06 | December | 2008 | Snorkeling the ABC Islands

I’m posting this late Saturday night, from our second condo. I’m going to talk about our trip to DePalm Island on Thursday. It has easily been the best snorkeling we’ve had on the island. Click on the pic to the left to get a panorama of the whole island.

It’s a cool deal – there is one price, and it’s for the whole day. They come and pick you up in an air conditioned bus, and take you to the southern part of the island. From there, it’s an easy five minute ferry ride to the island.

Once on the island, there is a restaurant that serves an all you can eat buffet breakfast, with everything from french toast, eggs, bacon, ham, sausage, fruit, cereal, juices, yogurt – you name it, it’s there. That is available til 11 am. At 11:30 am lunch starts and again, a generous buffet lunch, that is served til 3:30. Again, all you can eat.

There is a bar that serves any mixed drink, rum, vodka, whiskey, pina colada, daquiris, beer, etc. This place also serves all you can eat burgers, hotdogs, chicken, fries etc. There are over 70 rides for the kids in the water park.

And then – there is the snorkeling! WOW – just spectacular. You can even swim out to a coral reef. DePalm Island tho, is famous for the Blue Parrotfish. And wow, what a great fish!

The Blue Parrotfish is quite large, about as long as a person’s leg in some cases. They are extremely friendly, and very curious. They come around in schools of 5 or 6, and they will even let you “pet them.”
They want you to feed them and Pam and Pete did. They had tons of fish hanging around them and I tried to snap pic after pic! However, the Olympus sprung a leak and I was only able to get a few pics in before it died. Quite annoying – but now that Mike is here, we’ll head over again next week, so I’ll be able to put up some pics, since I have replaced the Olympus with the latest model.

All in all, it was a great day. Tons of things to see and do. Nice food, lots of it, and nice beach chairs, palapas, drinks…
Seldom does something so hyped, so talked about, so advertised, live up to it’s reputation. But DePalm Island delivered. It’s the coolest thing we’ve done so far! It’s definitely worth a repeat visit.

Sorry, but I’m posting this on Saturday! We’ve been busy doing the tourist thing – shopping, laying on the beach, swimming, eating….

But Tuesday night there was a big tropical downpour, and it lasted almost 20 minutes! Man – talk about a deluge! It made the ocean kinda cloudy and the snorkeling wasn’t great, so we made the tour around the island again, catching Charlie’s Bar.

It’s quite a place – it’s in the refinery town of San Nicolas and it’s worth the drive to experience the place. People from all over leave, or send, memorabilia and it’s quite the pile of stuff in there. You could spend three days just checking it out.

Unfortunately, we forgot our money, and we’d ordered and ate lunch and couldn’t pay so Charlie put us to work behind the bar for a couple hours.

We snorkelled Baby Beach again, but it was fairly cloudy from all the storm stirring things up.

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Yes Mike arrives today (Saturday) – we change condos, moving close to the beach this morning. Yes the camera we bought on the internet arrived the morning we left. Some pics on the site are from the new one. My Olympus died – got some water in it and that’s that. So – I bought the new model here, and we’ll have some pics from it up tomorrow – it’s a 10.1 megapixel camera, and can be underwater to 100 feet, versus only 10 feet from my other one.

I’ll have more to post today – Thursday we were on De Palm Island and it’s great – I’ll save the details for later.

OH – BTW – if you click the GALLERIES link on the top menu, you can select the Aruba gallery to see all the pics i’ve uploaded. Most I’ve put into posts, but some I didn’t. It’s a cool slideshow anyway…. (you can even make it full screen to view them in the slideshow.)