Spending whole days at the beach is never something we plan to do, and our time on Aruba was structured to alternate beach-going activities with other diversions. That included several animal-centric attractions.
One was the Donkey Sanctuary, home to over 130 animals whose numbers are best illustrated with this perspective.
There is no fee to enter the facility where you can freely mingle with the four-legged residents. The sanctuary is a volunteer-run non-profit surviving on sponsorships and donations, with a mission to save and care for the donkeys, who are otherwise mostly abandoned and neglected in the world that discarded them as a once-primary mode of transportation in favor of motorized vehicles.
Here are a few portraits.
The most illustrious members of the herd are immortalized in paint…
… and in sculpture.
Other animals – like cats, chickens, peacocks – piggyback on the attention showered on the donkeys.
The above picture illustrates the obvious biggest negative of being around freely roaming animals – the droppings are everywhere, and you have to watch your step every second.
That cautiousness is pretty hard to maintain when you are trying to get a full frontal close-up of a peacock’s train in its unparalleled splendor.
On the positive side, dancing around donkey droppings was done among lively colors and decorations.
Elsewhere on the island is the Ostrich Farm. There is no noble-purpose explanation for its existence. “Why would there be ostriches in Aruba to start with?” the tour guide asks himself. “Because there are tourists who are willing to pay to see them,” is his immediate answer. A classic case of supply catering to demand.
For a relatively sizable monetary outlay, you get to be guided around a set of enclosures housing a couple of dozen ostriches and emus.
I got only a single emu close-up, but ostriches posed plentifully.
They also all expected to be fed – and feeding these huge birds is a mildly unsettling endeavor as they peck away with terrifying speed and power.
A separate enclosure houses a veritable poultry yard.
Finally, on our very last day in Aruba, we stopped by the Butterfly Farm, which is among the more expensive attractions on the island, enjoying nonetheless a lot of visitors due to its prime location in the middle of the main resort strip. For reasons that defy explanation, I decided to leave my camera in the car, so the only butterfly pictures I have are these phone snapshots of occasions that a large Lepidoptera landed on one of us.
These three visited attractions are not the only animal-centric ones on Aruba; there is also a bird sanctuary and a private non-profit animal garden/zoo, to name just a couple of others that I am aware of. None of them is a must, of course, but all should be pretty enjoyable for children of all ages to do something away from the beach.