bron: Miami Herald

BY TOM UHLENBROCK

WILLEMSTAD, Curacao -- Born in Argentina, Nolo Ambrosi was vice president of an oil services company in Oklahoma when he chucked it all and moved his family to Curacao.

''I'm Argentinian by birth, Italian by blood and American by choice,'' Ambrosi said. ``We came here in `96 on our 20th wedding anniversary and we liked the island. I quit my job cold turkey.''

What attracted the Ambrosi family to Curacao is not obvious at first glance. The island's beauty is deeper, literally. Curacao is in the southwestern Caribbean, 35 miles north off the coast of Venezuela, and is a commonwealth of the Netherlands Antilles.

Curacao and its sister islands of Aruba and Bonaire are known as the ABCs. Before Aruba gained its independence in 1986, the three islands were funded by Holland. Aruba was given money to promote tourism, Bonaire promoted diving and Curacao -- the largest -- was the government seat, with tourism getting a belated nod about a decade ago.

From the air, Curacao is a relatively flat volcanic island covered with cactus and scrub. Near its middle is Schottegat Weg, a protected bay that once was a stronghold for the Caribbean's slave trade. It is now circled by oil refineries and a ship repair center.

Willemstad is the capital of Curacao and the island's only city. Designated a World Heritage Site because of its Dutch colonial buildings, the colorful city is split by a canal that allows oil tankers and cargo ships to enter the bay, with a floating, moveable pedestrian bridge joining the two sides.

The water is so clear, with visibility of up to 150 feet, you can stand on the bridge and see multi-colored fish even in the busy canal. And that was part of the attraction for the Ambrosis.

''We used to be very avid divers,'' Nolo Ambrosi said. ``The shore diving here is wonderful. The west end of the island you can have the beaches all to yourself.''

While the north side of the 38-mile-long island is rocky and battered by waves, the south side is dotted with sand beaches that drop gently into the deep blue sea, with the slopes covered by some of the Caribbean's most gorgeous and healthy coral reefs. Many of the hotels rent equipment to certified divers who don their gear on the beach and head into the turquoise waters without the need for a boat.

The Ambrosis don't dive that much anymore because Nolo and his two sons are busy running Ocean Encounters, a diving operation with four shops and five boats.

''The dive shop was an accident,'' Ambrosi said. 'We never expected to do what we did. We started with 11 employees and have 30 now. We thought, `This is going to be fun.' We underestimated the work, though.''

Ocean Encounters specializes in picking up guests at the hotels by boat and taking them out on diving and snorkeling excursions. And that part of the business may be about to skyrocket.

While Curacao is well known as a vacation spot by Europeans, especially the Dutch, only about 25 percent of its visitors are from North America. But a major push is on to increase that percentage, with several upscale hotel chains either building resorts on the island, or preparing to do so.

The Lodge Kura Hulanda and Beach Club, located on a secluded beach at the island's west end, and the Clarion Hotel & Suites opened last year. The 350-room Hyatt Regency Curacao broke ground in December 2005, with the opening scheduled for the summer 2008. The Curacao Marriott, Hilton Curacao, Lion's Dive & Beach Resort and Avila Hotel, a four-star boutique resort, all have added or upgraded facilities in the past few years. And then there's the new Renaissance going up on the waterfront of Willemstad.

''The Renaissance will be a monster complex,'' Ambrosi said. ``The beach will be on the second floor, on the end will be an infinity pool going back to the ocean. They pump the water up from 70 feet.''

Offshore banking, large ship repair and refining oil tanked in from Venezuela had been the major industries in Curacao, but increasing tourism, especially among U.S. residents, is now the island's major goal.

''The plan for tourism is to double the number of rooms over the next five years,'' Ambrosi said. But he emphasized that island businesses want to maintain the Dutch-flavored cultural legacy that makes Curacao different from Bonaire and Aruba.

The island was claimed for the Spanish in 1499 by Alonso de Ojeda, a lieutenant of Christopher Columbus. One explanation for its name -- pronounced kur-uh-SOW -- is that it comes from the Spanish word corazon for heart. The Dutch beat out the Spanish in 1634, and used Curacao to become leaders in the international slave trade, capturing Africans and selling them to wealthy plantation owners from across the Americas.

The British took over for a while, and the French tried, but the Dutch regained control in 1815. Eight ancient forts bear witness to the tumultuous past. With street names like Caracasbaaiweg, Fokkerweg and Jan Noorduynweg, the Dutch influence remains heavy throughout the island. Dutch is the official language but English is widely spoken by the 140,000 or so residents. The European influence also was evident on the beach of Papagayo Resort, where we spent the first three nights, as topless blondes soaked up the sun.

The plan was to have Hannah, my 17-year-old daughter, do the classwork for her diver's certification back home, and then make the qualifying open-water dives in Curacao so she could join her parents and brother underwater. But schoolwork intervened, and she arrived on the island unprepared. That didn't matter at our first stop, Animal Encounters, next door to the Curacao Sea Aquarium.

