We were up bright and early this morning for our scuba lesson.  The scuba place had equipment for us, so we were able to go.  It was a much better experience than last time, and I only sucked water into my lungs once during the training!  It was easier this time partly because we had done it before and knew what to expect.  Our instructors were both young Dutch guys and they were good teachers.  One of them was becoming a certified scuba instructor and the other supervised, but in practical terms, we had two dive instructors.  Both did a great job and they have a better scuba environment here than in Colombia. Rather than training in a swimming pool, they have part of the ocean near the hotel roped off and you train there.  It’s much easier to do it that way and once the training is finished, you just swim out into the ocean.  

I still had some problems. The equipment is really heavy and hard to manage. My scuba mask is new and it kept fogging up.  It was fogged the entire time and I had trouble seeing clearly.  Apparently, you are supposed to let it sit overnight covered in toothpaste to clear off the film that new ones come with.  I wish I had known that.  My regulator (the thing you breath with) was also broken.  There are pieces that you bite into to hold it in your mouth. One of mine was missing and the other was barely hanging so I had to hold the regulator in my mouth.  This will be apparent in pictures that I’ll post with this blog.  Despite the problems, it was a way better experience and I’m glad I tried again. I was under for about 35 minutes and I think Bill was under for about 50.  He did great and was able to film and dive at the same time! After half an hour, I was ready to surface!  Bill went back down for another 10 or 15 minutes. I’m really glad I tried but I think I like snorkeling better.  About 30 minutes in, I started to feel desperate to surface.  It might be partly because my mask was so foggy or maybe scuba is just not my thing.  I really want to be a water rat, but I think I’ve spent too much time on land! My mask is currently sitting in the bathroom covered in toothpaste so it should be ready to go for our snorkeling trip tomorrow.  

I met a French Canadien family at the scuba shop.  They have done scuba all over the world and seemed really excited to talk to someone about it.  They were also impressed that an American could speak even bad French to them.  It was nice to be able to practice French with them.  We mostly hear Dutch and Dutch Creole.  There have been surprisingly few other languages.  

After our scuba lesson, we set up a kayaking/snorkeling mangrove tour for tomorrow and a coastal snorkeling tour in 3 different places for Sunday.  I’m really looking forward to both of those.  Bill’s underwater camera is great and he has gotten some really fun pictures and video.  He is more into technology than me, which is good because I would have probably ended up with almost no pictures.  The internet here is not good so I’ve had a hard time posting pictures.  The hotel rooms only have internet sporadically but I’m going to try to post stuff near the restaurant tonight.  The signal seems stronger there.

This afternoon, we went souvenir shopping again.  More stores were open so it was more fun.  We found a store with beautiful metal art.  I love metal art!  The art is made by a Dutch artist who lives here and is friends with the store owner.  I bought a very pretty turtle and I think I’m going to buy another piece to hang over my fireplace.  It’s pricy, but I’ve been waiting to hang something over the fireplace until I found something I loved and these pieces are lovely.  One piece was a big octopus and the owner had a picture of someone’s house with the octopus above the fireplace.  It was striking but I’m not sure I can pull that look off in my house.  There were also some beautiful sting rays in sets of three but they also don’t really go in my house.  There is a school of bright blue fish that arch and I think they will be perfect.  The store ships stuff to the US so I’ll have to do that.

There is live music at the hotel restaurant tonight, so we’ll probably see what what’s like for a little while.  Hopefully I can post more pictures tonight.  I have some from yesterday that I wasn’t able to post plus the scuba pictures from today.  If anyone has questions, feel free to email me!

The following pictures are from yesterday. I’ll post scuba pictures with Bill’s post if I can get them to load.

Happy Boxing Day! 

So we’ve spent another day on the island, we are well fed for now, we have water, today we did have to forage for our own lunch as we were not going to be at the resort during the 12:30-1400 time frame they allow for lunch. We ended up getting hotdogs and fries at the Scu-bar next to the resorts dive shop, Toucan Dive. It was a good lunch. 

