INTOXICATING
Curaçao
It's a Caribbean island which welcomes divers - if not always the right sort of divers - without feeling it should bend over backwards to impress. That, says Andy Blackford, is exactly what he likes about it
2100 hours, the Habitat Resort, Curaçao: We finished a leisurely, candlelit dinner on the balcony, watching the lightning flicker silently over the mountains of Venezuela. A pair of tiny yellow birds yawned and retired to their nest between the jaws of a glass fibre shark on the restaurant wall.
Then we strolled the 50 metres down to the hotel's diving centre and began to kit up.
We were quite alone: the Habitat operates a policy of "diving freedom". Once you've shown your certification, you're given an orientation briefing and off you go. You plan your own dives. You can use their guides or not, as you wish. You can use air or nitrox, and dive from the shore at any time, day or night.
We checked our torches and eased down the ladder at the end of the jetty into the still, milky water of the lagoon. We picked up the rope immediately: a hefty old hawser that leads you out from the shore for about 100m, then plunges down the wall to 30m and beyond.
All right, I know. Perhaps they could have provided a bus, too. But it was dark and we didn't know the reef and I appreciated the certainty of a guideline. I must be getting old. We swung off the rope at 15m and headed west along the reef.
The coral was immaculate: it had hardly been kicked to pieces at all by shark-wrestling Latin American psychopaths. The elks and stags still had their horns and the brain coral wasn't brain damaged.
We ambled through fairytale mushroom villages and towering chimneys of coral-like submarine oil refineries.
Engulfed in an eerie phosphorescence, we tiptoed along so as not to startle the dozing parrotfish. After a while, lulled by the sonorous rumble of my DV, I contemplated generating my own mucous sheath and lying down with them under a rock. The darkness and the warmth and the weightlessness were combining to hypnotise me: I was reminded of my experience of sensory deprivation in the flotation tank in Notting Hill.
There was more life on the reef than in the tank - but not much more, apparently. While the coral was pristine, there was a disappointing shortage of night-prowlers: not a crab or lobby to be seen. We did, however, encounter the world's biggest pufferfish, a real Don Quixote when it came to tilting at torches.
Having exchanged notes with Tom, the Fish-Swallowing Orthodontist from South Carolina, I think we were just unlucky. The night before, he'd seen a couple of sharks and played tag with a big turtle.
Still, it made me think: when you fill in your log, you tend to list the flora and fauna you did see - never the stuff you didn't. It's an interesting exercise, trying to recall the creatures that aren't there.
For instance, in a week of diving, we didn't see a single lionfish. And yet, in the Cayman Islands to the north-east, and the Bay Islands to the west, they're lounging around on every street corner like over-dressed hookers.
The same went for starfish. Anemones were few and far between, too.
On the other hand, we did enjoy the spectacle of 100 dolphins parading past our breakfast table, on their annual migration to the western cape of the island. And during almost every dive, we would cross paths with a nonchalant turtle or two.
Smokestack forests
Curaçao is unspoiled, in the truest sense of the word: you can buy a postcard of the oil refinery.
Most Caribbean islands don't even have an oil refinery. And the average tourist, if interrogated in a market research survey, will express a preference for tropical paradises that do not include among their attractions a cracking plant and a forest of smokestacks.
Not me. I like real places. I'm impressed that Curaçao could get along perfectly well without me. Divers are a luxury - one to be welcomed, surely, but not to be fawned over in a sycophantic feeding frenzy, as if the island's economy depended on us. This healthy attitude derives from belonging to the Dutch Antilles and possessing the sixth biggest natural harbour in the world.
The Dutch manage to combine an industrious pragmatism with an easy-going tolerance, and their influence has created something unique in the region - a relaxed, multi-racial society with an economy that works.
It's not an outstandingly lovely place. It lacks the spectacular romanticism of a St Lucia, and the lushness and fecundity of a Virgin Gorda. But in the sparsely populated west, where lagoons glitter between tangles of mangrove and stunted thorns, and the breathless stillness of the heat is broken only by the clatter of parakeets, you can fancy yourself transported back to prehistoric times.
There is a ponderous significance in the air, as if something sudden were about to happen. But the moment remains perpetually poised, like a boulder, on the brink of the event, trapped in a sweltering inertia so profound that even the pink diagonal slash of a flamingo cannot rock it.
