Thanks for your trip report! No one should ever be beaten up for a trip report, regardless of whether one agrees with it or not. We appreciate your honest input and the time you took to write it. As you know, we are still in Curaçao (also our first trip here) and will return to the States on Tuesday. We do agree with some of your report, but in other areas are having a much different experience. We don’t care for the man-made beaches either — they mostly resemble large lagoons in our minds and do tend to look a bit 'cloudy' and silty. Did you drive further north than Coral Bay Estates resort? To Cas Abou or Playa Kenepa (Knip)? Those two natural beaches are stunning (in our opinion), not man-made, but open to the sea and just crystal clear waters. Very, very nice for swimming and/or snorkeling. Daaibooi was another nice one, but we liked Knip the best. We spent the most time there.
We visited Coral Bay Estates briefly the day you left, but were not impressed. Karakter was nice (we didn’t eat there), but too crowded by the time we got there; we could not find loungers in the shade, so didn’t stay too long. The lack of a sand beach was a surprise to us, though the view was wonderful. Coral Bay Estates was a little too 'sterile' for us. Hard to explain what we mean by that, but while very nice houses, it just isn’t the type of place we like to stay. Did you only have a/c in the bedrooms? I need to have a/c throughout. The a/c at Avila worked so well that sometimes the room felt too cold. LOL! Curaçao is indeed hot (being near the equator), but we were really quite comfortable most of the time with the gentle breezes blowing. It didn’t feel any worse than SXM in our opinion.
We didn’t really like any of the 'resort beaches' all that much, including Avila's (where we stayed) or the Mango Beach strand beaches. They are all 'man-made' and had that lagoon-like appearance. Avila's in particular looked very cloudy. We much preferred the natural beaches mentioned above. Avila Resort was otherwise a very nice place to stay, however, with some very good food in 3 different restaurants and a beach bar. Will go into more detail when we wrote our trip report upon arriving home in a few days. This was not SXM, but we found it a decent place in its own right while waiting for our favorite island to heal.
Again, thanks for your trip report. Wish we had been able to connect while we were all here.