We had planned on trying to get some lunch downtown but we were too efficient about getting souvenirs and there were still a lot of places closed today. We were somewhat surprised as there was a cruise ship docked today. That’s a lot of tourist’s dollars they missed out on. They did have some little independent street vendors set up but things were a little spendy for what you got. Jewelry must be a big tourist buy, a lot of places where we go sell over priced jewelry. 

We went on a quad tour at 12:15 today, the reason we missed the buffet lunch. Bonaire reminds me of being in the southwest United States. The terrain is covered in cactus 🌵. They use the cactus to make fences to keep the roaming donkeys out and there is a distillery here that makes liquor out of it. It can also be eaten, mostly in a goat soup. 
We were feeling the humidity this morning but on the quads it felt very dry with the dust. I was eating Emily’s dust as she took the lead behind our guide and she maintained it the whole tour even after our stops. She made sure to keep the others that we’re trying to get in front of us behind us. 
Our tour took us out into the desert or so it seemed, on the east side of the island. The thing about the ground though is it’s not regular sand and gravel, it’s mostly coral gravel/ sand and some other remnants of the sea floor that has pushed up to become land, it had aspirations I guess. Where we were the ground looked very much like the sea floor where we want to snorkel. Very rough, not someplace to be without shoes. We visited a lighthouse that has been refurbished and is currently solar. They also have radar on it for looking for human and drug traffickers. There was a old lighthouse keeper’s house that had not been redone and sounded very dangerous to allow people in, some (limit 3 at a time) did go in, I snapped a few pictures from a ways off. I’m not looking to end my vacation early. I already bashed my toe on the tub, not as cool as Emily’s toe injury from Kitesurfing. The tour was fun but very dirty!! 

Tomorrow morning we are probably doing a discover scuba class again, providing they have equipment for us. We have our books and waivers to do tonight. If they don’t have equipment they will take us out snorkeling I believe to the little island we can see from shore, Kline Bonaire. I’m hoping that they have equipment. I like the scuba idea but I think snorkeling is actually a very good alternative. It really doesn’t take a lot of effort to snorkel in the salt water, unless you have low single digit body fat you float fairly well. It is nice to get closer some times and scuba would make that easier. I think there will be mostly snorkeling in the future just because of the easy and low equipment needs compared to scuba but I do like being able to try it with the discover scuba class. 

Before dinner tonight we went for a scooter ride around the south end of the island. It was an excellent ride. Scooters are a good fit for the island, it’s not very big and scooters don’t go very fast. On a regular motorcycle you can cover the 10-15 mile we went tonight pretty quick, on the scooter we took about an hour. We did stop at several places to see some of the sites along the road. The road is actually a black top of sorts. Seems like it’s harder as it doesn’t have ruts, it does have rough patches and areas where I am guessing they have cut in utilities under the road. The one road that goes around the south end is one lane once you get past the area where they load salt onto ships. Mostly on the inland side is salt ponds and the ocean side is areas people go diving or kitesurfing on the western side. 
Not much goes on when you get farther south and on the eastern side. The trade winds come from the east and would blow you into the rocks. There maybe some beaches north of where we turned to head back to the resort, it was getting to be dinner time and we had an early lunch. 
Along the road We did get to see some donkeys and flamingos. We stopped at the slave huts and the obelisks that were indicators for grade of salt and where to park you ship to get loaded based on what you wanted. 
We also encountered a motorcycle street race. I knew the scooter wasn’t up for it. They were running some quick bikes. There was a lot of black marks on that section of road. We came up on an area that I could see they were doing burnouts at a bit before we came upon the riders parked on the side of the road. We got to see the start but they were to far down the road to see which one was the winner. One of the bikes parked was a 214 mph off the showroom floor bike. That’s a bit overkill for a place with a max speed limit of 38 mph. 

Dinner tonight was not as crowed as last night. We are thinking either a lot of people left or they figured out they really didn’t have to be there at six like the note stated for a full evening of dining.  