When I ran through this Jurassic landscape, my breath roared in my ears like a demand valve. I heard a footfall behind me and jumped, but it was just the sound of my own shoes on the rough earth track.
Willemstad, the principal town, is a chaotic jumble of Dutch colonial houses in the grand style. Some streets are in the final stages of decay and collapse. If we'd firebombed Amsterdam instead of Dresden, this is what it would have looked like.
The houses, like the entire island, are made of limestone. Unless they're painted every year, they turn into pumice stone, absorb 10 times their own weight in water and fall down.
This provides the perfect excuse for the conservation-minded to exercise an almost psychedelic taste in dŽcor. The waterfront, for instance, is like a grander version of Tobermory, pinks and blues and acid greens fighting for the privilege of blinding you.
The newly restored Jewish Quarter, too, is spectacular: the bow-fronted villas with their leaded casements, curvaceous balustrades and elaborate gables straight from the Prinsengracht, are testament to the huge wealth once generated by the port.
The Manic Brazilians
All of our dives could have been accomplished from the shore, but the four operators we dived with used boats - presumably for speed and convenience.
The Habitat's best site was a few metres off an idyllic little bay called Port of Marie. Within seconds of entering the water, I saw what I swore was a seasnake, but which they tell me was a snake eel. (They tell me. I remain unconvinced.)
Then down the wall, to a bewildering circus of marine life - spotted drums, tarpon, puffers, a 2m free-swimming moray eel, the inevitable turtle. And all this amid as pristine a jungle of corals as I've seen anywhere in the Caribbean.
It was the next day that we met the Manic Brazilians. We were diving with another outfit at the more populous, eastern end of the island. They were an attractive, high-spirited bunch, and there was an easy competence about the way they kitted up.
Hah!
Once in the water, they were transformed into drunken football hooligans. If they weren't trying to strangle the corals, they were kicking them to death. Their gauges dragged across the sensitive heads, scoring livid furrows in the polyps.
Several had ignored the house rule about gloves (don't wear any) and were prodding and poking the most delicate fans and sponges as if they were produce on a supermarket shelf.
Two more were performing headstands on the rim of a barrel sponge as they tried to photograph a hapless shrimp.
Because the dive guide didn't seem inclined to stop them, my buddy and I were reduced to dragging the buggers off the coral by the tips of their fins and wagging admonishing fingers at them.
Back on shore, we recounted the episode to the dive operator. He promised to have the dive leader burned alive, but it wasn't difficult to read between the lines. The Brazilians were regular customers, and they paid handsomely for the privilege of destroying the island's second most important natural asset.
The crowning irony: to a man, they were PADI instructors.
Wet wet wet
It rained last night. For two days, the sullen heat had slumped across the island, pressing out the air. The Antilles stifled in an uncanny stillness in compensation for the fury of the hurricane that was devastating the northern Caribbean (though the surge wave from Lenny would later cause coastal damage even in Curaçao, way below the hurricane belt).
Then as dusk fell, the sky caught fire over South America. Each bolt of lightning exposed a photograph of towering thunderheads - the galleons of the gods, trading broadsides in the terrific light of creation.
It was party night at the Lions Dive Hotel. On the deck of the restaurant, a soul band laboured through their set against the elemental tableau that was devouring the stars behind them.
And then, with a sound like the world ripping in half, the sky burst in on us. There was no running for cover - within a second, we were drenched to the skin.
The players fled, cradling their instruments, as the bill-topping act of the night launched into its opening and only number. We watched from our room, drenched to the skin, drinks in hand, windows wide, as the stupendous ferocity of the storm raked the palms and lashed the sea into a phosphorescent froth.
Next day, a moody sky put up a token resistance against the indomitable cheeriness of the tropics. But by 11, the clouds were shrivelling in the sun and we were heading west again, this time for the Christofell National Park and a pair of lean but amiable horses.
The park is a wild old estate, once ruled by a notoriously cruel slave-owner. The salt pans on which his wealth was based are now overgrown with thorny scrub; the channel that once linked lagoon to ocean choked by prickly pear and cactus.
We came across a young deer, prostrate in a thicket of thorn. Staggering to its feet, it careered away, shaking its head and crashing into trees. It was suffering, explained our guide, from a strange disease that was afflicting a growing number of the deer population. I didn't like to say so, but it looked uncomfortably like BSE.
