The Voyage

Spectacles

Andy and Melissa are sailing around the world on their 48-foot sailboat, Spectacle.

The Position

Bali, Indonesia

The Pictures

The Voyage of Spectacle

Archive for January, 2008

Project Backfill

Posted by: andy

Having managed to get months behind in posting, I’m now finally attempting to fill in our exploits from Grenada, Bonaire, Curacao, Aruba and Cartagena, Colombia.  Procrastination has been begetting further procrastination, so I’m finally going to admit partial defeat – we’re going to pick things up with our current activities, and I’m going to go back and “backfill” the Grenada / ABCs / Colombia content.  Weak, I know.  However, the much more attentive Melissa has posted a large number of pictures from these exploits here.  To summarize for now:

Grenada – beautiful terrain and beaches, friendly people, got almost disturbingly quiet and sleepy once the World Cup ended.

Bonaire – great diving, surprisingly delicious food, but an absurd performance by Budget Marine equaled being stranded on the island for months instead of a week or two.  Not the worst place to be stuck (in fact a great place to be stuck), but stuck we were …

Curacao – insanely windy and dusty, world’s most confusing roads and rental car needed to get anywhere.  Marina / anchorage nowhere near town.  Should have done more diving and less driving.  Casino highly accommodating, food pretty tasty, but overall a decidedly mediocre place.

Aruba – among the cheesiest, low-rent places imaginable.  Utterly culture-free.  Reno with beaches.  A KFC on every corner.  Couldn’t wait to leave.  Casino highly non-accommodating (which didn’t help…).  Contemplating a visit?  Sit down until the feeling passes.

Cartagena – perhaps our favorite place in the entire Caribbean.  Never have we so inaccurately prejudged a place.  Beautiful historical center, triumph of urban planning, surprisingly great food, splendid marina, fascinating culture and history everywhere.  Absolutely nothing like the poverty-stricken, narcotrafficante-overrun, third-world battlefield we Americans tend to believe it is.

I’ll do all these places better justice shortly (and I’ll probably eventually eliminate this place-holder), but if we don’t fast-forward to the present, even more material will be lost.