Bonaire the Beautiful...

I am happy to report that diving is going well. We completed 4 dives today, which brings us up to 19 total dives for our time on Bonaire. Larissa has been good about supporting my insatiable appetite for going underwater. We have not had one day yet without going on 3 dives with the exception of the one day we skipped diving entirely. Today we got into the water, put on all of our gear, put our heads under water and only then realized that we were in a huge school of jellyfish. We froze immediately but we hadn’t been feeling any stings so we went down anyway. Swimming through the jellyfish was a different story. I guess they have motion sensors in them because as soon as we started swimming, we felt the stings. They didn’t do much but really annoy us though so we swam downward until we could look up and see the huge field of them. It was disconcerting knowing that we would have to swim through them on the way back as well. Unfortunately, it was a very large school of jellyfish because we had to endure them on every dive today. Hopefully they will be gone tomorrow. We have seen some pretty cool things underwater though. Here is Larissa and a turtle:

This is one of my favorite fish. There are a lot of these around.

We haven’t suffered anymore break-ins, probably because we have been leaving all of the windows down. We have been diving stress free, with the “club” locked on the steering wheel and the car free of valuables. We have been leaving some cookies in the car for a thief that comes by and really wants to steal something. We took the day off from diving yesterday so that we could explore the island a bit. It turned out to be Dia Del Rincon, a day that celebrates the oldest town on Bonaire. We enjoyed going to the celebration but didn’t see much besides some booths

and the forming of a parade:

People in Rincon love to celebrate.


We read that the town, while not Bonaire’s largest, tends to be the place to be for partying no matter what the holiday.
We wanted to check out the national park, just north of Rincon. It boasts a good population of donkeys, pink flamingos,

and cacti, but it was unfortunately closed due to the holiday. We did get a chance to enjoy the parks bathrooms however. At first I didn’t know which one to go into, but then I realized that they had used unconventional signs for designating which bathrooms were reserved for which sex.



We drove back to Kralendijk for lunch, scouting dive sites and watching lizards along the way. After hanging around for the early part of the afternoon, Larissa decided that we had better do some more exploring. We decided to take the road around the southern part of the island. The eastern coastline of Bonaire is jagged and barren

but beautiful in places. Larissa admits that she cannot appreciate desert beauty, which Bonaire is.

In fact, it is so much of a desert, they make their fences out of cacti.


She got more excited than she had been all day when we came to a beach almost completely covered with trash that had washed ashore. While I saw an unsightly beach, she saw an opportunity for a treasure hunt. She immediately announced that we would have a competition to see who could find the most unique object. We went off on our separate ways. I noticed a lot of shoes and plastic bottles, among a lot of uninteresting trash. I lost interest rather quickly, though I was mindful of Larissa’s clever attempt to keep my attention by making a competition out of it. I decided, hard as it was, that I would lose this competition. A short while later Larissa arrived with her treasures. Two matching baby stroller wheels found on separate sections of the beach, a high quality toddler’s shoe and, a compact hairbrush and a toilet seat.


I told her that I had seen the toilet seat but had had no interest in picking it up. As we were pulling away from the beach Larissa commented, “…And you know what I’m pissed about? Out of all those thousands of bottles on the beach, not one of them had the decency to be a message in a bottle.”

At the town house, we were inside watching TV when we saw a green flash on the porch. We went outside and found a HUGE iguana.

We had only seen little iguanas up until then but this one was a monster. We fed him bits of bread and tons of other little iguanas came to feast as well.


Well, we have really loved Bonaire but tomorrow is our last day. I think Larissa will let us dive four times as it is our last day and everything. Keep your fingers crossed.