We’re going to fill out our scuba stuff and hopefully post our updates. We need some internet, our connection has been spotty. US Cellular also didn’t have a plan for certain on this island so all I have is wifi. One of these trips I am going to learn about doing the international SIM card swap. I’ve read about it and it sounds easy but I haven’t really seen it advertised. They say a lot of times you can do it at the airport. We are on vacation and don’t really have a lot of need for our devices, we do like to get these updates out though. 

I haven’t seen any places that offer special island food, I think the things I have noticed is a Caribbean chicken that is chicken legs in a sauce and fruit. There is a Caribbean ceviche and that was on the buffet so I skipped it. I’ve had some that was good, I didn’t care for the Peruvian ceviche though. And there is a cactus soup with goat. No rodents on a stick or fried under a brick here. 

Hopefully we cam get these and some pictures posted!! 

We’ve had another busy day and I’m wearing down.  Bill has a long update so I’m going to make mine short.  I’ll add pictures with his. This morning, we took our scooter into town for some shopping.  Bill needed a hat for our 4 wheeler tour this afternoon, we needed a backpack for water bottles and I wanted a cup.  Many stores were still closed for holidays, but we found everything we needed.  We ate an early, light lunch then left for our 4 wheeler tour at 12:15.  It was really interesting.  Bonaire is basically an island desert.  The entire island got pushed up out of the ocean probably relatively recently in geological terms and the whole place is made of rock and fossilized coral. Fossilized coral has the same consistency as concrete with sharp edges.  The tour was fun, but it was the roughest 4 wheeler ride I’ve ever had.  The guides went pretty fast along the “trail” which was a semi-flat rock surface with holes and crevice. It used to be the bottom of the ocean.  We visited a lighthouse and a bat cave.  The bats were deeper in the cave so we didn’t see them but we did see some feral goats and donkeys and a bazillion lizards.  That’s the only thing that can live here.  

We were coated in a thick layer of dust after the tour so Bill took a shower and I went to swim for a little while.  The water here is really amazing.  It’s beautifully clean and blue.  I swam without my snorkel gear today and there were all kinds of little fish swimming under me.  It’s hard to tell how far away the bottom is because you can see right to it.

We had some time before supper, so we took a lovely scooter ride in a loop around half the island.  We got some pictures of the salt producing operation and some other historic sites.  We found some ocean sponges on one of the stops we made.  The weather was perfect by the time we went.  The sun was setting and there was a nice breeze to cool things off.  The part of the island we visited was greener than other parts we’ve seen.  There were powerful waves crashing on one side of the road and wild bird refuge ponds surrounded by green plants on that other.  It was a very nice evening.

I’m exhausted and Bill is writing a more thorough update than me so you’ll all get a better story and pictures from him!  We have scuba tomorrow morning at 8:30, so that should be an adventure!

Sent from my iPad

Merry Christmas 🎄🎁 from Bonaire!!! We had an excellent day!! We didn’t have any set plans for the day, so we embraced the “caribe lyfe” as they say here and took it easy. 
Food here for breakfast and lunch seems to be the same things each day. I tend to have meats and cheese with bread for both and some fruit added in occasionally. They do cook to order some things at all meals and those options are usually good, I’ve only done that for supper once so far. The rest of the choice have been good so I haven’t done it more. The staff still needs to work on providing drinks. I’m not sure if they are purposely slow due to most are ordering alcoholic beverages and they are trying to keep costs down? You would think they would be Johnny on the spot though with water. Speaking of the water here, it’s desalinated sea water so it’s very good. 

We went into town on the scooter and looked around a little, there wasn’t much to do since it’s Christmas and most places were closed. We are going to go in some morning for souvenirs. The island is known for diving with a history in donkey and salt exports. There is also a slave history here as well. I’m going to guess most souvenirs will be dive related. 

The salt fields/concentration ponds are owned by Cargill. It’s interesting to see the big piles of salt and it’s not in a D.O.T. Shed for road use. I know slaves were used in the salt production back in the day and hopefully we get a chance to find out more of the history of all that at some point. 

