Most people pack for Aruba once, then pack for Arikok by accident. Flip-flops, a beach towel, one lukewarm bottle of water from the hotel fridge, and off they drive into a stretch of desert that sees maybe 400 mm of rain in a year, most of it crammed into a three-month window. I have walked…
The gate at San Fuego swings open around eight, the air is still cool enough to make you smug about the early start, and the map on the wall hands you two circled names: Fontein and Guadirikiri. They sit roughly three kilometres apart on the same limestone ridge inside Arikok National Park, and one day…
My first descent into Guadirikiri came in February 2016, three weeks after I moved half my life from Bristol to Aruba. A woman behind me whispered that it felt like a cathedral, then pointed a compact camera at the ceiling and popped the flash at a sleeping colony. She meant nothing by it, and that…