away by how good the coral was and the abundance of the fish life. The visibility wasn’t terrific, maybe 40-50 feet, but that is unusually low. (It steadily improved throughout the trip and was well over 100 feet by Bonaire) Shore Diving was a new experience. All of our previous diving has been from boats with a dive master. I am afraid that shore diving has spoiled us. We loved being able to dive at our own pace and go whatever direction we wanted. After overcoming our initial concerns about navigation, we couldn’t get enough. Dan had 31 dives when we got to Curacao and 62 when we left Bonaire. The best part about shore diving was being able to stay down longer. When you are with a group, you always have to come up based on the air of the least efficient diver. Dan and I are comfortable divers and spent at least 60 minutes under on each dive. I think not having a dive master made us better divers. We are both more comfortable with using a compass, communicating under water, and the dive tables than we were previously.

Curacao is a former Dutch colony that is working towards independence. It is located about 40 miles of the Venezulan Coast and it’s main industry is refining oil for Venezula It has a high standard of living for a Caribbean country and an interesting mix of people. The offical languages are Dutch and Papiamentu (a creole language derived from Spanish, African languages, and Caribbean Indian languages). Most people we encountered spoke four languages. Dutch, Papiamentu, Spanish, and English. While Willemstad is the capital and only large city, there are numerous small villages scattered around the island. We stayed at Westpunt, about 45 miles from the capital on the “quiet” end of the island. We found it ironic that when locals heard where we were staying, they would remark on how far away it was from Willemstad. Coming from a country where most people commute 45 minutes to work, we didn’t find it too far. Besides, all the quiet beaches and dive sites were at our end of the island.

We stayed at Marazul Dive Resort. I picked it due to it’s reasonable rates and proximity to the ocean. We received a free nights stay under the Curacao Now deal. September is the low season in Curacao and we were pleasantly surprised to have the resort almost to ourselves. There were a few other people in residence, but mostly empty condos. Due to a problem with our freezer, I was able to convince the manager to upgrade us from an ocean view studio to a 1 bedroom ocean front condo. I think this might have been the nicest place we have ever stayed. The view was incredible and the steps to the ocean were 20 feet from our front porch. The ocean was around 82 degrees. Warm enough that even Dan didn’t get cold. September is the hottest month of the year in Curacao with temps in the 80’s and 90’s during the day and low 80’s at night. The constant breeze helps keep things comfortable, but A/C is a must for sleeping. Curacao is not in the hurricane belt which makes it possible to visit in low season.
One of the highlights was seeing two large Manta Rays playing in front of the resort. You can see a clip of them here They passed within 50 feet us of the platform we were on. We also saw large pods of spinning dolphins from our front porch. We did two dives on the unnamed house Reef and thought it was world class coral. Being surrounded by schools of fish and swimming by 30 foot mushroom coral towers made us remember how much we love diving.

We were constantly surprised by how friendly and helpful the people were. Since the economy doesn’t depend on tourism, everything is in Dutch. People went out of their way to help us navigate the city, tell us their favorite places, discuss the best dive locations, talk to us about birds, etc. It was wonderful and very surprising. The other surprising thing is that most of the other tourists were from Europe. In general, Europeans go to Curacao and Americans go to Bonaire. We met a wonderful French couple that owned a condo at Marazul and they spent a lot of time discussing their favorite dive sites with us.

We have been to countries where tourists are only seen as dollar signs, and it was really refreshing to not feel that. It was also wonderful to get some exposure to a different culture. Would we go back to Curacao? Absolutely. I’ll be keeping a eye out for next year’s Curacao promotion. I’ll post about two weeks in Bonaire soon.