After our scooter cruise downtown we were going to snorkel. I had a good idea in theory to take the scooter out to some of the other dive sites and snorkel but, the accesses along the beach road are very rocky with some sharp corals and we don’t have aqua sock or shoes for the water with us so… 
we came back to the resort and went snorkeling for quite a while. I got some videos and pictures with my little camera. I am able to save pictures to my phone so we do have some of those, for some reason it won’t let me save 720 resolution videos though. I may have to see if I can change some settings either on the phone or the camera so we can get some of those posted! 

Snorkeling was fun, I think that was the longest I have had my face in the water. We seem to do really well with snorkeling. I’m hoping it is helping to prepare us for scuba if we get to do that on Friday. 

They had a “special” Christmas dinner tonight, not sure what made it special. I had to wear long pants because they put a note under our door yesterday requesting no shorts and to dress to impress. Emily looked very nice, she usually does though. Food was basically same type, there were more deserts, nothing that was impressive though and there were still plenty of shorts and sweatshirts to be seen. They are probably not going to get long pants tomorrow for Boxing Day dinner, I only brought one pair of legs. (My Columbia pant/ shorts)

We are sitting out by the ocean doing our updates. It’s very nice out, the breeze is strong but keeps it a nice temperature and there are a few waves 🌊 we can hear. They are picking up the cushions to close this area down, so it’s time to wrap this up. I should find out about the exercise area but I also feel like relaxing. 
I hope everyone had a wonderful day and enjoyed however you chose to celebrate Christmas. 

This was a very fun, although weird, Christmas!  Bill and I took the morning slow so I could recover from kitesurfing yesterday.  I have mystery bruises in various places, but nothing serious.  We went for a scooter ride downtown this morning but everything was closed.  We’ll go again tomorrow so I can get a tea cup.  I have a collection going from all the places I visit.  After lunch, we decided to try to find a snorkel location other than the hotel just for something different.  We took the scooter past miles of beautiful beaches but most of them weren’t good locations for entering the water.  Rather than sand, they are covered with pieces of coral and then a rock shelf that’s almost impossible to walk on without shoes.  There are sharp edges everywhere and they hurt.  So, we came back to the hotel and snorkeled here for a while.  The reef is really close to shore and it’s filled with various kinds of fish.  The fish are used to snorkelers so they stay pretty close although not close enough to touch. There are little damselfish that are black with bright blue and purples spots that look like tiny lights.  I wonder if they glow in the dark.  We also saw some crabs and sea urchins.  I’d really like to see some seahorses, rays, and octopuses, but none so far.  We might see more when we go to Kline Bonaire.  Bill has a GoPro-like camera and he got some great underwater pictures and video.   I’ll attack the pictures.
We got a note from management asking people to dress up for Christmas dinner.  They wanted people to wear long pants instead of shorts, which is a little unfair since many people don’t pack pants to come here.  There’s not much reason to have them. Bill and I dressed up, but the meal was basically the same as every other night and lots of people weren’t dressed up.  The restaurant offered “wild game” pate, but we aren’t sure what counts as wild game here.  So far, I haven’t seen any mammals – no squirrels, rabbits, rodents- nothing!  Do iguanas count as wild game?  There are lots of those.  We ate fish and chicken instead.  
We are sitting by the pool now overlooking the beach.  It’s a beautiful evening with a nice, cool breeze and palm trees blowing around us.   We can’t see the ocean because it’s dark, but we can hear the waves crash in.  No one else is out here so it’s peaceful and perfect!  It’s definitely not a snowy Christmas, but it’s been lovely just the same!
Tomorrow, we are doing a three hour 4 wheeler ride to a bat cave.  That should be a lot of fun.  I’m hoping to go shopping for a tea cup too and we’ll probably snorkel again.
I hope you all had a great Christmas and everybody is healthy and well!