After a 30-minute introductory lesson, she was strapped into scuba gear and accompanied into the water by her instructor. Animal Encounters has enclosed a section of coral reef, with sting rays, puffer fish and other creatures swimming freely with you, including Harold, a sea bass the size of a bathtub. At either end, behind netting, is a pool of sea turtles and another of sharks. Divers are given containers of sardine bait to hand feed the fish.

The preliminary instruction includes the proper method for sticking a dead sardine through holes in a Plexiglas window that separates you from the sharks and turtles. The barbs have been removed from the tails of the swarming stingrays, but the sharks have all their teeth, and might mistake your finger for a limp sardine.

The signature photo of Curacao is the strip of pastel-painted Dutch colonial buildings along the waterfront in Willemstad. The buildings were said to be white originally, but painted in technicolor in 1817 by decree of Governor-General Albert ''Froggie'' Kikkert, who complained that the glare from the white buildings gave him chronic migraines.

More than 750 buildings within the historic area are listed as monuments, including the Mikve Israel-Emanual Synagogue, built in 1732 by Jewish immigrants. With giant brass chandeliers and floors sprinkled daily with sand, the synagogue is the oldest in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere.

While mother and daughter headed for the shops of Willemstad to spend our excess money on designer purses and sunglasses, I walked to the Hotel Kura Hulanda to admire the work of Jacob Gelt Dekker, who used a fortune amassed from the sale of his 120 one-hour photo shops in Europe to invest heavily in Curacao 

In 1998, Gelt Dekker began buying houses in a run-down section of Willemstad and refurbishing them into a sprawling complex of hotel rooms and upscale shops, joined by cobblestoned streets and sprinkled with sculpture gardens, all discreetly enclosed and protected by a gatekeeper. Gelt Dekker, 58, built his own mansion within the complex, and also owns homes in Key West, New York city and Amsterdam.

Within the Hotel Kura Hulanda -- the name means ''garden of Holland'' -- is a museum housing Gelt Dekker's personal collection of art and antiquities that dates back to 2,000 years before Christ. The collection includes clay zoomorphic vessels from Mesopotamia, terra-cotta idols carried by Roman soldiers, pre-Colombian ceramics from South America and Benin bronze heads from Africa. The rooms segue into the ''Black Holocaust'' museum, where shackles and iron cages display the atrocities of the slave trade. KKK robes and photos of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tell the Americas' civil rights story.

Gelt Dekker was not on the island, so Rolf Oversier, resident manager of the newly opened Lodge Kura Hulanda on the west point of the island, explained his boss's mission.

''He loves Curacao,'' Oversier said of Gelt Dekker. ``The Hotel Kura Hulanda was built in an old area of town full of junkies, prostitutes, the whole thing. He slowly bought the whole area, and made an exclusive hotel with 80 rooms, all different. It's like a little village in the city of Willemstad. He offered the junkies, the prostitutes, the dealers jobs. He's sort of an idealist, but he gets things done.

``The lodge was the ruins of a resort. The government asked him if he could do something with it. He built the lodge with 44 oceanfront rooms and 30 garden-view rooms. He never does anything halfway.''

For our final three nights, we relocated to the Curacao Marriott Beach Resort, which, like many of the other upscale resorts, has a lobby open to the tropical weather, a sprawling pool complex and a reef waiting off the stretch of beach. Snorkelers roamed the shallows and divers disappeared into the deeper waters.

We took one of Ocean Encounters' boats out to Tugboat Reef, named for a coral-encrusted boat sunk in 17 feet of water. My son, wife and I slowly toured the reef with tanks while the daughter snorkeled above. The highlight of the dive was two slinky snake-like creatures, pale pink with yellow polka dots, that the divemaster later identified as sharp-tailed eels. Very cool, as they wiggled through the garden of coral.

Both air and water temperatures are near perfect in Curacao, averaging around 80 degrees. Because this is the tropics, a sunny day may evolve into a rain shower, which disappears as fast as it came. While January through March is the high season, and Easter up to Dec. 23 is the low season, Nolo Ambrosi, the transplanted Oklahoman, said the seasons don't exist in Curacao.

''We're below the hurricane belt,'' he said. ``The only difference between summer and winter is the sun sets 15 minutes earlier in winter. You can plan a vacation far ahead and know you're not going to go wrong. The weather is almost boring.''

On our last night, we watched the sun set, then returned to the beach after dinner in time to catch a falling star. Behind us, the eerie glow in the sky looked like a distant fire, but was the after-burners of the oil refineries reflecting off their own fumes.

Oversier and others in the tourist industry said they would like to see the protected bay lined by resorts and marinas, instead of refineries, but the heavy industry was still a power broker on the island. Besides, Ambrosi said, Curacao was not impacted by air pollution from the refineries. ''Everything goes to Aruba,'' he said.