wildlife of Aruba

Monday night is always an odd night, what with coaching to get out of the way. No Conrad tonight - he's in Alabama - so it's me and leftovers and a short, easy bit of blogging before bed.

I'm still drawing on the Aruba photos for blog entries and likely will get one or two more out of them even if it was a month ago (and I've neglected the Easter weekend trip to Pasadena, haven't I?). No matter. Aruba was an extraordinary experience on so many levels - it merits more than one entry.

So while I'm winding down, let me post some photos of the wildlife of Aruba.

It actually surprised me that we saw relatively few colourful birds - I struggle to think of any though we heard much birdsong. Certainly we saw fish - bright blue parrotfish from a hotel bridge, all the fish in the water just below us as we dined on a restaurant's dock two of the nights there,

and the many other amazingly coloured fish on our snorkeling expedition. Frankly, the snorkeling was wonderful - at the second stop we descended into what felt like an aquarium - clouds of fish around us, nibbling at the sandwiches we held tight in our fists. That was amazing. Truly. I could have watched them for ages.

We saw many other gorgeously coloured fish while snorkeling, and that was a real highlight of the trip despite my foolish sunscreen failure.

Aruba is an arid island, a small island. So far as I know, there are no big mammals on the island. Wild ones, that is. But there are lizards.

If only I'd got a photo of that vividly blue one I saw near the Westin. Ah well. I did capture shots of a few others, including at our hotel.

The other cool thing was seeing the crabs on the rocks at the waterfront.

It brought back all the memories of overturning rocks on the waterfront at my Grandma's when we were younger, and picking them up so they could scuttle over as our hands, one hand to the next. I admit that nowadays I wonder how good eating they make...

Oh, and the first critter spotted? This little guy!