When I tell people I've been to Bonaire I get the kind of blank look I would expect if I said I had been to Ulaanbaatar. For some reason everyone has heard of the nearby islands of Curaçao or Aruba, but nobody knows where Bonaire is. So I'll start with a bit of old fashioned geography. Bonaire is a small island in the southern Caribbean, about 50 miles north of Venezuela. It's around 24 miles long and up to 7 miles wide and made up of fossilised corals atop an ancient volcanic peak. In many places the coast is made up of a series of coral terraces showing where the sea level has changed several times over the last million years.
But I didn't spend nine boring hours on a plane just to see the cacti and divi divi trees, and the closest I got to the sun-loungers above was stopping to take a photo. All because Bonaire has a well developed coral reef system which has been (mostly) protected from human interference. I was there to dive! dive! dive! As usual when I go diving there were problems with the luggage allowance. Despite packing my clothes in Sue's luggage, my dive bag still weighed in at 24kg, and the KLM desk spent 10 minutes trying to get me to move 1kg to a different bag which would be travelling on the same plane. What's the point?? It's annoying enough that they have reduced the baggage allowance to one bag. Insisting that we need to move 1kg from one bag to another is just plain stupid. So, not much customer satisfaction at the KLM check-in desk.
Our flight from Amsterdam arrived at some ungodly hour in the morning, and somehow Buddy Dive had forgotten to send a car out to collect us. So after waiting around for thirty minutes while the airport become increasingly deserted, we gave them a call and they woke up some poor taxi driver to come and collect us.
We had booked a two bedroom apartment at Buddy Dive, but it was off season so they had put us in a three-bedroom place which was spotlessly clean and even had three separate balconies. Excellent! With quiet air conditioners in every bedroom we could even get a decent night's sleep without strange noises in the middle of the night. So after a couple of hours sleep Dave and I headed for the dive shop.
We had signed up for the full-on diving package which included unlimited nitrox (32%) and a pickup truck to transport us and our dive gear around the island. But, before we could dive in the national park we needed to buy national park badges, watch a short video about nature conservation on the island and do a checkout dive on the house reef. After a wholly forgettable video we were expecting some kind of supervised dive but were told, “naah, just go and have a dive”, so off we went....
Buddy Dive has their equipment and cylinder storage right on the waterfront. So diving couldn't be easier. Grab a fresh cylinder, put your kit together and drop in off the pier If we wanted to go further afield we could sign up for a boat trip on the blackboard or use the drive-through cylinder store to load our the truck before driving to a different dive site. The dive sites are clearly marked by yellow rocks alongside the road bearing the name of the dive site.
For the next few days we slipped into eat-sleep-dive mode. Typically that meant a dive before breakfast, a dive before lunch, a dive in the afternoon, and a night dive before dinner, then sleep. Of course I took plenty of pictures...
For me the highlights of the first few days the night dives. They included Dave spotting an octopus camouflaged
on the bottom after I had passed a couple of feet away and completely missed it. Then there was our first encounter with Charlie
the Tarpon. Charlie is around four feet long and loves to buzz people on night dives. It is pretty startling the first time
you this enormous silvery predator passing through your torch beam. Presumably he was expecting
us to scare something up for his dinner.
At the start of the holiday we agreed to have four days diving, then take a day off. So day 5 was dedicated to seeing as much of the island as possible. We planned to cram in everything. Flamingos, slave huts, the lighthouse, the salt flats and the Washington-Slaagbai national park. So after a very substantial breakfast, Dave, Sue, and I chucked our stuff into the pickup truck and headed up past the oil storage depot towards the north of the island.
First stop the flamingos, which were adept at spotting tourists coming and heading off into the deeper water before we arrived. Without a long lens or a lot of patience the flamingos were going to remain pink specks in the distance. So we continued north into the Washington-Slaagbai national park to see what the island flora and fauna looked like. There we learned that the interior of the island only sees short periods of very heavy rain, which quickly drains away into the salinas (shallow lakes where the flamingos feed). So only the most drought tolerant species like cacti survive to provide a home for numerous lizards.
Within the park the traffic is one-way so once you enter you're committed to quite a long drive. The roads themselves are mostly dirt tracks with occasional concrete sections on steep parts which would otherwise wash out in the torrential showers. The dirt roads are pretty uneven in places but we made reasonable speed with occasional stops.
Strangely enough, the closest I came to wrecking the car was going downhill on a nice smooth concrete section. We were on a good surface so I'd stopped looking at where the wheels were going and was looking across the valley to where the road ascended quite steeply. We were doing a fair speed when we hit a pothole big enough to swallow the entire back wheel, then spit it right back out. So one moment we were cruising downhill, then there was a huge thump and Dave almost joined Sue and I in the front seats. After this I drove extremely carefully for a while until I was sure we hadn't broken anything in the rear suspension.