The path wound down to the shore. Like most of Curaçao's coastline, the bay was embraced by low cliffs, undercut to a depth of perhaps 4m by the action of tide and wave. As we climbed a rough-hewn stairway up the cliffside, I realised that the "rock" consisted entirely of petrified coral stems and fragments: slabs of shelf, sprigs of fire, antlers of stag and elkhorn.
Nine metres thick, it must have represented hundreds of thousands of years of prehistory. It was strange to think of the reef existing just as it did today, but browsed by ichthyosaurs instead of turtles.
The sun glittered on the sea's shattered mirror, forcing us to turn inland, where the forest stretched unbroken from the deserted beach to the ragged scarp of a low range of hills.
For as far as the eye could see, there was no sign of human habitation. But for the second time in a week, I felt an instinctive unease, a sinister undercurrent to the picture of a tropical Eden.
Perhaps it was the ghosts of the slaves whose bones are piled as deep as the fossil corals beneath the tranquil woodlands, once the beautiful backdrop to unthinkable horrors.
Fun of the fishtank
Generally speaking, the reef (and certainly the coastal scenery) seems to get better as you travel west. And you can't go any further west than All West Diving & Adventures. The operation
has two bases - a spectacularly pretty cove with its own, designated snorkel trail, easily accessible from the shore, and a boat terminus at a little bay around the headland.
The boat is open - not much more than a fishing cobble - but it's perfectly adequate for these easy conditions. The best dive was a slow drift through giant "mushrooms", culminating in a beautiful field of soft corals.
Our final dive of the trip was at the big Curaçao Seaquarium next door to the Lions. You're briefed, a pot of sardines is clipped to your harness and you slip off the wooden decking into a few metres of greenish water.
You're surrounded instantly by sting rays, sliding up your body like giant calves' tongues, nuzzling and ferreting for fish. The rays are hotly followed by tarpon and a couple of big remora, not to mention a shoal of piranha-like reef fish who would have chewed their way through our chum buckets, given half a chance.
But the main event was the shark-feeding. On the other side of a thick, perspex wall, a handful of big lemon and nurse sharks were impatiently parading. We stuffed the sardines through a small hole in the wall and gritted our teeth as the sharks swiped them from our fingertips. The suspension of disbelief was as perfect as the transparency of the perspex - it really was a gripping experience.
The next tank contained turtles - huge turtles - and, like sumo wrestlers, they barged one another out of the way for precedence at the feeding hole.
The only monster I didn't get to feed was an enormous jewfish which crouched, sulking, in the bows of a little wreck and was clearly fed up to the gills with sardines.
I wish I could have enjoyed such close encounters with these creatures out on the reef. But this well-managed artificial environment was the next best thing.
We left for home the next evening, and as the romantic glow of the desalination plant faded away behind us, I caught myself considering the possibility of returning some day.
Given that I make it a rule never to go back, that says a lot about Curaçao.
FACTFILE
GETTING THERE: The most popular way from the UK is with Dutch airline KLM, changing at Amsterdam. Direct flights are available from there. A return flight costs around £475.
DIVING: Habitat Curaçao Dive Resort offers 24-hour shore diving, nitrox, equipment hire etc (tel 5999 5605454, e-mail divecuraçao@habitatdiveresorts. com), and All West Diving & Adventures (5999 8640102) offers boat and shore diving. At the other end of the island, Lions Dive Hotel & Marina (5999 4618100) offers boat diving from a centre under new management
ACCOMMODATION: Habitat in St Marie has low-rise accommodation with air-conditioning, balconies, good food and service. It is remote, with little to do but diving, but Lions is outside Willhelmstadt, with its nightlife, shops and bars
WHEN TO GO: The island is south of the hurricane belt, so you can go all year round. Average temperature is 27¡C.
LANGUAGE: English and Dutch.
MONEY: Credit cards, dollars, Dutch guilden and local guilden accepted. There are "hole in the wall" machines.
FURTHER INFORMATION: Six UK tour operators offer packages: for further details contact the Curaçao Tourism Development Bureau on 020 7431 4045, e-mail destinations@ pwaxis.co.uk, website: www.curaçao-tourism.com
Appeared in DIVER - February 2000
