Establishing Bonaire Entry
Some of you may wonder, "where is Bonaire?" Well I put a Google Maps link into my away msg, but it's not on the Caribbean chain, rather it's one of the ABC's (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao) just north of Venezuela. It's a Dutch island, part of the Netherlands Antilles. Why Bonaire...well my family's been scuba diving since I wanted to get certified at age 12, and Bonaire has some of the best diving in the world and the best diving we've ever encountered. It's also almost completely shore diving, so you can just drive around the island and go into the water basically anywhere and find a nice, deep wall to dive along with varying conditions and sealife at different places. And after coming here over my spring break last year, my parents bought a condo.
Anyway, as we just got here last night after American Airlines delaying our flight 4 hours (we still made our connection in Puerto Rico at least), I don't have many pictures yet, so to give you an idea of where I am, as an establishing-entry, I'll post pictures I took a year and a half ago when we first came down here.
Here's a great view from the plane looking south across the shore down to the salt ponds and piles that make up the southern portion of the island as you can see on Google Maps.
The first of two iguana pictures showing their cool tales. The iguanas are quite large and just lounge around all day sunning themselves...
Most of the coastline is rocky, which is why we all had to buy new boots/fins for shore diving cuz walking across rocks hurts your feet otherwise, but in some areas, like by our condo, the ocean has carved under the rock, like so.
Here's that second iguana picture I promised you, was it worth it?
This was our view from the second floor, our condo now is on the first floor, which can still see the water and sunset, but has far easier access since we can just walk out the back instead of having to go around to the front where the stairs were.
Another view from the unit we had rented, showing the grounds a little behind the building, and also a cruse ship on the other side of Klein Bonaire, a small island off the coast with diving all around it for boat dives and kayakers.
Since the island is fairly flat and dry, cacti are quite common and are even used to make quite effective fences.
By the fresh-water showers on the dock these lil crabs gather, seemingly attacted to the water.
My dad infront of a sunset after a late-afternoon dive
Speaking of sunset...here's the sunset in the winter over Klein, which basically looks like it's over the water...though in the summer, the sun's shifted to the right so I should be able to get some of it directly over the water.
Here's the full 360 degree panoramic photo I took that sunset pic out of showing you the view from our dock looking out to sea, and back at the shore, to the left of the dock, the red-roofs are Sand Dollar, our condo/hotel. The building under-construction is a restaurant that's now finished and open.
My mom at a favorite restaurant of our's that's outside under a flowering tree so flowers drop down on us and wind up in her hair.
Ol'Blue is a shore dive we went on that was absolutely beautiful, and while you can't really tell it from the picture, the beach there is all coral and it was a little rough getting into the water.
The Mystery-Mobile-type minivan they rented us instead of the pick-up we had reserved infront of what used to be the shoreline at some point before the water apparently receded.
Here's my dad and Alex infront of more cool rock-formations from past waterlevels.
Alex and I infront of the lake in the park to the north.
A panoramic of that same lake.
Driving around parts of the island showed Bonaire's serengeti-side...
except instead of having gazelle and shrubs, it was filled with cacti.
And now for something completely different, Bonaire is also known for having flamingos who seem quite happy standing around in any bodies of freshwater around the island.
The north and east coasts of the island, where the wind and current hits, are far rougher and rockier.
These are "slave huts," but they're tiny and not really where the slaves lived, but where they'd chill there to escape the heat during the day I guess. You have to duck down to get through the doorway, though I guess this picture has a lack of scale or perspective for you to tell how small they were.
Here are those salt piles that you could see from the airplane shot with the pink salt pond infront of it from the algae that grows in that concentration of salt.
Interestingly enough there was a lot of foam around the pink pond that blew around in the wind and sorta wiggled around on the ground.
Hope you enjoyed that, since getting wireless internet's not too hard here (I just have to walk 10 feet towards the cafe from our condo), I was thinking that semi-daily updates would be fun with what fish I saw that day since we have the underwater housing working well with a desiccant packet in it to prevent fogging. Would people like lots of fish and underwater updates?
Anyway, as we just got here last night after American Airlines delaying our flight 4 hours (we still made our connection in Puerto Rico at least), I don't have many pictures yet, so to give you an idea of where I am, as an establishing-entry, I'll post pictures I took a year and a half ago when we first came down here.
Here's a great view from the plane looking south across the shore down to the salt ponds and piles that make up the southern portion of the island as you can see on Google Maps.
The first of two iguana pictures showing their cool tales. The iguanas are quite large and just lounge around all day sunning themselves...
Most of the coastline is rocky, which is why we all had to buy new boots/fins for shore diving cuz walking across rocks hurts your feet otherwise, but in some areas, like by our condo, the ocean has carved under the rock, like so.
Here's that second iguana picture I promised you, was it worth it?
This was our view from the second floor, our condo now is on the first floor, which can still see the water and sunset, but has far easier access since we can just walk out the back instead of having to go around to the front where the stairs were.
Another view from the unit we had rented, showing the grounds a little behind the building, and also a cruse ship on the other side of Klein Bonaire, a small island off the coast with diving all around it for boat dives and kayakers.
Since the island is fairly flat and dry, cacti are quite common and are even used to make quite effective fences.
By the fresh-water showers on the dock these lil crabs gather, seemingly attacted to the water.
My dad infront of a sunset after a late-afternoon dive
Speaking of sunset...here's the sunset in the winter over Klein, which basically looks like it's over the water...though in the summer, the sun's shifted to the right so I should be able to get some of it directly over the water.
Here's the full 360 degree panoramic photo I took that sunset pic out of showing you the view from our dock looking out to sea, and back at the shore, to the left of the dock, the red-roofs are Sand Dollar, our condo/hotel. The building under-construction is a restaurant that's now finished and open.
My mom at a favorite restaurant of our's that's outside under a flowering tree so flowers drop down on us and wind up in her hair.
Ol'Blue is a shore dive we went on that was absolutely beautiful, and while you can't really tell it from the picture, the beach there is all coral and it was a little rough getting into the water.
The Mystery-Mobile-type minivan they rented us instead of the pick-up we had reserved infront of what used to be the shoreline at some point before the water apparently receded.
Here's my dad and Alex infront of more cool rock-formations from past waterlevels.
Alex and I infront of the lake in the park to the north.
A panoramic of that same lake.
Driving around parts of the island showed Bonaire's serengeti-side...
except instead of having gazelle and shrubs, it was filled with cacti.
And now for something completely different, Bonaire is also known for having flamingos who seem quite happy standing around in any bodies of freshwater around the island.
The north and east coasts of the island, where the wind and current hits, are far rougher and rockier.
These are "slave huts," but they're tiny and not really where the slaves lived, but where they'd chill there to escape the heat during the day I guess. You have to duck down to get through the doorway, though I guess this picture has a lack of scale or perspective for you to tell how small they were.
Here are those salt piles that you could see from the airplane shot with the pink salt pond infront of it from the algae that grows in that concentration of salt.
Interestingly enough there was a lot of foam around the pink pond that blew around in the wind and sorta wiggled around on the ground.
Hope you enjoyed that, since getting wireless internet's not too hard here (I just have to walk 10 feet towards the cafe from our condo), I was thinking that semi-daily updates would be fun with what fish I saw that day since we have the underwater housing working well with a desiccant packet in it to prevent fogging. Would people like lots of fish and underwater updates?