We ate lunch at a cafe in the park, overlooking the sea of course, then carried on south towards the salt pans. For many years salt was a major industry on the island. The combination of shallow lagoons, reliable trade winds and sunshine meant salt by the bucket load. Today the process is automated and there are salt heaps 10 meters high, but for many years slaves were employed to collect and load the salt. Around the coast a few small slave huts have been preserved. These were not the slaves main residences, but were used when the slaves had to spend the night out on the salt pans. The salt is still stored in piles next to the pinkish salt pans, but these days it is loaded onto ships by conveyor belt from a very industrial looking pier which makes an interesting night dive.
On the southernmost tip of the island stands a lighthouse overlooking a steep beach of coral rubble. This was listed as a possible dive site, but after a couple of minutes watching the waves running along the beach and sizing up the undertow neither Dave nor I fancied trying it. Though we did say that on a calmer day it might be possible.
By now the sun was sinking towards the horizon, so we decided to complete our circumnavigation of the island by heading for Sorobon. A natural bay fringed with mangroves, this shallow lagoon is known for watersports including wind surfing, kite surfing and kayakking. But when we arrived everything had closed for the day and it was deserted. After a short stop to photograph a small mangrove and it's huge root system we headed back to Buddy Dive. We were all exhausted and couldn't be bothered to go out, so we ate in the resort and got ready for another early start.
After a whole day out of the water we were the first ones on the pier in the morning. The water was at swimming pool temperature and I'd started diving in a t-shirt and shorts, infinitely better than cold damp neoprene before breakfast! The pre-breakfast dive turned out to be one of our best dives of the trip. We found a large octopus which clearly thought I wanted to eat it. So it spread it's mantle to convince me it was more than a mouthful, then used all it's colour changing tricks to try and evade me before slipping beneath a coral overhang. On the way back to the pier we saw a sharp tailed eel investigating the crevices in the coral rubble. It was being shadowed by four different predators, each hoping it would chase out something for their breakfast. Later in the day we dived the Hilma Hooker, a wrecked drug smuggler which was sadly rather sterile despite 20 years on the bottom. Great for wreck training but we'd hoped for more life on it.
The following day we had no wind, yep dead calm means small waves. So after lunch Dave and I went off to dive by the lighthouse. We were very cautious on this dive because even without waves the coral rubble is steep and the shallows rocky. After a short surface swim we dropped into an area of deep gulleys covered in sea fans and soft corals, all completely unspoilt. They thrive in this area because there is plenty of water movement (current) which brings food and keeps divers away. This meant sea fans several feet tall and soft corals being swept back and forth in the surge. While this was one of our top dives on Bonaire it is definitely not suitable for inexperienced divers and is only feasible in calm conditions.
I also fitted in a spot of photography tuition which gave me some good tips and ideas.
1) Shoot UP. Aim to have the subject above you to get better separation from the background and more natural looking fish.
2) Concentrate on getting one winning picture of a subject instead of trying to see everything
3) Learn to shoot one-handed, if necessary use one finger of the other hand to steady yourself on a dead piece of coral.
Our final night dive was also pretty good, with Charlie the Tarpon and four others swimming around us looking out for meal opportunities. At times Charlie swam past so close I could easily have reached out and touched him. A stunning way to finish up our diving. (I've done a little research on Tarpon since I wrote this and there's a fair chance Charlie is actually female. Yes, the female of the species is more deadly than the male!!).
On our final day Sue and I went on a kayak tour of the mangroves. We lasted almost 5 minutes before capsizing our kayak, but despite our drenching we had a good tour and saw masses of upside-down jellyfish which live in the clear areas between the mangroves. These are unusual in that they don't swim around, but instead rest upside-down on the bottom relying on algae for a large part of their energy as well as trapping food with their tentacles. The larger ones are the size of dinner plates and have quite a nasty sting.
As well as some absolutely excellent dives, the other highlight of this year's holiday has been the food. The food at Buddy Dive was pretty good, but we wanted to try out some of the local restaurants. Probably our best find was Bistro de Paris, which was unpretentious, friendly and served outstanding food. We also liked Cactus Blue, in the centre of Kralendijk, which was a bit more modern and offered a good selection of fish. My final recommendation would be Patagonia, an Argentinian restaurant with good steaks and tables overlooking the marina. Eating out on Bonaire wasn't particularly cheap, but we have enjoyed some really good food.
The final excitement of the holiday was when a naptha tank at the BOPEC oil storage depot further up the island was struck by lightning and caught fire. The fire was big enough to light up the night sky, and the following morning we could see that the rising column of sooty smoke was creating it's own weather, non-stop rain. Fortunately, nobody was killed and most of the Naptha was pumped out from the bottom of the tank, but what remained took three days to burn out.
In summary, for people who are interested in underwater photography and good food (me, me, me!!) Bonaire is pretty much perfect. There are shore dives all along the western (downwind) side of the island marked with yellow painted signs and you can dive whenever and wherever you like (with the exception of the salt pier which must be guided). Above water there is enough to keep you occupied for a few days, but if you're looking for shopping and nightlife you should head for Aruba. The only drawback is that it's a sod of a long way from Europe and there are still a lot of places around the world I want to see.