Traveling to Aruba
Hello Everyone!
Shame on me for not writing this earlier but Caitlyn and I recently made a trip to Aruba. Aruba is a beautiful little island located off the coast of Venezuela. The weather is warm, sunny, and mostly windy with clear blue waters and white sand. We went from April 26th - April 31st. This trip was very spontaneous and booked very last minute.
When I say last minute, we booked our airfare three nights before our departure and our hotel two nights before our arrival. We used Google Flights to find the best price on airfare and then we used mostly Tripadvisor to find our hotel. We ended up staying at this awesome little ‘boutique’ hotel called Bubali Bliss and we were not disappointed at all. I would actually love to stay at a place like this more often. This wasn’t your ordinary hotel, it was a building that contained no more then 7-8 studio suites. Each suite had it’s own bathroom, full kitchen, living room, and bedroom. It was pretty awesome if I say so (sorry for the lack of pictures). The hotel also had a nice little pool to sit and relax at after a day of adventuring.
The hotel was very inexpensive compared to a lot of the surrounding hotels since Aruba is a pretty popular vacation destination. It was definitely a more independent style of hotel because there was really no hotel staff on site for 75% of the day. There was a cleaning lady there in the morning and the guy who owned the hotel was there from 9AM-11AM. We found this to only be troublesome once the whole trip as I locked our cash in the safe and reset the code on accident. Other then that small incident, it was awesome!
The hotel was conveniently located behind a Super Food which is like a Walmart. We wasted no time stocking up on food and supplies for the beaches as we were planning to do a lot of nothing during our time in Aruba. We also decided once we landed that it would be a good idea to rent a car for the week to avoid any taxi’ing and could travel freely. We found this awesome rental service called Carvenience. They delivered the car to our hotel within an hour and the price for the week was really cheap ($115~)!
During our trip we visited a bunch of beaches all over the island. The really cool thing about Aruba, especially if you have a car, is that you can drive from one side to the other in about 35 minutes. We were able to visit all of these different beaches and see the beautiful southern coast of the island. Our favorite beach was definitely Baby Beach but we also went to Eagle Beach and Mango Alto. We also went during the Easter holiday which was pretty cool. In Aruba during Easter all of the locals camp out on the beaches for days setting up these pretty extensive campsites enjoying food and music.
In addition to beautiful beaches, on the northern side of the island is a more scenic view of amazing coastlines from high ledges and ocean views that seem to never end. On our last day of the trip we attempted a hike to a Natural Pool which is said to only beach reached from a miserable three mile trek through mostly rock and desert unless you have a jeep. However we were told by a local that it is possible to reach the natural pool hiking along the beach from a different starting point. We made it halfway before we decided to stop and watch the sunrise.
I feel like I’ve went on a lot about this already so I’m going to sum up the rest of this trip here. Aruba is beautiful. It is a really awesome island that has a lot of amazing natural offerings if you’re into that stuff. Tourism is a major part of Aruba’s economy and with that comes some things that can be pretty expensive. A lot of the restaurants that we went to were pretty pricey but I felt like I got more then my moneys worth. Some restaurants worth mentioning are Taste of Germany and Papillion. Taste of Germany was by far my favorite because they had 106 beers! 106 BEERS! Of course I only got to taste like three of them but still, they were so good and the food was delicious (the beer probably didn’t hurt).
Would we go to Aruba again? Yes. Do we feel like we need to go back to Aruba soon to see more of the island? No. I wouldn’t consider this a bad thing. I feel like we saw most of what the island had to offer and don’t feel like we missed out on too much. Unlike when we went to Costa Rica we only saw like a third of Costa Rica and will probably go back sometime in the future.
For now if you have any questions about the trip or happen to be traveling to Aruba in the future feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email here.