Originally Posted by
MarcioCampos
Hi, Andrea! Thanks for the advice -- I'm a forum moderator myself and I know how boring it can be to move threads and messages to the right place, that's why I had asked those questions.
We chose Aruba for our honeymoon because Cristina loves beach locations and, when we decided to go to the Caribbean, we did some research to find "our" island -- a Brazilian travel website has lots of advice on it, and we discovered Aruba was the place we wanted to go to.
So, we would go there for the beaches and hotel comfort, but we also decided that honeymoon would the chance of doing, as a couple, lots of things we had never done before, and Aruba offers lots of different activities. Right now I don't have time to describe everything, so I could start with the underwater ones.
You may have read at the Aruba Bob thread that snorkeling was our #1 activity. Being in the ocean, with the fish, and discovering a whole new underwater world, was awesome! We did it first with Stuart (Aruba Bob) -- it was scheduled for Saturday the 12th, but because of the rain we changed it to Thursday the 17th. Stuart came to the Radisson to pick us up and we went first to Club Arias to get our gear, and then to Mangel Halto.
Cristina is a good swimmer; I'm a quite poor one. But the life jackets made me feel quite calm, and I could focus on learning how to breathe naturally with the snorkel, and on how to use the scooters. After a few minutes in shallow waters, when Stuart felt we were doing well enough to go into deep waters, he took us there. Really amazing! We saw lots and lots of different fish -- later I discovered that among the ones we had seen there were sergent majors, French angelfish, parrotfishes, a pair of squids, blue tangs, French grunts. Stuart took pics of a trumpetfish but I hadn't seen it while in the water. I saw much more than I had imagined I would see. I especially recall a small fish with a very dark body (black or dark blue, I don't know) and light blue fluorescent spots. It was really amazing! There was also another nice one, with a red belly and black, white and beige spots on the body. Right after Stuart left us in the hotel, both Cristina and I agreed that it was the most incredible thing that we had done in Aruba and that it would be very difficult to do something as nice in the two remaining days.
On the following day, Friday the 18th, we took the Jolly Pirates morning sail with snorkel. To be honest, we were expecting more of the pirate stuff. Cristina is a big fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and that's why I had decided to book this tour. But the crew was dressed like normal folks (the exception being the guy who welcomed us at check-in). We met a couple of artists who were avid snorkelers and we had a very pleasant talk. The snorkeling was nice -- I used the life vests all the time, and the visibility close to the Antilla wreck was great, so even from the surface I could see a lot of the ship. In all three snorkeling sites there were large groups of sergent majors; I also saw other nice fish whose name I don't know, and many small fish that look a lot like bluehead wrasses but have yellow bodies and green heads (or maybe they were really blue but I was seeing green).
And on our last day in Aruba, Saturday the 19th, we took the Atlantis submarine ride. Yeah, we go into the deep, see different fish, but... well, it's not the same thing as snorkeling. We did see a green moray, some barracudas, yellowhead wrasses, foureye butterflyfishes, etc. etc. but I felt that 1. the price we pay considering the time we spend down there is a bit high; 2. actually being in the water with the fish is much more exciting than being safe and dry inside a submarine. That's why we likely wouldn't repeat the Atlantis in a second visit to Aruba. But we don't plan to wait until returning to the island to snorkel again!
All the best from Brazil
Marcio
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but nothing that a whole day in Arashi doing nothing can't heal. We also have already taken a sunset sail and visited downtown Oranjestad. Our snorkeling trip was rescheduled because of the bad weather on Saturday morning.
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