We only got to spend the evening here in Bonaire yesterday, the good Netherlands according to the local travel channel. It had a very entertaining spot about the differences between the Netherlands to the north and the Caribbean Netherlands. 
Not much happened yesterday other than landing at the Flamingo Airport, a tour of the resort, eating and resting from out travel day . 
Emily didn’t get to hear everything the guy said during our tour of the grounds, she did notice he said “don’t forget” a lot, must be a Dutch or island thing. I found it amusing when he was driving by the scooters they rent and he pointed at the scooters and said these are scooters parked here. They looked like scooters, there was a sign that said scooters but he wanted us to know they were in fact scooters. 

Today we signed up for some activities, possibly scuba on Friday, a quad tour and Emily got to try out kitesurfing! We also rented a scooter for three days. We’re also looking at doing a kayaking tour of the mangroves. 

After renting our scooter we took it for a spin downtown. They do lane splitting here, I’ve never been comfortable with that. I’m probably not going to be doing that. For those that don’t know the jargon, lane splitting is when motorcycles and in our case scooters get to weave trough traffic using the open spaces between cars to get to the front. It’s legal in some states. In California I seen people doing it at highway speeds. I think Iowa was considering allowing it at traffic lights so that motorcycles can get to the front. I would consider doing that as the safest place to be is usually in front of traffic. We got to see a bit of the city. We made it back without getting lost. 

After lunch we took the scooter out to Emily’s kitesurfing lesson. They have a max speed of 60 km/h or 38 mph roughly. The scooter maximum is about 52 km/h. Scooter rental was $29 a day after taxes and we were told a taxi would be about $25 and that doesn’t include a tip for those inclined to do so. Scooter maybe a good option especially since they really don’t seem to have a lot of crazy traffic here. 
Our ride was right along the Caribbean. It’s a lovely ride. We also got to see the salt flats and a flamingo. 
It’s very interesting that all along the coast road there are places for people to pull over and go scuba diving. There are marked areas and other places it appears people are just pulling off and going diving. 
The place where Emily had her lesson was a ways out from the resort. It was a section of beach were it must be extra good for kitesurfing as there were a couple different groups offering lessons. The beach was covered with kite surfers 🏄‍♀️ that had a hippyish vibe about it. It was cool to see all the activity going on. I will have some video of Emily’s lesson after were get back. I recorded it on a little gopro type camera, hopefully it turned out. The sun is very bright here and I couldn’t see the screen on the camera. 

We did a little snorkeling after we got back before dinner. I was impressed with our ability to just go out to the beach and see so much, I will get some vid tomorrow when the lighting is better and have them as well after we get back. There were a lot of fish and some corals just in the area we were in.   

We will get more pictures tomorrow as well. We have a few and we will get them posted. 

The food here isn’t bad. It’s buffet style with one cooked to order meal in the main dining area. It’s open air and the drink staff are a little slow on the refills. The birds are an issue in the morning and afternoon, not at night though. They have a snack bar that’s open during the day for burgers and pizza if you want to go that route. The selection is has been good. Emily likes the idea of not deciding where to go. The all inclusive deal hasn’t been a bad. 

The age of the resort is showing in places. They are currently in progress of a 5 year renovation, they have a new pool that is very nice and the construction of a new building for the check in desk and what not is under way. European/ Caribbean’s do make some interesting room  choices, but still nice. 

The sun here can be hot but there always seems to be a nice breeze. The trade winds offer some relief and in the shade with them it’s very pleasant. The ocean is beautiful to look at with the greens and blues.  
The people here are very nice and they will tell you that the people here are very nice. I think they like to point out the obvious. 

Hopefully everyone has a Merry Christmas! 🎄 

We had a fun first full day! After breakfast this morning, Bill and I set up some of our activities for the rest of the week. Places are pretty booked for scuba so we may not get to do that, but there are plenty of other fun things to keep us busy. We rented a scooter and Bill is now driving us all over the island. We went downtown to see what was there and he took me to my kitesurfing lessons. He’s a very useful person. I would have been completely lost.

