Oranjestad, Aruba

The very colourful town of Oranjestad has of course a lot of Dutch influence. Pink houses with white trim, palm trees, cacti, 7 miles of pristine white sand beaches.

We took the "Town & Countryside" tour which brought us to the Aloe factory where we saw the harvest and production of Aruba's aloe plant. The hand cream is so rich and wonderful!

We also visited a botanical garden that had every species of cacti imaginable, and that was just a sample of what exists in the world! If you climb to the top of one of the hills, you see a cone-shaped hill in the distance which looks like a volcano, but it's not. It was just shaped like that with the wind and through time.

We drove by an ostrich farm, by the Bushirubiana Gold Mill Ruins, the famous divi divi trees shaped by the trade winds, and finally arrived at the ocean-carved Natural Bridge. After having survived forever, it was destroyed just 3 years ago by nature itself. Karl is king of the ruins!

I'm not a shopper, but if you wanted to pick up a few baubles this is the place to be: Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, etc. My budget allowed me to pick up the cutest little milkmaid magnet for my fridge!

A little history: Small, sunny and very much its own, Aruba has just emerged as a major tourist attraction in the last ten years. It was discovered in 1499 by Alonzo de Ojeda for Spain. At that time, the Spanish considered the island of so little value that they did not bother to colonize it and thus left it to the native Arawak Indians. Even today, in spite of the fact that thousands of Arawaks were rounded up and sent to slave labour in Hispaniola (now Dominican Republic and Haiti), where they faced eventual termination, Arawak features can still be seen in the faces of Aruba natives.

In 1634, with victory in their 80 year war growing near, the Dutch turned their attention to the Caribbean and unceremoniously helped themselves to Aruba. There were six islands in all, the principal ones known as the ABC's: Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao.