The 1998 eclipse was the last total eclipse that Curaçao will see for the next 500 years! Because of this there was obviously a massive amount of interest from all people on the island, and on a global scale. During our stay, we spent a large amount of time at the International School of Curaçao. Here the pupils ranged in age from four up to eighteen! All the children were very aware of the eclipse and the reasons for it. We were very surprised at the vast amount of knowledge, even the youngest children had. They had spent a lot of time talking about the eclipse and definitely realised how lucky they were to see it.

All through the year people on Curaçao save up for the annual carnival, this is when people build extremely colourful floats, have extremely loud music and through out February they dance through the streets. In this huge street party there were a large number of floats dedicated to the sun and the coming eclipse, this shows how incredibly excited the people were.

On exiting the plane we were welcomed by a Tele-Curaçao camera crew, this was just the beginning of a long run of media interviews and reports that we were involved with. We were accompanied by two BBC camera crews and during our stay we did several radio interviews via our satellite phone link supplied by BT.