I tried kitesurfing this afternoon. As it turns out, I’m not a natural. It was really hard. I never even made it to trying out a board. My instructor started me out on land with a small kite so I could learn how to maneuver it and keep it in the air. I was pretty good at that part. Then we set up a much bigger kite to take out on the ocean. My instructor took the kite out with a board and had me swim out to the boat. I cracked my toe on a rock on the way out and it barely moves now. I had on really heavy equipment and barely managed to haul myself into the boat alone. With nothing to stand on, it takes some effort to pull yourself and kitesurfing equipment into a floating boat. It was not a smooth operation. Bill probably has video. Once we finally got out into the water, my instructor attached the kite to my harness and it almost immediately pulled me into the water. Before you get a board, you have to learn to control the kite while you are in the water, keep it in the air, and get it back up when it falls in. This is much tricker than it sounds. I lost a contact lens and swallowed a lot of ocean water. By the end of my 3 hour training session, I could keep the kite up and let it pull me among the top of the water for a while. Apparently that’s all most people do on the first lesson. It takes a lot of time in the water with the kite to master the process. My teacher said the first lessons is mostly an exercise in being drowned over and over. If you lose control, the kite just drags you through the water. I’m going to be sore in the morning. Kitesurfing is actually really dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing. There are lots of ways things can go wrong. The bigger kites can pull 800 lbs and really good kite surfers can do jumps 60 ft in the air. I’m glad I tried it even though it wasn’t as smooth as I’d hoped.

On the way to my kitesurfing lesson, we passed some of the salt flats where they produce salt from ocean water. That was neat. The process produces this fluffy white salt residue that flies around like bubbles. Bill had to wait for 3 hours on the beach while I did my kitesurfing lesson. It was very nice of him to give up the afternoon to wait during my lessons. Once we got back to the hotel, we did some snorkeling so we could try out our equipment and so Bill could have some time in the water. The water here is the bluest water I’ve ever seen and there are all kinds of colorful little fish just a few steps off our beach. We are planning to snorkel at Kline Bonaire, a small island marine refuge, in a few days where scuba and snorkeling are supposed to be even better. We are also thinking about doing a nighttime snorkel trip. I think they have bioluminescent sea animals here so that would be neat! We’ve also set up a 4-wheeler tour of a nature reserve and a bat cave and we are planning to do a mangrove kayak tour.

The food is good and there is plenty of it! The accommodations are also nice. Bonaire is not the most beautiful place I’ve been. It’s very arid, dry and scrubby, but the water is spectacular and I think some of the nature reserves will be nice. There’s also always a nice breeze that keeps things cooler than you would expect. This place is really about the water and there are lots of divers. All the equipment is rented out which is why we may not get to dive. There are lots of Dutch people here, which I guess is not surprising since it’s a Dutch island. Everybody speaks English though so it’s fine. I think the Island only has 18,000 residents and even though big cruise ships come in, its surprisingly uncrowned. We had the beach and the pool mostly to ourselves this afternoon, and driving around, there are mostly empty beaches everywhere. The island is doing a lot of building so maybe it will be more crowded in a few years. Right now, it’s fantastic. I was really concerned that it would be super crowded since it’s Christmas break for everyone, but that’s not the case at all.

There are Christmas decorations up here, but sunny, warm weather and beaches doesn’t make things seem like Christmas. Some of the palm trees have been decorated with lights and there are some Christmas trees here. They seem very out of place.

Bill is working on his update, but I’m out of energy writing mine. I’ll probably have more tomorrow!

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Hello All! We made it Bonaire about 4pm their time yesterday. It was a very long travel day and the time zone is two hours different, so everything feels a little off for us. I think it’s going to be a good vacation though. It’s hot! We are 11 degrees south of the equator. The island has some of the best diving locations in the world and there are dive shops at our resort. We had good food last night. The restaurant is a buffet but the kitchen also cooks a few things fresh so I had some really good red snapper with crunchy stir fried cabbage. I’ll write more later today. We are headed out to get breakfast now and set up some activities. Hope everything is going well for you all!