Aruba, not bad!

It's a low sort of human that goes to Aruba and complains about it ... so I won't. I had a good time.

I went with my girlfriend, who is shy about being mentioned on the Interwhatsits and who shall therefore still be referred to as Alphonse Dubai.

Aruba, a tiny island outgrowth of the Netherlands is a lovely place if you can believe songs and tourist brochures, and also obviously if you like white sandy beaches and plenty of Americans. Seriously you can speak English and spend US dollars just everywhere there.

And everywhere in this case is about 13 miles long by five miles wide. It's like a squat Manhattan, but, I think, with more native born US citizens.

Through Alphonse's family we got much appreciated access to a time-share that was going unused, and not being ones to punch a gift horse right in the kisser, we found the cash for the plane and told work where to stick it for a week, before toddling off on our merry way.

Alphonse is a big fan of beach, because she likes sunshine and looks good in a bikini. I, being made almost entirely from English man-parts, am leery on both counts. However, we did find a way to combine our loves - hers of beach and ocean and mine of biology/zen sports - by going scuba diving quite a lot.

We got a 5 tank package and therefore dove 5 times. I think there's probably a certification you can pay for so you do multiple tank dives, but I don't have it and the dive shop didn't care to rig their systems up that way anyhow.

A short note about scuba: PADI, which certifies scuba instruction, is clearly a bit of a squirrely group. Scuba isn't actually all that hard to learn, and while there are all sorts of certifications you can get, and are no doubt supposed to have before you go diving in wrecks or diving too deeply, most dive shops don't really care as long as you remember to keep breathing (actually super important), breath in the correct hole, don't bob directly to the surface unexpectedly, and don't ruin dives for their other paying customers.

For instance, Alphonse and I are certified to 60 feet in open water and nothing more. We're not supposed to dive through enclosed spaces or, say, to 80 feet, both of which our dive shop were totally glad to chaperone us through because a) it seemed like fun and b) that's what they were doing. They were mildly troubled when we admitted after our first dive that we'd forgotten more about scuba than we currently knew, but we went home and watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to set up our equipment, so by the time we came back we'd pretty much completed the majority of what PADI actually charges you to learn anyhow.

We dove a couple of wrecks, one of the Antilla, a German merchant ship that scuttled itself in Aruba at the outbreak of WWII (I'm assuming because if you know you're likely to become POW's, why not Aruba?), and a couple of planes that were, get this, sunk because people might want to scuba through them. Fascinating history. We saw some cool wildlife including an eagle ray, a couple of moray eels, a lion fish, some spiny lobsters, and toward the end of one dive, a huge school of silvery 8-inch fish that I tried to float unobtrusively into the middle of. They knew.

Also, once they'd dashed off, I realized that what it seemed they'd been doing, was feeding on the distressingly large cloud of jellyfish I suddenly found myself unobtrusively infiltrating. It wouldn't have been quite so unobtrusive if you could scream underwater. You can, I learned, get stung. Also you can panic. Lucky for us, the boat came and picked us up right in the middle of this cloud of stingy little bastards. Sigh.

Anyway, a good time was, in balance, had by all, and I finally got to examine underwater life in a spot where you could see more than two feet in a row. Alphonse got to hang out on the beaches. The "lively" Aruba economy of money for slightly less alcoholic beverages than advertized, got money. I'm not sure I'd go back to Aruba, but I'd certainly consider it and I'd definitely try other Caribbean vacations. Not cruise ships.