Famous Blue Curacao Liqueur
13 February 2021 | 12 03.520'N:68 51.216'W, Spaanse Harbour, Curacao
NC
12th February
12 03.520 N
68 51.216 W
Weather; overcast, wind n/a, waves n/a
After spending the last couple of days doing sight- seeing , or not depending on how you look at things being closed, we decided that today we would take things really easy and have a late start to the day. Last night just as we were getting ready to go to bed we had an issue with both the toilets - oh no here we go again! The forward toilet had suddenly become really hard to manually pump out despite the fact that we had been really careful and not put anything down it, including toilet paper, other than urine and we always gave it a really good pump out each time to clear the line, obviously the scale was building back up again. Gerry got out his trusty bottle of Muriatic acid and poured some into the toilet bowl, there followed a lot of gurgling and then he pumped it out again, put a second lot of acid down and repeated the process which seemed to do the trick, it is back to being relatively easy to pump out once more. The aft toilet, that's the one with the electric pump and macerator, at about the same time seemed to not have enough water coming into the bowl when the toilet was flushed - possibly the solenoid valve was giving up the ghost. Gerry checked the connections on the solenoid valve, cleaned the strainer, not that it needed it, and checked that the water flow coming in was adequate, for the moment it seems to be OK again but we are going to have to keep an eye on it to make sure we don't end up in the poo! Wasn't that just the thing you needed to have to sort out before going to bed? So we went to bed and had a decent nights sleep, both toilets were working OK this morning but we needed to buy another bottle of Muriatic acid as Gerry had used up all of ours last night. Gerry spent the morning putting a new running back stay preventer and a new spinnaker pole downhaul on. The next job was to change the coolant in the main engine and the generator which was done whilst I spent the entire morning labeling photos - an extremely boring job but if I don't do it whilst the places are still fresh in my memory I won't be able to recall where they were taken. We finally got moving off of the boat at about 1.30 in the afternoon with no particular plan of where we were headed in mind, or so I thought! The first stop, I bet you can guess by now, was Budget marine - to replace the bottle of Muriatic acid. That turned into a disaster as Budget no longer carry it but they gave Gerry directions to a hardware store where he would be able to buy it. We put the driving directions into Google maps and set off, for some reason the directions are a bit slow to keep up and we missed a couple of turnings which just had Gerry getting more frustrated and blaming me for not telling him that the turning was coming up - it really wasn't my fault that we were on top of the turns before the map caught up, we got to the place eventually and discovered that it was a big hardware store like Bunnings or Home Depot. I waited in the car, cooling my heels whilst Gerry went in search of the acid, he arrived back at the car with said bottle in hand plus 2 ice creams - much appreciated as Ice cream has become a real treat because we can't keep it on the boat. So having achieved our goal for the day we decided to give Best Buy supermarket another try, hopefully we would find them open today. Once again the google maps had trouble keeping up and trying to send us down no entry streets but we got there in the end with Gerry squealing the car wheels into the car park out of frustration. We found the place open, thank goodness, and made our way around what essentially is a warehouse rather than a supermarket, I didn't think much of their fresh produce but it had plenty of grocery items and they are probably cheaper than at the supermarket we went to on Monday. I think we will have to do a stock up between the two places when the time comes. We did find some chocolate bars and stropwaffles that we couldn't live without. By now it was coming up to 4pm and I suggested that we try to do the tour of the Curacao liqueur distillery that we had been talking about doing for the entire week. Gerry protested that we didn't have time but then looked up the closing time of the place which was 5pm - we had an hour, we then looked at the directions, it was 3 mins away from where we were so we thought we would give it a try, arriving at the place at just after 5 past 4. We were met at the ticket kiosk by a nice lady who told us that the last tour for the day was at 3 pm ( why don't they advertise that fact?) but we were welcome to go into the shop and buy anything we wanted and the cafe / bar behind it was open until 5pm if we would like to buy a drink. We had nothing better to do so we headed into the bar and ordered a couple of cocktails, made of course with their famous Curacao liqueur. I couldn't resist having the blue stuff in a house special Mai Tai, Gerry had what was supposed to be an original recipe Mai Tai (I've had enough of them in the past to know that it wasn't!) Both were very nice though and it made a good end to the afternoon. Despite not being able to go on a tour we found out a few things about the production of Curacao Liqueur, so for your education here is what we learnt and I quote from the back of their bottle here.
"Shortly after their discovery of the island in 1499 the Spaniards planted their so-called "Valencia" orange. Due to the special climate and soil conditions however, the fruit changed into a kind of almost inedible product. It was not until decades later that it was discovered that the sun dried peels of the orange contained an etheric oil with an extraordinary pleasing fragrance."
These orange (known locally as Laraha, meaning golden Orange of Curacao) peels are still the basis for the liqueur which comes in 5 colours, Clear, Blue, Green, Red and Orange (all the same flavor) and also Rum and Raisin, coffee and chocolate flavor. I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed to discover that the 5 different colours all have exactly the same flavor and that the colour is derived from adding dye to the clear liqueur. Whilst they might add an interesting look to a bar and the cocktails it is really a waste of money buying them all for their colour alone, I'm pretty sure I could add dye to a clear alcohol and add interest to a cocktail without paying a fortune for it but I am tempted to buy the original Blue Liqueur just to have some.
Just before they closed up for the day we spoke again to the lady at the ticket office and found out that they are closed on the weekend and would also be closed on Monday this coming week as it is apparently a public holiday. This sort of puts paid to us doing the tour as we won't have a car from Monday onwards, oh well if you've seen one bottle of Curacao Liqueur you have seen them all but I would have liked to know more about the distilling process. Our next decision was about dinner - it really wasn't worth returning to the boat to come back out again for dinner so we thought we would have an early dinner. We had planned on having Chinese tonight at a restaurant that our Good Samaritan had pointed out to us on our journey to check in. The only problem with that was that Gerry thought it was one place and I knew it was another! Never doubt She Who Must Be Obeyed, we took the route to where I knew it to be and sure enough it was the right place. We had food in front of us by 5.45pm and it was delicious, we of course ordered far too much and had enough left over to take home for tomorrow. It was now time to return to the boat for the night. Just as we were climbing back aboard and hoisting our dinghy up a catamaran arrived and dropped its anchor so close to our port stern that we could have invited them to take one step across and join us for the night , they didn't put out a heap of chain so they remained fairly close to us for the duration - what is it with some people and how close they have to anchor?
We watched a couple of Netflix series and that was it for the day.