Every year in February we treat ourselves to a holiday in Curaçao, to get away from the dreary grey winter days in The Netherlands. It is a luxury that we feel very grateful to be able to afford, and we enjoy the relaxed atmosphere and constant high temperatures a lot. We mainly come here to relax, rest and snorkel, but I try to do some exploring too. However in our first few days we have no car available. We basically don’t need it as we walk to the beach for swimming and eating, and we don’t feel like doing anything else until the second week. This means that for my exploring I am restricted to the area around our apartment. There is not a lot of green landscape (where I am most comfortable shooting), if there are any plants they are small and covered with thorns, except for the palm trees and flowers on the resorts. But I still managed to take a decent amount of photos that I am quite happy with. I decided to do one post with all my favourites from the first 5 days of our stay, and not split it up. That means a picture heavy post, but I think it gives a nice overview.

Most of the time I try to go out and about before sunrise. When there aren’t too many clouds the light is wonderful at that time no matter where you are, but the Caribbean light is just a bit extra special 🙂 . So here are some ocean views at dawn:

The water can be quite rough some times, and I spent a lot of time trying to catch the right moment with the waves hitting the shore. Not only at sunrise, but also midday:

Some colourful flowers that decorate our resort:

Although there is not real woodland, I found a hiking route with some trees with green leaves. As you can imagine it’s all very dry, but it has its own charm. And no surprise, this path again leads to the ocean…

Of course, when at Curaçao you inevitably run into Iguana’s. So I couldn’t resist including a couple of shots of them too. There was nice group gathered at a rocky wall at the beach. They seemed a nice bunch of animals, until one of them decided to check me out. I was sitting down on my bum in the sand, and when the iguana came walking between my legs I decided that more intimacy was unwelcome from my side, so that is where the photoshoot ended 🙂 .

Finishing the day at the beach is also a treat. Everyday we watch the sun go down from a bar or beach cafe, mostly with a nice cocktail in our hands 🙂

And finally a night shot from our balcony. It was very cloudy, so my plan to shoot stars didn’t work out. But I think this is just as well, as the clouds add some nice drama. It was a balancing act, there was a lot of wind so the moon disappeared behind the clouds every other second or so. Noise-wise I would have preferred lower iso and longer exposure, but then the moon would not be in the photo.

We will hang around here for a bit longer, but I hope you enjoyed the photos so far. Thanks for reading!